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A DNA-organizing protein offers new insight into infertility, IVF and generational health

The causes of male infertility can be hard to diagnose, with many tests failing to detect genetic defects. Sometimes, infertility doesn’t even involve the genes themselves. It can arise from improper folding of the father’s DNA in the sperm. If a couple conceives, this mispackaged DNA can damage the lifelong health of the child.

“Paternal health is critical to sperm quality and the health of the offspring,” said Satoshi Namekawa, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. “Understanding the packing and folding of DNA in sperm cells is a fundamental question in modern biology.”

Namekawa and Ph.D. student Yu-Han Yeh have now unveiled an important new piece of this puzzle. They have identified a protein, called DAXX, that guides how sperm DNA is organized. DAXX silences thousands of genes so they don’t interfere with reproduction. It also keeps a handful of crucial genes turned on—shaping the delicate, early stages of embryonic development. The work was published recently in Genes & Development.

It took 40 years for technology to catch up to this zipper design

In 1985, the Innovative Design Fund placed an ad in Scientific American offering up to $10,000 to support clever prototypes for clothing, home decor, and textiles. William Freeman PhD ’92, then an electrical engineer at Polaroid and now an MIT professor, saw it and submitted a novel idea: a three-sided zipper. Instead of fastening pants, it’d be like a switch that seamlessly flips chairs, tents, and purses between soft and rigid states, making them easier to pack and put together.

Freeman’s blueprint was much like a regular zipper, except triangular. On each side, he nailed a belt to connect narrow wooden ‘teeth’ together. A slider wrapping around the device could be moved up to fasten the three strips into place, straightening them into a triangular tube. His proposal was rejected, but Freeman patented his prototype and stored it in his garage in the hopes it might come in handy one day.

Nearly 40 years later, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers wanted to revive the project to create items with ‘tunable stiffness.’ Prior attempts to adjust that weren’t easily reversible or required manual assembly, so CSAIL built an automated design tool and adaptable fastener called the ‘Y-zipper.’ The scientists’ software program helps users customize three-sided zippers, which it then builds on its own in a 3D printer using plastics. These devices can be attached or embedded into camping equipment, medical gear, robots, and art installations for more convenient assembly.

A new system developed at MIT CSAIL helps users design three-sided fasteners called “Y-zippers,” then 3D prints them. The devices can be attached or embedded to camping equipment, medical gear, robots, and art installations, seamlessly switching each item between soft and rigid.

Ancient Martian valley holds major clues to a past ocean

New images of Shalbatana Vallis from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter reveal well-preserved geological clues of past water and lava activity on ancient Mars. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30564/ancient-martia…st-ocean-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30564/ancient-martia…st-ocean-2)

How much water and lava flowed across the surface of Mars billions of years ago? This is what a recent image obtained from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter hopes to figure out as the more than two-decade-old orbiter captured incredible images that could help researchers piece together the environment on ancient Mars. This is because these images offer clues of past water and lava activity on Mars when the Red Planet was far warmer and wetter than it is today.

This latest image reveals a vast area comprised of a mixture of buried and visible impact craters, eroded hills and mesas, wrinkle ridges from lava cooling and contracting, chaotic terrain from the melting of ice, dark volcanic ash, and a massive channel called Shalbatana Vallis where researchers hypothesize was craved from massive amounts of groundwater that swelled up to the Martian surface. Because Mars lack plate tectonics like Earth, these landforms have been well-preserved for billions of years. Once Mars became incapable of having liquid water on its surface, the Martian wind and dust buried and eroded some of these features, though not to the extent as we see erosion on Earth.

This Gene Is Linked to Lower Alzheimer’s Risk — And We May Finally Know Why

There’s something special about the APOE2 variant of the APOE (apolipoprotein E) gene: People who carry it tend to live longer, and they have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Scientists are still trying to figure out why, and now, they have a new lead.

A team led by researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in the US set out to answer that question using human stem cell-derived neurons and mouse studies.

A new imaging approach captures brain activity across nine cell types at once

Scientists at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI), in collaboration with ZEISS and MetaCell, have developed a powerful new imaging pipeline called Neuroplex. As described in a paper published in eLife, the technique allows simultaneous monitoring of the activity of up to nine distinct neuronal populations in freely moving mice, dramatically accelerating the pace of scientific exploration into how the brain controls behavior.

For years, neuroscientists linking brain activity to behavior have faced a fundamental limitation: Miniscopes, the tiny head-mounted microscopes used to observe neural activity in behaving animals, could capture neural activity, but couldn’t reliably distinguish more than two different types of brain cells at a time.

“To understand the brain, we need to link patterns of activity in specific neurons to behavior,” stated lead author Dr. Mary Phillips. “We can readily use labels to color-code different populations of neurons, but when using miniscopes to correlate neural activity to behavior, we couldn’t distinguish more than two of these populations. This made it difficult to compare the activity across multiple cell types and circuits to understand how specific circuits regulate behavior.”

Peptides as Versatile Regulators in Cancer Immunotherapy: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Future Prospects

The emergence of effective immunotherapies has revolutionized therapies for many types of cancer. However, current immunotherapy has limited efficacy in certain patient populations and displays therapeutic resistance after a period of treatment. To address these challenges, a growing number of immunotherapy drugs have been investigated in clinical and preclinical applications. The diverse functionality of peptides has made them attractive as a therapeutic modality, and the global market for peptide-based therapeutics is witnessing significant growth. Peptides can act as immunotherapeutic agents for the treatment of many malignant cancers. However, a systematic understanding of the interactions between different peptides and the host’s immune system remains unclear.

Hypoxia-induced autophagic degradation of HIF-1α attenuates cellular aging and extends mammalian lifespan

Emerging evidence suggests that organs age at different rates. This study identifies a mechanism by which the naturally hypoxic intervertebral disc ages relatively slowly, via selective autophagy of HIF-1α, and designs a small molecule to export this mechanism across tissues.

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