Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists can’t address the origins of life without having a basic understanding of evolution.

You’d think that would make the origins of life a popular research topic for evolutionary biologists. But Maria Kalambokidis, Ph.D. candidate in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, and recent recipient of the NASA Future Investigators Fellowship, may be one of only a handful across the globe investigating the topic. She thinks it might be because the origins of life, also called abiogenesis, has mostly been studied by chemists.

“It’s difficult to come into the field when you have a completely different scientific background than someone else,” says Kalambokidis. “There are insights from evolution that you might miss by only taking the perspective of a chemist.”

This review spotlights the revolutionary role of deep learning (DL) in expanding the understanding of RNA is a fundamental biomolecule that shapes and regulates diverse phenotypes including human diseases. Understanding the principles governing the functions of RNA is a key objective of current biology. Recently, big data produced via high-throughput experiments have been utilized to develop DL models aimed at analyzing and predicting RNA-related biological processes. This review emphasizes the role of public databases in providing these big data for training DL models. The authors introduce core DL concepts necessary for training models from the biological data. By extensively examining DL studies in various fields of RNA biology, the authors suggest how to better leverage DL for revealing novel biological knowledge and demonstrate the potential of DL in deciphering the complex biology of RNA.

This summary was initially drafted using artificial intelligence, then revised and fact-checked by the author.

Picture a strawberry. Most people can easily distinguish between that image in their mind’s eye and an actual strawberry. Now researchers say that they’ve worked out how the brain draws this distinction and where in the brain the process happens.

According to a study¹ in monkeys, the key part of the brain is the primary visual cortex, which is also involved in vision. The authors found that neurons in this region displayed a different activity pattern for images conjured up from memory compared with that for real-time visual input. They conclude that the primary visual cortex is crucial for recalling images stored in memory.

“It’s an intriguing study that goes beyond what we know in several ways,” says cognitive neuroscientist Floris de Lange at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the work. But others in the field, such as Julio Martinez-Trujillo, a cognitive neurophysiologist at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, says that another area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is more likely than the visual cortex to be key for recalling images.

Envision AI evolving beyond mere imitation, surpassing human intelligence to redefine the boundaries of consciousness and ethics.

Related: If the Big Bang created miniature black holes, where are they?

The research team thinks that super-color-charged black holes may have impacted the balance of fusing nuclei in the infant universe. Though the exotic objects ceased to exist in the first moments of the cosmos, future astronomers could potentially still detect this influence.

“Even though these short-lived, exotic creatures are not around today, they could have affected cosmic history in ways that could show up in subtle signals today,” study co-author David Kaiser, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement.

Future missions to Mars were not ruled out, though the scientists said that measures to protect the kidneys would need to be developed to avoid serious harm to astronauts. Methods of recovery could also be introduced onboard spacecraft, such as dialysis machines.

“We know what has happened to astronauts on the relatively short space missions conducted so far, in terms of an increase in health issues such as kidney stones,” said Dr Keith Siew, first author of the study from the London Tubular Centre, based at the UCL Department of Renal Medicine.

What we don’t know is why these issues occur, nor what is going to happen to astronauts on longer flights such as the proposed mission to Mars. If we don’t develop new ways to protect the kidneys, I’d say that while an astronaut could make it to Mars they might need dialysis on the way back.

Gene expression is inherently dynamic, due to complex regulation and stochastic biochemical events. Here the authors train a deep neural network to predict and dynamically control gene expression in thousands of individual bacteria in real-time which they then apply to control antibiotic resistance and study single-cell survival dynamics.

Nanotechnology has arrived in the turfgrass industry. What will the presence of tiny particles mean for fertility and plant protectant applications?

Immunizing enormous numbers of wild mice, however, is prohibitively difficult. By using genetic engineering, researchers could create white-footed mice that produced these antibodies from birth and could pass this ability on to their offspring. But did the island residents want to live with genetically engineered mice?

The answer was perhaps, but with caveats. In consulting with communities on this technology development, researchers found that community members preferred a cisgenic approach: They wanted white-footed mice that were engineered with DNA only from other white-footed mice.¹⁸ This would make the project more difficult for the researchers, and meant that a CRISPR-based gene drive, even one with limited spread, could not be used, since no white-footed mouse naturally has this gene-editing system. However, said Esvelt, “It’s their environment, so it’s their call.”

“We’re potentially causing an irreversible change to the environment,” said Telford. “We need to think about informed consent of the community as a proxy for informed consent of the environment. That’s been a real advance and something [that Esvelt] has pioneered—involving the communities from the very start.”