The creatures “can reversibly enter a state where outwardly observable signs of metabolic activity are paused under conditions that are essentially incompatible with life.”
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A once abandoned drug compound shows an ability to rebuild organs damaged by illness and injury.
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Miniaturised frogs form a fascinating but poorly understood group of amphibians. They have been exceptionally prone to taxonomic underestimation because when frogs evolve small body size they start to look remarkably similar – so it is easy to underestimate how diverse they really are.
As part of my PhD I have been studying frogs and reptiles on Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean that’s a little larger than mainland France. It has more than 350 frog species, giving it possibly the highest frog diversity per square kilometre of any country in the world. And many of these frogs are very small.
We have added to the knowledge of these tiny species by describing five new species as belonging to the group of frogs commonly referred to as “narrow-mouthed” frogs. The largest of them could sit happily on your thumbnail. The smallest is just longer than a grain of rice.
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Today our middle-aged Universe looks eerily smooth. Too smooth, in fact.
While a rapid growth spurt in space-time would explain what we see, science needs more than nice ideas. It needs evidence that whittles away contending arguments. We might finally know where to look for some.
A team of physicists from the Centre for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Harvard University went back to the drawing board on the early Universe’s evolution to give us a way to help those inflation models stand out from the crowd.
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Agree or Disagree?
According to two papers published in Cell on January 11, 2018, the making of memories and the processes of learning resemble, of all things, a viral infection. It works like this: The shells that transport information between neurons are assembled by a gene called Arc. Experiments conducted by two research teams revealed that the Arc protein that forms a shell, functions much like a Gag, a gene that transports a virus’s genetic material between cells during an infection. For example, the retrovirus HIV uses a Gag in exactly this manner.
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DAILY DOSE | A new cutting-edge cancer treatment has been developed in one of the innovation capitals of the world — Israel. How does it work and why is some of the medical community eagerly awaiting to use it? Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies CEO Ilan Morad discusses with host Ayman Sikseck.
Story:
Has a cure for cancer finally been found? Maybe, and it may have born right here in Israel.
An Israeli team of scientists is developing an anti-cancer drug that will target several mutations in cancer cells using a combination of several-cancer directed peptides.
For the first time scientists have found an organism that can produce chlorophyll but does not engage in photosynthesis.
The peculiar organism is dubbed ‘corallicolid’ because it is found in 70 per cent of corals around the world and may provide clues as to how to protect coral reefs in the future.
“This is the second most abundant cohabitant of coral on the planet and it hasn’t been seen until now,” says Patrick Keeling, a University of British Columbia botanist and senior researcher overseeing the study published in Nature. “This organism poses completely new biochemical questions. It looks like a parasite, and it’s definitely not photosynthetic. But it still makes chlorophyll.”
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