Biology

“Schrödinger’s Bacterium” Could Be a Quantum Biology Milestone

The quantum world is a weird one. In theory and to some extent in practice its tenets demand that a particle can appear to be in two places at once—a paradoxical phenomenon known as superposition—and that two particles can become “entangled,” sharing information across arbitrarily large distances through some still-unknown mechanism. Perhaps the most famous example of quantum weirdness is Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.

Organisms found on hike in the woods are like no other life on Earth

Lab-grown ‘mini brains’ produce electrical patterns that resemble those of premature babies

Your gut is directly connected to your brain, by a newly discovered neuron circuit

New anti-cancer drugs put cancers to sleep—permanently

In a world first, Melbourne scientists have discovered a new type of anti-cancer drug that can put cancer cells into a permanent sleep, without the harmful side-effects caused by conventional cancer therapies. Published today in the journal Nature, the research reveals the first class of anti-cancer drugs that work by putting the cancer cell to sleep – arresting tumour growth and spread without damaging the cells’ DNA. The new class of drugs could provide an exciting alternative for people with cancer, and has already shown great promise in halting cancer progression in models of blood and liver cancers, as well as in delaying cancer relapse.

New anti-cancer drugs put cancers to sleep—permanently

In a world first, Melbourne scientists have discovered a new type of anti-cancer drug that can put cancer cells into a permanent sleep, without the harmful side-effects caused by conventional cancer therapies. Published today in the journal Nature, the research reveals the first class of anti-cancer drugs that work by putting the cancer cell to sleep – arresting tumour growth and spread without damaging the cells’ DNA. The new class of drugs could provide an exciting alternative for people with cancer, and has already shown great promise in halting cancer progression in models of blood and liver cancers, as well as in delaying cancer relapse.

Swarming Bacteria Create an “Impossible” Superfluid

Researchers explore a loophole that extracts useful energy from a fluid’s seemingly random motion. The secret? Sugar and asymmetry.

Our cancer preventing genes revealed

In our bodies, we all have genes working hard to prevent cancer. If they don’t do their job properly, rogue cells can mutate and develop into the life-threatening disease. The malfunction of one so-called “super tumour suppressor gene” known as p53 causes at least half of all cancers.

Human blood cells transformed into functional neurons

Human immune cells in blood can be converted directly into functional neurons in the laboratory in about three weeks with the addition of just four proteins, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found. The conversion occurs with relatively high efficiency — generating as many as 50,000 neurons from 1 milliliter of blood — and it can be achieved with fresh or previously frozen and stored blood samples, which vastly enhances opportunities for the study of neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. A paper describing the findings was published online June 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness

You’ve got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you’ve got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought. According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals.

Mean differences in men’s and women’s brains are very large

Mice with 3D-Printed Ovaries Successfully Give Birth

AsKatherine Kornei at Science reports,the researchers used a 3D printer to build the scaffolding of the organs, weaving layers of gelatin to createtiny (15 x 15 millimeter) ovaries on glass slides. They then tested the scaffolds by embedding a follicle—the tiny sacs composed of hormone-secreting cells that containthe maturing eggs. This test suggested that the tightest weave supported the highest survival rates, reports Kornei.

How an AI Startup Could Defeat Now Unbeatable Bugs

The need for new medications is higher than ever, but so is the cost and time to bring them to market. Developing a new drug can cost billions and take as long as 14 years, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Yet with all that effort, only 8 percent of drugs make it to market, the FDA said.

The Microbiome is the Fundamental Future of Personalized Medicine

If anything makes us human it’s our minds, thoughts and emotions. And yet a controversial new concept is emerging that claims gut bacteria are an invisible hand altering our brains. Science is piecing together how the trillions of microbes that live on and in all of us—our microbiome—affect our physical health.

Using CRISPR to edit coral

The work was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Phillip Cleves, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and coral enthusiast, is first author on the study. Cleves and his collaborators were able to use CRISPR to successfully introduce mutations to three genes (red fluorescent protein, green fluorescent protein and fibroblast growth factor 1a, a gene that is thought to help regulate new coral colonization) in a specific type of coral, Acropora millepora, definitively showing for the first time that the gene-editing technology could be successful in coral species.

‘Double Trojan Horse’ Drug Tricks Bacteria into Committing Suicide

Bacteria come in two very broad categories based on the structure of their cell walls, the outer region that gives the cells shape and integrity. The cell walls of Gram-positive bacteria consist of a membrane surrounded by a thick layer of sugar and protein, while the cell walls of Gram-negative bacteria consist of a membrane surrounded by a second membrane. This fundamental anatomical difference has a profound medical implication: The types of antibiotics that can kill Gram-positive bacteria are likely ineffective against Gram-negative bacteria and vice versa.

Allen Integrated Cell is a powerful tool for visualizing biology in 3D

Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens

When 12 men gathered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to discuss the art and science of alien hunting in 1961, the Order of the Dolphin was born. A number of the brightest minds from a range of scientific disciplines, including three Nobel laureates, a young Carl Sagan, and an eccentric neuroscientist named John Lilly—who was best known for trying to talk to dolphins—were in attendance. It was Lilly’s research that inspired the group’s name: If humans couldn’t even communicate with animals that shared most of our evolutionary history, he believed, they were a bit daft to think they could recognize signals from a distant planet.

Cells Talk in a Language That Looks Like Viruses

For cells, communication is a matter of life and death. The ability to tell other members of your species — or other parts of the body — that food supplies are running low or that an invading pathogen is near can be the difference between survival and extinction. Scientists have known for decades that cells can secrete chemicals into their surroundings, releasing a free-floating message for all to read.

Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform

Crispr, the powerful gene-editing tool, is revolutionizing the speed and scope with which scientists can modify the DNA of organisms, including human cells. So many people want to use it—from academic researchers to agtech companies to biopharma firms—that new companies are popping up to staunch the demand. Companies like Synthego, which is using a combination of software engineering and hardware automation to become the Amazon of genome engineering.

Researchers find a gene that lets bacteria kill all male flies

Learning to Speak Shrub

A few months later, Karban, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies plant defense communication, returns to the sagebrush and examines its leaves, many of which now have damage from real grasshoppers or beetles. However, within about two feet of the branches he clipped, leaves have been spared the worst ravages of the hungry insects. That’s because Karban’s cuttings convinced those damaged leaves they were under insect attack, so they sent chemical alarms into the air.

Why Water Is Weird

It’s striking that water can illustrate and elucidate a martial arts philosophy while also being, to this day, the “least understood material on Earth,” as researchers reported recently.

Exabytes in a Test Tube: The Case for DNA Data Storage

New form of DNA discovered inside living human cells

A newDNAstructure inside human cells known asthe “i-motif”, has been identified by scientists. This form resembles a twisted “knot” of DNA, instead of the well-known double helix first described by James Watson and Francis Crick.

How Many Genes Do Cells Need? Maybe Almost All of Them

MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

There is a borderland between waking life and the uncharted wilderness of sleep that we all traverse each night, but we rarely stop to marvel at the strangeness of this liminal world. If we do, we find that it is full of hallucinations both wonderful and terrifying, a mental goulash of reality and fantasy.

Your Brain’s Music Circuit Has Been Discovered – Facts So Romantic

Seeing More with In Silico Labeling of Microscopy Images

In the fields of biology and medicine, microscopy allows researchers to observe details of cells and molecules which are unavailable to the naked eye. Transmitted light microscopy, where a biological sample is illuminated on one side and imaged, is relatively simple and well-tolerated by living cultures but produces images which can be difficult to properly assess. Fluorescence microscopy, in which biological objects of interest (such as cell nuclei) are specifically targeted with fluorescent molecules, simplifies analysis but requires complex sample preparation.

The Interstitium, the Largest Organ We Never Knew We Had

Newly-discovered human organ may help explain how cancer spreads

This discovery was made by chance, from routine endoscopies – a procedure that involves inserting a thin camera into a person’s gastrointestinal tract. Newer approaches enable doctors to use this procedure to get a microscopic look at the tissue inside a person’s gut at the same time, with some surprising results.

Breakthrough study reveals how LSD dissolves a person’s sense of self

ProteinNet: A standardized data set for machine learning of protein structure

This Unidentified Sea Creature Washed Up on a Georgia Beach, then Vanished

Nanofibers Dramatically Improve Wound Healing and Tissue Regeneration

The discovery that wounds in the fetus can heal without scarring has prompted scientists to work on designing new biomaterials based on the properties of the fetal skin as promising regenerative strategies.

Dark Matter Is in Our DNA

While some point to galaxy cluster work by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, dark matter was truly “discovered” in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, who was studying the rotation of spiral galaxies. Rubin found that galaxies were spinning too fast for the matter we could see in them, yet they weren’t flying apart. Rubin’s work left astronomers with a choice: Either our laws of gravity were wrong, or there was something else out there pulling on the galaxy’s stars and speeding them up while keeping them together.

How to build a brain – An introduction to neurophysiology for engineers

Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth

In recent years, by working on tadpoles and other simple creatures, Levin’s laboratory has amassed evidence that the embryo is molded by bioelectrical signals, particularly ones that emanate from the young brain long before it is even a functional organ. Those results, if replicated in other organisms, may change our understanding of the roles of electrical phenomena and the nervous system in development, and perhaps more widely in biology.

How Cheese, Wheat and Alcohol Shaped Human Evolution

As our evolution continues, the crucial role of diet hasn’t gone away. Genetic studies show that humans are still evolving, with evidence of natural selection pressures on genes impacting everything from Alzheimer’s disease to skin color to menstruation age. And what we eat today will influence the direction we will take tomorrow.

Cracking Open the Black Box of AI with Cell Biology

Study Reveals Brain Mechanisms That Allow “Iceman” Unusual Resistance to Cold

How Evolutionary Biology Explains Smartphone Addiction

That’s according to a new research paperthat argues for a new way of thinking about our phone addiction. The authors claim that hundreds of thousands of years of evolution made us social in order to survive–and social media simply is driving this deeply ingrained human behavior into overdrive. This isn’t actually all that bad, they say, if you follow two basic rules.

Sleeping In Rooms With Even a Little Light Can Increase Risk of Depression, Study Finds

It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids

It is a bit of a stretch, but by no means impossible or even unlikely that a hybrid or a chimera combining a human being and a chimpanzee could be produced in a laboratory. After all, human and chimp (or bonobo) share, by most estimates, roughly 99 percent of their nuclear DNA. Granted this 1 percent difference presumably involves some key alleles, the newgene-editing tool CRISPR offers the prospect (for some, the nightmare) of adding and deleting targeted genes as desired.

Brain tissue samples suggest we stop growing new neurons in our early teens

Our Microbiomes Are Making Scientists Question What it Means to Be Human

Did plants cause one of Earth’s great extinctions?

Clues are hard to come by when you’re trying to look back to a time when the continents clumped together like a closed fist. But geologists have found evidence that plants, the most gentle of organisms, may have helped kill most of the life in the oceans 374 million years ago.

New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life

For decades, descriptions of viruses have straddled life and nonlife, a divide that usually isn’t difficult to navigate. Their hallmark characteristics, namely their small size, tiny genomes and parasitic dependence on cellular hosts for replication, set them apart from all other living things despite their animation. But that story has gotten far more puzzling — particularly since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, which was so large that researchers initially thought it was a bacterium.