Theory suggests that empty space is filled with enormous energy, but according to a new proposal this energy may be hidden because its effects cancel at the tiniest scales.
The Columbia team behind the revolutionary 3D SCAPE microscope announces today a new version of this high-speed imaging technology. In collaboration with scientists from around the world, they used SCAPE 2.0 to reveal previously unseen details of living creatures—from neurons firing inside a wriggling worm to the 3D dynamics of the beating heart of a fish embryo, with far superior resolution and at speeds up to 30 times faster than their original demonstration.
These improvements to SCAPE, published today in Nature Methods, promise to impact fields as wide ranging as genetics, cardiology and neuroscience.
Why is having faster, 3D imaging so valuable? “The processes that drive living things are dynamic and ever-changing, from the way an animal’s cells communicate with one another, to how a creature moves and changes shape,” said Elizabeth Hillman, Ph.D., a principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the paper’s senior author. “The faster we can image, the more of these processes we can see—and imaging fast in 3D lets us see the whole biological system, rather than just a single plane, offering a clear advantage over traditional microscopes.”
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Every year, 2.6 million people die in middle and low-income countries because of incorrect medical care, according to a recent report published by the World Health Organization (WHO). The health agency is hoping to shed light on the issue by launching a campaign in solidarity with patients on the first-ever World Patient Safety Day on September 17.
“No one should be harmed while receiving health care. And yet globally, at least 5 patients die every minute because of unsafe care,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
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Stars constantly douse their planets with harsh ultraviolet radiation flares. However, some life-forms may have developed a protective glow, also known as biofluorescence, to survive powerful stellar bursts.
This latest design has held to the present day; SpaceX is still shooting for a 387-foot-tall Starship-Super Heavy stack, with six Raptors on the spacecraft. The number of engines on Super Heavy could vary from flight to flight; Musk said the rocket has space for up to 37 Raptors, and each mission will probably require at least 24.
With the design nailed down, SpaceX plans to move fast. The company wants to reach Earth orbit with a Starship prototype in about six months. And people could start flying aboard the vehicle in the next year or so if the test program continues to go well, Musk said.
While Musk and SpaceX have been lauded by their ambitious push for a Starship capable of deep-space travel, the road has not always been smooth.
Quantum computers exist today, although they’re limited, cut-down versions of what we hope fully blown quantum computers are going to be able to do in the future.
But now, researchers have developed hardware for a ‘probabilistic computer’ – a device that might be able to bridge the gap between genuine quantum computers and the standard PCs and Macs we have today.
The special trick that a probabilistic computer can do is to solve quantum problems without actually going quantum, as it were. It does this using a p-bit, which the team behind this research describes as a “poor man’s qubit”.
Some of the most important tools in the toolbox of modern cell biologists are special chunks of DNA that act like spies, reporting on the cell’s function. The markers, known as reporter genes, allow researchers to get a sense for what cells are doing by watching genetic programs embedded in their DNA turn on and off.
Reporter genes work by encoding proteins that can be seen from outside the cell. One particularly popular reporter gene encodes something called the green fluorescent protein (GFP), which, true to its name, is a protein that glows bright green. So, if a researcher wants to learn more about how cells become neurons, they can insert the GFP gene alongside a neuronal gene into an embryo’s DNA. When the embryo’s cells turn on the neuron gene, they will also express the GFP gene, and the cells will glow green, making it easy for the researcher to see that the genetic program that encodes neuron formation is active.
As useful as this technique has been, it has a big limitation: Because light does not penetrate well through most living tissue, the GFP gene cannot be used for monitoring the activity of cells deep inside an organism. But now, Caltech’s Mikhail Shapiro has a solution. A team consisting of Shapiro, professor of chemical engineering and investigator with the Heritage Medical Research Institute, graduate student Arash Farhadi, and their colleagues, has developed a reporter gene that allows them to see genetic activity using ultrasound, which can penetrate deeply through tissue, instead of light.
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