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Using a targeted gene epigenome editing approach in the developing mouse brain, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers reversed one gene mutation that leads to the genetic disorder WAGR syndrome, which causes intellectual disability and obesity in people. This specific editing was unique in that it changed the epigenome—how the genes are regulated—without changing the actual genetic code of the gene being regulated.

The researchers found that this gene, C11orf46, is an important regulator during . Specifically, it turns on and off the direction-sensing proteins that help guide the long fibers growing out of newly formed neurons responsible for sending electrical messages, helping them form into a bundle, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Failure to properly form this bundled structure, known as the , can lead to conditions such as , autism or other brain .

“Although this work is early, these findings suggest that we may be able to develop future epigenome editing therapies that could help reshape the neural connections in the brain, and perhaps prevent developmental disorders of the brain from occurring,” says Atsushi Kamiya, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

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Yoshua Bengio is known as one of the “three musketeers” of deep learning, the type of artificial intelligence (AI) that dominates the field today.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is credited with making key breakthroughs in the use of neural networks — and just as importantly, with persevering with the work through the long cold AI winter of the late 1980s and the 1990s, when most people thought that neural networks were a dead end.

He was rewarded for his perseverance in 2018, when he and his fellow musketeers (Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun) won the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing.

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No one has ever seen an active asteroid up close like this.

“Among Bennu’s many surprises, the particle ejections sparked our curiosity, and we’ve spent the last several months investigating this mystery,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in a statement. “This is a great opportunity to expand our knowledge of how asteroids behave.”

The researchers are trying to figure out what is causing these “ejection events.”

“No one has ever seen an active asteroid up close like this,” Carl Hergenrother, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, told Wired. “It wasn’t that long ago that the conventional wisdom was that asteroids are these dead bodies that didn’t change very much.”

Continue reading “NASA Baffled: Asteroid Bennu Keeps Spitting Out Small Rocks” | >

A ketone-supplemented diet may protect neurons from death during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, according to research in mice recently published in JNeurosci.

Early in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, the brain becomes over excited, potentially through the loss of inhibitory, or GABAergic, interneurons that keep other neurons from signaling too much. Because interneurons require more energy compared to other neurons, they may be more susceptible to dying when they encounter the Alzheimer’s disease protein amyloid beta. Amyloid beta has been shown to damage mitochondria — the metabolic engine for cells — by interfering with SIRT3, a protein that preserves mitochondrial functions and protects neurons.

Cheng et al. genetically reduced levels of SIRT3 in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. Mice with low levels of SIRT3 experienced a much higher mortality rate, more violent seizures, and increased interneuron death compared to the mice from the standard Alzheimer’s disease model and control mice. However, the mice with reduced levels of SIRT3 experienced fewer seizures and were less likely to die when they ate a diet rich in ketones, a specific type of fatty acid. The diet also increased levels of SIRT3 in the mice.

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How to confine turbulent plasma fuel in a donut-shaped vacuum chamber, making it hot and dense enough for fusion to take place, has generated questions—and answers—for decades.

As a under the direction of Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering Professor Anne White, Pablo Rodriguez-Fernandez Ph.D. ‘19 became intrigued by a fusion research mystery that had remained unsolved for 20 years. His novel observations and subsequent modeling helped provide the answer, earning him the Del Favero Prize.

The focus of his thesis is turbulence, and how heat is transported from the hot core to the edge of the plasma in a tokamak. Experiments over 20 years have shown that, in certain circumstances, cooling the edge of the plasma results in the core becoming hotter.

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Inspired by their use in mechanical systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are testing a magnetically-actuated fluidic valve to use in trauma patients suffering from hemorrhage.

Yonatan Tekleab and his colleagues will explain how the valve works at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting on Nov. 25 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. The talk is part of a larger session on biological dynamics for medical devices.

Approximately 80% of trauma related deaths after the first hour of admission to the hospital are due to hemorrhagic shock. Tekleab said their system of an injectable magnetorheological suspension and externally placed small magnets would be able to significantly reduce bleeding before the patient is transported to the hospital.

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The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field,[8][9] one of the fields in particle physics theory.[9] It is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964, along with five other scientists, proposed the Higgs mechanism to explain why particles have mass. This mechanism implies the existence of the Higgs boson. The boson’s existence was confirmed in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations based on collisions in the LHC at CERN.

On December 10, 2013, two of the physicists, Peter Higgs and François Englert, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical predictions. Although Higgs’s name has come to be associated with this theory (the Higgs mechanism), several researchers between about 1960 and 1972 independently developed different parts of it.

In mainstream media the Higgs boson has often been called the “God particle”, from a 1993 book on the topic,[10] although the nickname is strongly disliked by many physicists, including Higgs himself, who regard it as sensationalism.[11][12].

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