The entire notion of sound—today limited by the vibration of air—may be entirely reinvented by electronic signals transmitted directly into your brain.
Researchers from Brazil have found a way to use leftover kitchen grease and lithium battery waste to create a reliable, eco-friendly biofuel.
Cells communicate
Posted in biotech/medical, chemistry
Cells work around the clock to deliver, maintain, and control every aspect of life. And just as with humans, communication is a key to their success.
Every essential biological process requires some form of communication among cells, not only with their immediate neighbors but also to those significantly farther away. Current understanding is that this information exchange relies on the diffusion of signaling molecules or on cell-to-cell relays.
Publishing in the journal Developmental Cell, a research team at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Medicine reports on a novel method of communication relying on ‘mechano-chemical’ signals to control cell movement. The research group focused on a fundamental pathway—MAPK/ERK, or ERK pathway—and were able to demonstrate how the movement of a single cell could trigger a cascading reaction resulting in the migration of a cell collective.
When DNA forms, it usually creates the characteristic double-helix that we’ve all come to recognize. However, given the right ingredients, DNA can fold with another pair of strands to create a quadruple-stranded structure that may have some pretty important roles. These structures, called G-quadruplexes (G4), have only been seen in chemistry lab experiments or in some cancer cells, so understanding exactly what their roles are has been difficult, until now.
Scientists have now produced the first visualization of a G-quadruplex formation in live, healthy cells. By developing a fluorescent marker that can bind to G4s, the researchers could track the formation of a quadruplex structure for the first time, with the results published in Nature. This provides confirmation that normal cellular processes produce these structures, and not a process gone haywire like those in cancer.
“For the first time, we have been able to prove the quadruple helix DNA exists in our cells as a stable structure created by normal cellular processes. This forces us to rethink the biology of DNA. It is a new area of fundamental biology, and could open up new avenues in diagnosis and therapy of diseases like cancer,” said one of the lead researchers Dr Marco Di Antonio in a statement.
Sony’s Reon Pocket is shipping now in Japan. It’s a portable air conditioner that you wear inside special T-shirts. But does it actually work?
Following a marathon EU summit in Brussels, national leaders this morning agreed to a €1.8 trillion, 7-year budget and pandemic recovery fund that will spend €81 billion on Horizon Europe, the main EU research program. That’s far less than what researchers had hoped for—and €13.5 billion less than a proposal 2 months ago from the European Commission, the EU executive arm.
An €81 billion budget for Horizon Europe disappoints researchers.
Lift-off for China’s mission to Mars
Posted in space
China is on its way to the red planet: It launched a probe on Thursday, and hopes to land on Mars in February 2021.
Full story here: https://sc.mp/zf178
What do you think?
Seems great, until that kid that’s flicking popcorn or spilling their drink is now doing so from 40 feet overhead. Still, a movie-going experience that makes me feel like I’m in the Galactic Senate Chamber is tempting, and it’d make food/drink service far less disruptive for everyone else. The verticality makes me think we’ll see a version of this in Hong Kong or Shanghai first.
🤔
In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a pandemic tabletop exercise called Event 201 with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Recently, the Center for Health Security has received questions about whether that pandemic exercise predicted the current novel coronavirus outbreak in China. To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic. We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people. Although our tabletop exercise included a mock novel coronavirus, the inputs we used for modeling the potential impact of that fictional virus are not similar to nCoV-2019.
COVID19 has no treatment, yet people have been treating disease for centuries. How is that possible? Are people now just using the wrong treatment?
Colds, accompanied by coughing, running nose, sore throat, bronchitis, sinus infections, eardrum infections and infectious flu, do not occur only during the cold and wet seasons, but all through the year, according to your disposition. Himalayan Pink Salt applications not only help to relieve the cold (Infectious flu and sorethroat), but are also excellent preventive therapies.