A team of scientists in France sustained an artificial sun for 22 minutes, which in the future could potentially provide unlimited clean energy.
About 15 years ago, Stanford Medicine neuro-oncologist Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, began to suspect that the brain tumors she studied were doing something strange. Cancer cells sometimes copycat their healthy counterparts, so Monje and her team weren’t surprised to uncover simple parallels between healthy and malignant brain cells. The cancer’s biological “borrowing” was similar to a symphony-goer who whistles the theme from a concerto on the bus ride home.
But the team’s data hinted that these brain tumors were orchestrating something much more complex. Instead of just humming the themes of healthy brain biology, the research suggested the tumors could round up many important cell-signaling instruments — the microscopic equivalents of, say, violins, cellos, flutes and trombones — and use them to play a score of its own.
In physiologic terms, Monje’s team gradually demonstrated, certain cancer cells form working electrical connections with nearby nerves. The tumors wire themselves neatly into the brain’s electrical apparatus, then use healthy nerves’ signals for their own purposes — to drive malignant growth. These cancers also hijack the machinery of learning to strengthen connections with the healthy brain and further enhance their ability to multiply.
Gutierrez and Tyler investigate the limits of replicative lifespan in yeast. The authors show that nucleolar expansion during aging is a mortality timer. Enlargement of nucleoli beyond a defined size alters their biophysical properties; normally excluded DNA repair protein enter, causing aberrant rDNA recombination, genome instability and death.
Researchers have developed a new, highly effective “gene switch” to deliver targeted cell therapy.
The ETH Zurich team states that this cell therapy has the potential to offer a more precise and personalized treatment for diabetes.
Diabetes is a major global health concern, classified as a metabolic disease and affecting about one in ten individuals.
Simply outstanding progress with humanoid bots. I really like Figure — they seem to be making really good progress.
We’re introducing Helix, a generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome multiple longstanding challenges in robotics.
Here’s a detailed report on Helix: https://www.figure.ai/news/helix
A team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed an artificial ‘worm gut’ to break down plastics, offering hope for a nature-inspired method to tackle the global plastic pollution problem.
By feeding worms with plastics and cultivating microbes found in their guts, researchers from NTU’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) have demonstrated a new method to accelerate plastic biodegradation.
Previous studies have shown that Zophobas atratus worms – the larvae of the darkling beetle commonly sold as pet food and known as ‘superworms’ for their nutritional value – can survive on a diet of plastic because its gut contains bacteria capable of breaking down common types of plastic. However, their use in plastics processing has been impractical due to the slow rate of feeding and worm maintenance.
Life on Earth has always existed in the flux of ionizing radiation. However, fungi seem to interact with the ionizing radiation differently from other Earth’s inhabitants. Recent data show that melanized fungal species like those from Chernobyl’s reactor respond to ionizing radiation with enhanced growth. Fungi colonize space stations and adapt morphologically to extreme conditions. Radiation exposure causes upregulation of many key genes, and an inducible microhomology-mediated recombination pathway could be a potential mechanism of adaptive evolution in eukaryotes. The discovery of melanized organisms in high radiation environments, the space stations, Antarctic mountains, and in the reactor cooling water combined with phenomenon of ‘radiotropism’ raises the tantalizing possibility that melanins have functions analogous to other energy harvesting pigments such as chlorophylls.
Incyte will partner with Genesis Therapeutics to research, discover, and develop small molecule treatments through a collaboration that could generate at least up to $620 million for Genesis, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based drug developer.
The companies have agreed to discover and optimize at least two initial small molecule programs through Genesis’s AI platform, Genesis Exploration of Molecular Space (GEMS). GEMS is designed to generate and optimize molecules for complex targets by integrating proprietary AI methods that include language models, diffusion models, and physical machine learning (ML) simulations.
Incyte has been granted exclusive rights for potential clinical development and commercialization of the products to be developed through the collaboration.
The lead researcher has told the BBC he was so astounded he assumed his computer had been hacked.
EMBL tech developers have made an important leap forward with a novel methodology that adds an important microscopy capability to life scientists’ toolbox. The advance represents a 1,000-fold improvement in speed and throughput in Brillouin microscopy and provides a way to view light-sensitive organisms more efficiently.
“We were on a quest to speed up image acquisition,” said Carlo Bevilacqua, optical engineer in EMBL’s Prevedel team and lead author on a paper published about this technological development in Nature Photonics.
“Over the years, we have progressed from being able to see just a pixel at a time to a line of 100 pixels, to now a full plane that offers a view of approximately 10,000 pixels.”