The vision of human-level machine intelligence laid out by Alan Turing in the 1950s is now a reality. Eyes unclouded by dread or hype will help us to prepare for what comes next.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
A Parasite Carried by Billions Has a Secret Life Inside the Brain
A common parasite hiding in the brain turns out to be far more active and organized than anyone realized.
A team of scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has discovered that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite estimated to infect up to one-third of the world’s population, is far more biologically complex than previously understood. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, provide new insight into how the parasite causes disease and why it has proven so difficult to eliminate with current treatments.
How Toxoplasmosis Spreads in Humans.
How synthetic biology helps extract more rubber from dandelions, produces fungal fashion
By John Sanford
Researchers from across Stanford’s campus gathered May 7 for a symposium focused on ways synthetic biology can promote a sustainable world.
Scientists Identified a New Blood Group After a 50-Year Mystery
It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort.
A pregnant woman’s blood sample taken in 1972 was mysteriously missing a surface molecule found on all other known red blood cells at the time.
More than 50 years later, that strange absence finally led researchers from the UK and Israel to describe a new blood group system in humans. The team published a paper on the discovery in 2024.
“It represents a huge achievement, and the culmination of a long team effort, to finally establish this new blood group system and be able to offer the best care to rare, but important, patients,” hematologist Louise Tilley from the UK National Health Service said in September 2024, after nearly 2 decades of personally researching this bloody quirk.
Cells adapt to aging by actively remodeling endoplasmic reticulum, study reveals
Improvements in public health have allowed humankind to survive to older ages than ever before, but, for many people, these added golden years are not spent in good health. Aging is a natural part of life, but it is associated with a greatly increased incidence of most chronic diseases, including various cancers, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.
The laboratory of Kris Burkewitz, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, wants to figure out if there is a way to break the links between the aging process and disease so that we can stay healthy longer, allowing us to better enjoy our later years. To accomplish this goal, the Burkewitz lab focuses on how cells organize their internal compartments, or organelles, and how organelle structures can influence cellular function, metabolism, and disease risk.
In his most recent paper, published in Nature Cell Biology, Burkewitz describes a new way by which cells adapt to the aging process: by actively remodeling the endoplasmic reticulum, one of the cell’s largest and most complex organelles. His team found that aging cells remodel their ER through a process called ER-phagy, which selectively targets specific ER subdomains for breakdown. The discovery that ER-phagy is involved in aging highlights this process as a possible drug target for age-related chronic conditions such as neurodegenerative diseases and various metabolic disease contexts.
New method predicts asthma attacks up to five years in advance
“One of the biggest challenges in treating asthma is that we currently have no effective way to tell which patient is going to have a severe attack in the near future,” says the senior author. “Our findings solve a critical unmet need. By measuring the balance between specific sphingolipids and steroids in the blood, we can identify high-risk patients with 90 per cent accuracy, allowing clinicians to intervene before an attack occurs.”
The team discovered that while individual metabolite levels provided some insight, the ratio between sphingolipids and steroids was the most powerful predictor of future health. ScienceMission sciencenewshighlights.
Researchers have identified a new method to predict asthma exacerbations with a high degree of accuracy. The study is published in Nature Communications.
Asthma is one of the world’s most common chronic diseases, affecting over 500 million people. Asthma exacerbations – commonly known as asthma attacks – are a major cause of disease morbidity and healthcare costs. Despite the prevalence of asthma, clinicians currently lack reliable biomarkers to identify which patients are at high risk for future attacks. Current methods often fail to distinguish between stable patients and those prone to severe exacerbations.
The study analysed data from three large asthma cohorts totalling over 2,500 participants, backed by decades of electronic medical records. Researchers used a high throughput approach called metabolomics to measures small molecules in the blood of individuals with asthma. They identified an important relationship between two classes of metabolites, sphingolipids and steroids, and asthma control. Specifically, they identified that sphingolipid to steroid ratios could predict exacerbation risk over a 5-year period. In some cases, the model could differentiate the time-to-first exacerbation between high-and low-risk groups by nearly a full year.
Using Placental Cells to Test Anti-Aging Compounds
Researchers publishing in Aging Cell have discovered that cells derived from the human placenta may be useful in estimating the effects of potential anti-aging treatments.
A seemingly odd choice
Of all the organs in the body, the placenta may be the least concerning with regards to aging; it only exists for at most 10 months, after which it is discharged as part of the birthing process. The researchers openly admit that this lifespan difference may make placenta-related aging processes distinct from those in other tissues, which harms translation and generalizability.
