Posted: 12/27/2015
- What the mites on your face say about where you came from (“Now, a new study shows that people of different ancestry carry different subgroups of the bugs, and that the mites’ distribution throughout the global population may even reflect how our species has migrated and evolved over the course of history. … The researchers also found that each individual’s mite population was stable over time periods as long as 3 years—even in people who had moved to new regions of the world with different dominant clades. Furthermore, the mite profiles appear to be passed across generations—a second generation person of African descent living in Europe will most likely retain the mites of her ancestors, rather than acquire a European profile.”)
Here is another article on same subject: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/your-hair-mites-are-so-loyal-their-dna-reflects-your-ancestry-180957545 - THIS PILL MAY BE A CURE FOR RADIATION POISONING Chemist Rebecca Abergel and her colleagues have found a way to remove radioactive contaminants from the body. Now they are trying to put their solution in a pill. (“Abergel and her team at Berkeley have made a chelator that binds to actinides — without interfering with other metals that we need in our bodies, such as zinc or iron.”)
- A brain link to autism Scientists find neurotransmitter that ties in with disorder’s behavior (“Using a visual test that prompts different reactions in autistic and normal brains, …, was able to show that those differences were associated with a breakdown in the signaling pathway used by GABA, one of the brain’s chief inhibitory neurotransmitters. … This theory that the GABA signaling pathway plays a role in autism has been shown in animal models, but until now we never had evidence for it actually causing autistic differences in humans.
To find that evidence, Robertson and colleagues went searching for an easily replicable test that produced consistently different results in people with and without autism, and found it in what visual neuroscientists call binocular rivalry. Normally, she said, the brain is presented with two slightly different images — one from each eye — that it averages to create the single image we see. The binocular-rivalry test, however, forces each eye to take in very different images, with surprising results. ... “Where the average person might rock back and forth between the two images every three seconds, an autistic person might take twice as long,” she said. “They spend the same amount of time in the steady state, where they see only one image, as the average person. It just takes them longer to switch between them, and the second image is not as deeply suppressed.”) - Scripps Florida Compound Successfully Targets Hard-to-Treat Breast Cancer (“The study points to an enzyme called casein kinase 1δ (CK1δ), a critical regulator of growth, as a novel and highly vulnerable therapeutic target. Increased CK1δ expression is common to breast cancer, including the difficult-to-treat subtype called “triple negative breast cancer” (those cancers not driven by estrogen, progesterone, or the HER-2/neu gene), affecting 10 to 20 percent of breast cancer patients. … Our findings confirm that aberrant CK1δ regulation promotes tumor growth in breast cancers by activating the protein β-catenin,” … “The best news, however, is that we have been able to treat CK1δ-expressing breast cancers with a highly selective and potent CK1δ inhibitor developed … that triggers rapid tumor cell death.”)
- Clouds may hide water on alien worlds (“Now, a team of astronomers using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have gathered enough data to compare 10 large exoplanets, finding a range of atmosphere types, and to propose a solution to an early mystery of exoplanet atmospheres: why some don’t seem to have enough water. … A team led by David Sing of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom has carried out detailed studies at optical and infrared wavelengths on eight of those new exoplanets, adding to the data already obtained on the original two. As they report online today in Nature, the distant planets clearly contain water and some are cloudy. Moreover, the strength of the water signature depends on the amount of clouds, suggesting that the hazy planets may be concealing water.”)
- Cracking cocaine’s secret to sneaking into the brain (“Up until now, it was though that cocaine had to be deprotonated to penetrate the blood–brain barrier. McLain and her team uncovered that conformation and hydration were far more significant. Rather surprisingly, a water mediated internal hydrogen bond appears to pull cocaine into a formation that shields its hydrophilic regions.”)
- X-ray vision? New technology making it a reality for $300 (“A group of researchers … has developed software that uses variations in radio signals to recognize human silhouettes through walls and track their movements.”)
- In Pursuit of AIDS Vaccine, Team Sheds Light on Antibody Origins (“The images in the new study showed that the PGT121 family of antibodies starts its attack by grabbing onto one of the glycans, (called the N332 glycan) as well as a short segment of the HIV Envelope glycoprotein (called the GDIR motif), turning them into binding partners. … Interestingly, if researchers remove the N137 glycan from HIV, the antibodies immediately behave as well-trained antibodies and don’t require a two-year boot camp.”)
- Light Chips Could Mean More Energy-Efficient Data Centers For the first time, researchers have used existing manufacturing technology to make a complex processor that uses energy-efficient optical connections. (“Now a prototype described in the journal Nature offers a promising and practical approach. The electronic-optical microprocessor, developed by a group of researchers at MIT, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, integrates over 70 million transistors and 850 optical components. The system uses optical fibers, transmitters, and receivers to send data between a processor chip and a memory chip.”)
- Genome misfolding unearthed as new path to cancer IDH mutations disrupt how the genome folds, bringing together disparate genes and regulatory controls to spur cancer growth (“By studying brain tumors that carry mutations in the isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) genes, the team uncovered some unusual changes in the instructions for how the genome folds up on itself. Those changes target key parts of the genome, called insulators, which physically prevent genes in one region from interacting with the control switches and genes that lie in neighboring regions. When these insulators run amok in IDH-mutant tumors, they allow a potent growth factor gene to fall under the control of an always-on gene switch, forming a powerful, cancer-promoting combination.”)
- Virus particles engineered to hold enzymes that generate carbon-free hydrogen fuel (Note to author/journalist of this article: hydrogen is carbon-free!)
- Seabed-Mining Robots Will Dig for Gold in Hydrothermal Vents Nautilus Minerals will test its gear on the ocean floor in 2016 (Will deep sea mining finally become reality after several failed attempts)
- Entangling Different Kinds of Atoms Could Be the Way Forward for Quantum Computers (“The NIST group reported in the journal Nature that they successfully entangled magnesium ions and beryllium ions, and used the entangled pair to demonstrate two key quantum logic operations—CNOT and SWAP gates. The scientists at Oxford obtained a similar result with ions of calcium-40 and calcium-43, and also performed tests proving that showed that the pair were properly entangled.”)
- Flexible Optogenetics Implants Hack the Sense of Pain (“The new demonstration represents a huge step forward for optogenetics technology: A futuristic field of science that hacks nerve cells by genetically changing them to become responsive to light. Until now, the rigid electronic components of such implants limited their placement inside living bodies. The newest generation of stretchy, wireless electronic implants bypasses those old limitations with flexible implants that can control pain signals in the main leg nerve and spinal cord of genetically-engineered mice. ”)
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