Microbial motility as an amazingly simple biosignature to detect life on Mars and elsewhere (and dangerous pathogenic bacteria on Earth)
Posted on BigThink, Link through SearchforLifeintheUniverse.
Insects exhibit impressive agility and responsiveness even when faced with low-light conditions. The secret lies in their compound eyes, which are capable of detecting motion with incredible speed and sensitivity.
Now, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed a camera that mimics this feat to achieve ultra-high-speed imaging.
Interestingly, this bio-inspired camera surpasses the limitations of traditional high-speed cameras.
As an embryo grows, there is a continuous stream of communication between cells to form tissues and organs. Cells need to read numerous cues from their environment, and these may be chemical or mechanical in nature. However, these alone cannot explain collective cell migration, and a large body of evidence suggests that movement may also happen in response to embryonic electrical fields. How and where these fields are established within embryos was unclear until now.
“We have characterized an endogenous bioelectric current pattern, which resembles an electric field during development, and demonstrated that this current can guide migration of a cell population known as the neural crest,” highlights Dr. Elias H. Barriga, the corresponding author who led the study published in Nature Materials.
Initially, Dr. Barriga and his team began research on the neural crest at the former Gulbenkian Institute of Science (IGC) in Oeiras, Portugal before continuing research in Dresden, establishing a group at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life.
Our genes contain all the instructions our body needs to function, but their expression must be finely regulated to guarantee that each cell performs its role optimally. This is where DNA and RNA epigenetics come in: a series of mechanisms that act as “markers” on genes, to control their activity without modifying the DNA or RNA sequence itself.
Until now, DNA and RNA epigenetics were studied as independent systems. These two mechanisms seemed to function separately, each playing its own role in distinct stages of the gene regulation process.
Perhaps that was a mistake.
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Music: Frontline Assembly — Synthetic FormsAlbum: Implode ℗ 1999 Metropolis RecordsComposer, Writer: Bill Leeb / Chris Peterson Released on: 1999/04/27.
Oby, Degenhart, Grigsby and colleagues used a brain–computer interface to challenge monkeys to override their natural time courses of neural activity. They found the time courses to be highly robust, suggestive of network-level computational mechanisms.
Seven years ago, an outburst in a distant galaxy brightened and faded away. Afterwards, a new supermassive black hole jet emerged, but how?