“Of all currently known temperate exoplanets, LHS 1,140 b could well be our best bet to one day indirectly confirm liquid water on the surface of an alien world beyond our Solar System,” said Charles Cadieux.
The search for Earth’s twin just got a little closer as astronomers recently presented findings regarding a potential icy or watery “super-Earth” called LHS 1,140 b, which is located approximately 49 light-years from Earth and whose radius is approximately 1.7 times our planet, along with orbiting within its star’s habitable zone. What makes this finding unique is LHS 1,140 b was previously hypothesized to be a mini-Neptune and astronomers speculate could be completely covered in either ice or water.
The findings were recently accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and hold the potential to help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets, and specifically Earth-sized exoplanets within their star’s habitable zone.
Global food waste is a cross-cutting issue that starts during agricultural production, available food supply, and continues all of the way to the landfill.
Over 30% of food is lost or wasted each year. This number is even more striking, given the large number of hungry people in the world. Wasted food is not only inefficient, it’s a social justice issue – as all the food wasted could be used to serve the food recovery hierarchy and prevent perfectly good food from being wasted.
The extent and impact of global insect movements is hindered by tracking limitations. This study reveals a 4,200 km transatlantic journey by butterflies from West Africa to South America, lasting 5–8 days, highlighting the remarkable capacity of certain insects to disperse over vast distances.
This study investigated the ability of vessel wall imaging to identify the rarely reported spontaneous intracranial carotid dissection (sICD) guided by postmortem validation:
Scientists have connected two organoids together with an axon bundle, to study how brain areas communicate. They sent signals back and forth and responded to external stimulation. This could be a step toward biocomputing.
Human brains outperform computers in many forms of processing and are far more energy efficient. What if we could harness their power in a new form of biological computing?
In multicellular organisms, many biological pathways exhibit a curious structure, involving sets of protein variants that bind or interact with one another in a many-to-many fashion. What functions do these seemingly complicated architectures provide? And can similar architectures be useful in synthetic biology? Here, Dr. Elowitz discusses recent work in his lab that shows how many-to-many circuits can function as versatile computational devices, explore the roles these computations play in natural biological contexts, and show how many-to-many architectures can be used to design synthetic multicellular behaviors.
About Michael Elowitz. Michael Elowitz is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. Dr. Elowitz’s laboratory has introduced synthetic biology approaches to build and understand genetic circuits in living cells and tissues. As a graduate student with Stanislas Leibler, Elowitz developed the Repressilator, an artificial genetic clock that generates gene expression oscillations in individual E. coli cells. Since then, his lab has continued to design and build synthetic genetic circuits, bringing a “build to understand” approach to bacteria, yeast, and mammalian cells. He and his group have shown that gene expression is intrinsically stochastic, or ‘noisy’, and revealed how noise functions to enable probabilistic differentiation, time-based regulation, and other functions. Currently, Elowitz’s lab is bringing synthetic approaches to understand and program multicellular functions including multistability, cell-cell communication, epigenetic memory, and cell fate control, and to provide foundations for using biological circuits as therapeutic devices. His lab also co-develops systems such as “MEMOIR” that allows cells to record their own lineage histories and tools for RNA export, and precise gene expression. Elowitz received his PhD in Physics from Princeton University and did postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University. Honors include the HFSP Nakasone Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Presidential Early Career Award, Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
The European Space Agency’s member countries have endured a space access predicament as they have waited to have a functioning rocket in their toolbox.
But a new rocket, dubbed Ariane 6, just launched on its maiden mission after years of delays and hang-ups in the development process.
If successful, the space agency hopes that the Ariane 6 rocket system may go on to make the space agency more self-reliant and perhaps challenge SpaceX’s dominance inthe global market for launching satellites.
