Lifeboat Foundation

Glioblastoma is the most aggressive type of cancer that begins with the brain and develops from astrocytes, star-shaped brain cells that help protect the brain from diseases in the blood and provide the brain’s neurons with nutrients, with around 12,000 cases diagnosed in the United States each year. Glioblastoma cells have more genetic abnormalities than the cells of other types of astrocytoma brain cancer. Now researchers from the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine report they have identified an oncogene responsible for this deadly cancer.

Their study, “A cytoskeleton regulator AVIL drives tumorigenesis in glioblastoma,” is published in Nature Communications and led by Hui Li, PhD, associate professor, pathology, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the UVA Cancer Center.

“Glioblastoma is a deadly cancer, with no effective therapies. Better understanding and identification of selective targets are urgently needed. We found that advillin (AVIL) is overexpressed in all the glioblastomas we tested including glioblastoma stem/initiating cells, but hardly detectable in non-neoplastic astrocytes, neural stem cells or normal brain,” the researchers wrote.

“This photo shows the channel wall in the braided channel region of the flow,” HVO says. “Note the small ferns growing on the upper channel wall.” USGS photo by M. Patrick.

(BIVN) – Geologists visited the lower East Rift Zone lava flow field in Puna this past week “to make continued measurements and observations, to better understand and reconstruct the dynamics of the Fissure 8 lava flow,” reports the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. The lava flow, active two years ago this month, changed the landscape of Puna and destroyed the entire seaside-village of Kapoho.

HVO posted photos of the trip to its website on July 13.

The first images from the Solar and Heliospheric Imager, or SoloHI instrument, reveal the zodiacal light (the bright blob of light on the right protruding towards the center). Mercury is also visible as a bright dot on the image left. The straight bright feature on the very edge of the image is a baffle illuminated by reflections from the spacecraft’s solar array.

Credits: Solar Orbiter/SoloHI team (ESA & NASA), NRL

Images from the Polar and Helioseismic Imager, or PHI, showed it is also primed for later observations. PHI maps the Sun’s magnetic field, with a special focus on its poles. It will have its heyday later in the mission as Solar Orbiter gradually tilts its orbit to 24 degrees above the plane of the planets, giving it an unprecedented view of the Sun’s poles.

The launch of the United Arab Emirates’ Hope Mars mission has been further delayed by bad weather at the launch site.

The giant impacts that dominate late stages of planet formation have a wide range of consequences for young planets and their atmospheres, according to new research.

Research led by Durham University and involving the University of Glasgow, both UK, has developed a way of revealing the scale of atmosphere loss during planetary collisions based on 3D supercomputer simulations.

The simulations show how Earth-like planets with thin atmospheres might have evolved in an early solar system depending on how they are impacted by other objects.

Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides every square meter of Earth — when it’s in direct sunlight — with a constant ~1500 W of power, enough to keep our planet at a comfortable temperature for liquid water to continuously exist on its surface. Just like the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy amidst the trillions of galaxies in the Universe, our Sun shines continuously, varying only slightly over time.

But without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Even in the extreme conditions found in the core of a massive star like our Sun, the nuclear reactions that power it could not occur without the bizarre properties that our quantum Universe demands. Thankfully, our Universe is quantum in nature, enabling the Sun and all the other stars to shine as they do. Here’s the science of how it works.

Animals have an innate preference for certain scents and tastes. Attractive scents are linked to things like good food. Less attractive scents—that of spoiled food, for example—instinctively give the animal a signal which says: “There could be danger here!” When it comes to taste, all animals have similar preferences: Sugars and fats are perceived positively, whereas a bitter taste is perceived rather negatively.

In order to be able to make such evaluations, we need signals in the brain that tell us “This is good” or “This is bad.” The dopaminergic system in the brain, better known as the reward system, plays an important role in these evaluations.

The CRISPR-Cas system, naturally found in many prokaryotes, is widely used for genome editing. CRISPR arrays in the bacterial genome, derived from the genome of invading viruses, are used to generate a CRISPR RNA that guides the Cas enzyme to destroy repeat viral invaders. Recently, an unexpectedly compact CRISPR-Cas system was identified in huge bacteriophages. Pausch et al. show that even though this system lacks commonly found accessory proteins, it is functional. In addition to a CRISPR array, the only component of the system is an enzyme called CasF, which uses the same active site to process transcripts of the CRISPR arrays into CRISPR RNA and to destroy foreign nucleic acids. This system, which is active in human and plant cells, provides a hypercompact addition to the genome-editing toolbox.

Science this issue p. 333

CRISPR-Cas systems are found widely in prokaryotes, where they provide adaptive immunity against virus infection and plasmid transformation. We describe a minimal functional CRISPR-Cas system, comprising a single ~70-kilodalton protein, CasΦ, and a CRISPR array, encoded exclusively in the genomes of huge bacteriophages. CasΦ uses a single active site for both CRISPR RNA (crRNA) processing and crRNA-guided DNA cutting to target foreign nucleic acids. This hypercompact system is active in vitro and in human and plant cells with expanded target recognition capabilities relative to other CRISPR-Cas proteins. Useful for genome editing and DNA detection but with a molecular weight half that of Cas9 and Cas12a genome-editing enzymes, CasΦ offers advantages for cellular delivery that expand the genome editing toolbox.

How do you beat Tesla, Google, Uber and the entire multi-trillion dollar automotive industry with massive brands like Toyota, General Motors, and Volkswagen to a full self-driving car? Just maybe, by finding a way to train your AI systems that is 100,000 times cheaper.

It’s called Deep Teaching.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it works by taking human effort out of the equation.