The newly discovered Youti yuanshi larva fossil is so well-preserved that it provides a road map for arthropod evolution during the Cambrian period.
Researchers discovered diverse and stable immune cell populations in the upper respiratory tract, highlighting the critical role of mucosal immunity in COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases.
Aging is associated with blood flow changes in the brain.
These changes may be linked to an increased risk of neurodegenerative conditions.
Researchers have mapped the aging processes of blood vessels in the brains of mice in an effort to establish how they affect cognitive decline.
Continue reading “How do aging brain blood vessels contribute to cognitive decline?” »
The effective integration of extremely thin insulating layers with two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors could enable the fabrication of 2D transistors with an electrical capacitance comparable to SiO2 with thicknesses below 1-nm. These transistors could, in turn, help to boost the performance and reduce the power consumption of electronic devices.
Researchers at Nankai University in China recently introduced a new strategy to synthesize single-crystalline metal nanosheets that could be easily transferred onto 2D substrates. This strategy, outlined in a paper in Nature Electronics, was successfully used to deposit 2-nm-thick dielectrics based on Al2O3 or HfO2 for highly performing top-gated transistors.
“At the very beginning, we aimed to developing the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) synthetic strategy of 2D Cu2O, which is a p-type high-mobility 2D semiconductor,” Jinxiong Wu, corresponding author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.
We occasionally see animals that don’t look like they belong in the 21st century. Here are seven prehistoric-looking creatures that stand out more than most.
ACE, a groundbreaking DNA-powered signal amplification technology, significantly enhances the sensitivity of mass cytometry, providing new insights into various biological and pathological processes.
Since the 1950s, researchers have employed “flow cytometry,” a renowned technique devised by Wallace Coulter, to characterize various types of immune cells in research studies and human blood samples. This method has significantly enhanced our understanding of immune cell development and provided innovative approaches for evaluating human health and diagnosing various blood cancers. Eventually, flow cytometry was extended to analyze other cell types as well.
In traditional flow cytometry, cell surface and intracellular proteins are detected with antibody molecules that are linked to fluorescent probes. However, while providing single-cell sensitivity, this method is limited in detecting multiple proteins by the number of fluorophores that can be clearly distinguished within the entire spectrum of fluorescent light.
Summary: Researchers developed a computer model that mimics how the hippocampus stores new episodic memories without erasing old ones. This model demonstrates that the CA3 region of the hippocampus serves as an anchor point for memories, allowing efficient storage in surrounding regions.
The findings reveal insights into how the brain organizes personal experiences and maintains stability despite constant updates. The model shows promise for enhancing our understanding of memory retention and cognitive processing.
The ability to accurately quantify biological age could help monitor and control healthy aging. Epigenetic clocks have emerged as promising tools for estimating biological age, yet so far, most of these clocks have been developed from heterogeneous bulk tissues, and are thus composites of two aging processes, one reflecting the change of cell-type composition with age and another reflecting the aging of individual cell-types. There is thus a need to dissect and quantify these two components of epigenetic clocks, and to develop epigenetic clocks that can yield biological age estimates at cell-type resolution. Here we demonstrate that in blood and brain, approximately 35% of an epigenetic clock’s accuracy is driven by underlying shifts in lymphocyte and neuronal subsets, respectively. Using brain and liver tissue as prototypes, we build and validate neuron and hepatocyte specific DNA methylation clocks, and demonstrate that these cell-type specific clocks yield improved estimates of chronological age in the corresponding cell and tissue-types. We find that neuron and glia specific clocks display biological age acceleration in Alzheimer’s Disease with the effect being strongest for glia in the temporal lobe. The hepatocyte clock is found accelerated in liver under various pathological conditions. In contrast, non-cell-type specific clocks do not display biological age-acceleration, or only do so more marginally. In summary, this work highlights the importance of dissecting epigenetic clocks and quantifying biological age at cell-type resolution.
The authors have declared no competing interest.
The Illumina DNA methylation datasets analyzed here are all freely available from GEO (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo).
ChatGPT and other AIs consume as much energy as thousands of US households, and demand is only set to rise, but it’s a fraction of other tech.
