Lifeboat Foundation

Some researchers argue that looking for structural changes in sugar molecules called glycans could help identify different types of cancer early on.

Companies and countries are in a race to develop quantum computers. The machines could revolutionize problem solving in medicine, physics, chemistry and engineering.

In 2007, Luciano Marraffini struck out on what was then a scientifically lonely path: to understand CRISPR, which had been discovered in bacteria only about a decade before.

Seventeen years later, we all know what CRISPR is: a revolution in medicine. A once-in-a-lifetime scientific breakthrough. The most promising tool for gene therapy ever discovered. But back then, “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” were merely curious genetic fragments with no known purpose.

“When I started, there was nothing that indicated that it was going to one day help people to cure genetic diseases,” Marraffini recalls.

A robot that automates a common technique for animal cloning has been used to produce a litter of cloned pigs in China — with a much higher success rate than human scientists.

The challenge: China is both the world’s biggest producer of pork and its largest consumer, so having ideal breeding stock — animals that birthe large litters of quick-growing piglets — is important for the nation’s economy and food security.

However, in 2018 and 2019, an epidemic of deadly African swine fever wiped out almost 50% of China’s pig population. As a result, many farmers have had to import breeding pigs, and China is now eager for its pork industry to become almost entirely self-sufficient.

Experiments verify a theory that explains why paint doesn’t dry any faster on a dry day than on a wet day.

You might think that polymer solutions like paint dry more slowly on a humid day than on a dry day. But researchers have now verified a theory that explains why the evaporation rate of the water or another solvent in a polymer solution can be independent of the ambient humidity [1]. The experiments show that, as predicted, water evaporation drives the polymer molecules toward the surface, where they form a dense layer that hinders evaporation and shields the surface from humidity effects. This phenomenon may affect the rate at which virus-containing respiratory droplets evaporate and thus could help explain the seasonal dependence of viral infections.

Humidity-independent evaporation is an advantage in many situations. For example, to preserve the body’s hydration, human skin maintains a nearly constant evaporation rate thanks to cell membranes whose lipid molecules can be reconfigured to adjust the sweat evaporation rate. This reconfiguration is an example of an active process. In 2017, Jean-Baptiste Salmon, a chemical engineer at the University of Bordeaux in France, proposed that humidity-independent evaporation does not require an active response [2]. Instead, his theory suggested that it occurs whenever the solvent evaporates from a solution of large molecules, a process that was already known to draw those molecules toward the drying interface. He predicted that, after the large molecules form a dense layer, the solvent’s evaporation rate will remain unchanged whether the surroundings are bone dry or at 100% humidity. However, the theory has not been tested with a nonactive polymer solution.

Differences in information transmission in the brain network between humans and other species are not well understood. Here, the authors apply an information theory approach to structural connectomes and functional MRI and report that human brain networks display more evidence of parallel information transmission compared to macaques and mice.

Plus: a marketing group says it can listen to consumer conversations through their phones.

Japanese scientists said they have succeeded in creating the world’s first mental images of objects and landscapes from human brain activity by using artificial intelligence technology.

The team of scientists from the National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology, another national institute and Osaka University was able to produce rough images of a leopard, with a recognizable mouth, ears and spotted pattern, as well as objects like an airplane with red lights on its wings.

The technology, dubbed “brain decoding,” enables the visualization of perceptual contents based on brain activity and could be applied to the medical and welfare fields.

Summary: A new study illuminated a part of the “dark genome,” specifically focusing on LINE-1, a genetic element linked to various diseases and aging.

Researchers have provided the first high-resolution images and structural details of LINE-1, an “ancient genetic parasite” with about 100 active copies in each person. This research, involving international collaboration, reveals LINE-1’s mechanism of integrating DNA into the human genome and its correlation with diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration.

The study’s findings offer a foundation for potential treatments targeting this retrotransposon.