Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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From elongated oblongs to near-perfect spheres, vegetables come in almost every size and shape. But what differentiates a fingerling potato from a russet or a Roma tomato from a beefsteak?

Researchers at the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences have recently found the genetic mechanism that controls the shape of our favorite fruits, vegetables and grains.

In article published this month in the journal Nature Communications, Esther van der Knaap, professor of horticulture, and her team at UGA detail the genetic traits, shared by multiple plants that have been shown to control fruit, leaf and seed shape.

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Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a technique to stop the movement of cancer cells. When cancer moves from a primary tumor to other sites in the body, it becomes far more dangerous to the patient, and that has driven scientists to work for years to learn more about how cancer cells migrate. This work, which was reported in Nature Communications, may help create therapeutics that can prevent cancer from spreading.

After targeting the “motors” that generate forces in cancer cells to move, the cancer cells switch to a dendritic or “flowing” response to follow pathways in tumors that drive cell migration and promote spreading of the cancer. / Credit: Tabdanov/Provenzano, University of Minnesota

When tumors grow in the body, they can create interior networks that cancer cells can use like a highway, ultimately moving closer to blood vessels and other neighboring tissues. When patients have cancerous tumors with a large number of those highways, there is a lower likelihoood they will survive the cancer. One thing that has eluded researchers, however, is knowing exactly how cancer cells are able to find and move along those highways.

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The eastern section of Antarctica is buried beneath a thick ice sheet. Some scientists simply assumed that under that cold mass there was nothing more than a “frozen tectonic block,” a somewhat homogeneous mass that distinguished it from the mixed up geologies of other continents.

But with the help of data from a discontinued European satellite, scientists have now found that East Antarctica is in fact a graveyard of continental remnants. They have created stunning 3D maps of the southernmost continent’s tectonic underworld and found that the ice has been concealing wreckage of an ancient supercontinent’s spectacular destruction.

The researchers, led by Jörg Ebbing, a geophysicist at Kiel University in Germany, reported their discovery earlier this month in Scientific Reports.

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