See how Sonic Hedgehog (SHH) uses BOC, CDON and FARP1 to create cytonemes for cell signaling during embryonic development
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
Scientists Fear ‘Mirror Life’ Could End Humanity, But We May Now Be Able to Detect It
Many scientists are seriously worried about the potential threat of ‘mirror life’: hypothetical organisms built from molecules that are flipped from what we find in nature.
Many of life’s basic building blocks, including DNA and amino acids, have a certain ‘left-or right-handedness’
If that were to be flipped, like a DNA double helix twisting to the left instead of the right, then these looking-glass versions of life could sneak past the biological defenses of animals, plants, and humans.
Two Forever Chemicals Show Links to an Aggressive Breast Cancer Type in NIH Study
New NIH study links PFOA and PFOS to higher ER-negative breast cancer risk, highlighting PFAS and breast cancer concerns.
AI rivals tackle one of physics’ deepest mathematical challenges
One by one, artificial intelligence (AI) is felling some of the biggest trees in the mathematical forest. In September, OpenAI announced it had cracked the notoriously difficult Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics problem, one of math’s seven Millennium Prize challenges. A month later, the company released more than 700 math papers, including a major advance on the Riemann hypothesis, another famous unsolved Millennium Prize Problem involving prime numbers. Its latest release, on 28 October, included a refutation of a decades-old conjecture in computer science —as well as a proof that one of physics’ most successful theories is on firm mathematical footing.
Controversially, OpenAI did not release the 1147-page proof of the physics result, known as the 4D Yang-Mills existence problem. Instead, it appointed a committee of physicists and mathematicians headed by Nobel laureate David Gross to “shepherd” the result. On 10 November, the group released a validation of a formalized version of the proof in Lean, a computer language that can check mathematical arguments against a set of axioms. Although it doesn’t mean the still-unreleased proof is correct, it’s a sign of its logical consistency.
For physicists, the result is unlikely to change their day-to-day work: The Yang-Mills theory has already been remarkably successful at explaining the behavior of particles at accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. But important mysteries still remain, including how most of the mass of protons and neutrons arises, and why the quarks that make them up can never be found alone. A rigorous proof could offer fresh insights into these phenomena. “Maybe there’s something we’re missing,” says David Tong, a physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Astronomers trace mystery radio signals back to cosmic odd couple of white dwarf and sun-like star
“As a bonus, we also saw the white dwarf moving behind a region with a strong magnetic field, most likely a ‘stellar prominence,’ which is a large loop of plasma erupting from a star’s surface,” team member Natasha Hurley-Walker of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Curtin University, Australia, said. “It’s amazing that by using radio wavelengths we can detect the storms on a star over 5,000 light-years away.”
Hurley-Walker and the team at ICRAR have been at the cutting edge of rare star systems like this.
This AI finds patterns in visual brain activity and turns them into pictures
A new AI model, called Brain-IT, can transform brain scans into images and reverse the process, turning images into what they’d look like as brain activity.
‘Like writing and directing your own movie’: Live Science readers share whether they’d learn to lucid dream if they could
300 Live Science readers responded to a recent poll about whether they’d train themselves to lucid dream if they could.
Toward an integrated framework for a human and mammalian brain cell atlas
The BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network integrates molecular profiles, spatial maps, and anatomical frameworks into a curated cell-type taxonomy of the human, macaque, and marmoset basal ganglia. This multimodal atlas offers a blueprint for comparing brain cell types across species and for scaling to the whole brain.
Evolution found another way to build a primate brain
What makes the human brain so much larger and more complex than the brains of many other mammals? Scientists have long sought clues in our DNA. Some discoveries show how genetic changes enable the developing brain to produce more cells. Others help explain how long those cells can continue to multiply.
Now, researchers in Taiwan and Japan have uncovered another piece of the evolutionary puzzle: evolution may also have altered the instructions that determine which types of brain-building cells are produced. The research is published in the journal Science Advances.
Led by researchers at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) and Academia Sinica, alongside collaborators at Kyoto University, the study identifies a small region of DNA that helps control the production of specialized neural stem cells. The findings suggest that evolution can open up new developmental possibilities without necessarily creating entirely new genes.
AI detects regions around ‘microexons’ involved in genetic variation in autism
New research from scientists is helping piece together the missing genetics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
In a study published in Nature, researchers identified hundreds of new microexons — short gene segments that appear to play a key role in ASD and other neurological conditions — and developed a machine learning approach to predict the impact of ASD-associated genetic variants on the regulation of these segments.
“Autism is characterized by multifactorial genetics,” says the study’s co-senior.