The Research

A drug treatment that mimics fasting can also provide the same benefit, study finds.... Intestinal stem cells from mice that fasted for 24 hours, at right, produced much more substantial intestinal organoids than stem cells from mice that did not fast, at left. Credit: Maria Mihaylova and Chia-Wei Cheng     A s people age, their intestinal stem cells begin to lose their ability to regenerate. These stem cells are the source for all new intestinal cells, so this decline can make it more difficult to recover from gastrointestinal infections or other conditions that affect the intestine. In fasting mice, cells begin breaking down fatty acids instead of glucose, a change that stimulates the stem cells to become more regenerative. The researchers found that they could also boost regeneration with a molecule that activates the same metabolic switch. Such an intervention could potentially help older people recovering from GI infections or cancer patients undergoing chemot...

From a simulated bioattack on London's Underground to scientists self-testing hydrogen cyanide, a book about science under wraps exposes numerous horrors...... THE 26 July 1963 is widely remembered for the devastating earthquake that killed thousands of people in the city of Skopje, then in Yugoslavia. Far fewer know it as the date of a secret military trial on the London Underground, which aimed to simulate another sort of catastrophic event: the release of anthrax in an enclosed public space. At around midday, a small box of powder was dropped from the window of a Northern Line train, just as it pulled out of the south London station of Colliers Wood. As the box smashed and released its contents, hundreds of men, women and children were exposed to spores of Bacillus globigii, unaware that they had just become test subjects in one of the largest ever field trials of a simulated biological attack. As Secret Science explains, B. globigii is considered a human pathogen wit...

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researcher Dr. Charis Teh has led a study revealing a quality control step in the development in immune T cells. Credit: Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Australia The research into T cell development within an organ called the thymus revealed for the first time that a protein complex called LUBAC enables 'quality control' of the cells before they are released into the bloodstream. T cells are an important component of the immune system, orchestrating immune responses in reaction to infections. The thymus is like a 'school' for T cells, training them how to fight infections and eliminating the 'naughty' cells that have the potential to launch dangerous autoimmune attacks on the body's own tissues. Only a small proportion of the T cells that begin their development 'graduate' and are allowed out of the thymus, into the bloodstream - the rest do not survive. Dr Charis Teh, Dr Daniel Gray and colleagues made the di...

As we age our thymus shrinks and is replaced by fatty tissue, losing its essential ability to grow and develop T cells and leaving us susceptible to infections, immune disorders and cancers. Institute scientists have identified a cell that they believe is involved in the curious disappearance of our thymus; and could be the key to regenerating this vital organ. The aging thymus The thymus is a little organ that sits behind the collarbone, but it performs an important job. The thymus is where essential immune cells called T cells are made and trained to go out into the body and fight infections and cancer. A peculiar feature of the thymus is that it disappears as we get older. The thymus starts deteriorating after birth but the process speeds up after puberty and, by age 65, we are basically unable to make new T cells. As the organ shrinks, the T cell areas are replaced with fatty tissue, in a process called involution. As it is replaced by fatty tissue, the thymus can...

The link between a mother's body mass index (BMI) before pregnancy and the metabolic traits of her children is likely mediated by shared genetics and familial lifestyle rather than effects on the fetus during gestation, according to study published this week in PLOS Medicine by Debbie Lawlor of the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues. 20 to 50 percent of women in Western populations now start pregnancy overweight or obese, and researchers have hypothesized that this may lead to metabolic disruptions in offspring. Lawlor's group used data on 5,337 mother-father-offspring trios collected in three European birth cohorts. Each dataset included maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, paternal BMI, offspring BMI, and information on 153 metabolic traits in the offspring, based on a blood sample taken at age 16, 17, or 31. The researchers found associations between parental BMIs and offspring metabolic traits including VLDL-lipoproteins, VLDL-C, VLDL-triglycerides, VLDL-diameter, glyc...

, Credit: Northwestern University Specially programmed stem cells demonstrated the potential to regenerate lost muscle mass in muscular dystrophy, according to a Northwestern Medicine study published in Nature Communications.   Scientists reprogram stem cells to regenerate muscle in muscular dystrophy Images showing MiPs inducing regeneration of both heart and muscle tissue (green), and subsequent destruction of regenerated tissue when the MiPs are turned off by the molecule AP20187.  Elizabeth McNally, MD, Ph.D., the Elizabeth J. Ward Professor of Genetic Medicine, was a co-author on the study and Mattia Quattrocelli, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in McNally's lab, was one of the study's co-senior authors. Muscular dystrophy is a genetic disease characterized by the progressive loss of both skeletal and cardiac muscle mass. While there is no cure, physical therapy or medication can offer relief for symptoms, and recent advancements in induced pluripotent stem c...

Machine learning computer systems, which get better with experience, are poised to transform the economy much as steam engines and electricity have in the past. They can outperform people in a number of tasks, though they are unlikely to replace people in all jobs. So say Carnegie Mellon University’s Tom Mitchell and MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson in a Policy Forum commentary to be published in the Dec. 22 edition of the journal  Science.  Mitchell, who founded the world’s first Machine Learning Department at CMU, and Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy in the Sloan School of Management, describe 21 criteria to evaluate whether a task or a job is amenable to machine learning (ML). “Although the economic effects of ML are relatively limited today, and we are not facing the imminent ‘end of work’ as is sometimes proclaimed, the implications for the economy and the workforce going forward are profound,” they write. The skills people choose to develo...

Illustration showing fluctuations between regions of two different local structures (high density as red and low density liquid as blue) of water that depend on the temperature. Maxima in the thermodynamic response and correlation functions are observed as a function of temperature, when the numbers of molecules in the two structures become equal, resulting in strong enhancement in the anomalous properties of water in the deeply supercooled regime. Credit: Stockholm University Using x-ray lasers, researchers at Stockholm University have been able to map out how water fluctuates between two different states when it is cooled. At -44°C these fluctuations reach a maximum pointing to the fact that water can exist as two different distinct liquids. The findings will be published in the journal Science. Water, both common and necessary for life on earth, behaves very strangely in comparison with other substances. How water's density, specific heat, viscosity and compressi...

The biochemist Professor Dr. Dorothee Staiger from Bielefeld University has been studying the biological clock in plants for twenty years. Credit: research_tv   The Americans Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their research on the biological clock. They discovered the molecular mechanisms controlling biological rhythms. A new 'research_tv' report describes how scientists at Bielefeld are also advancing research on the biological clock. The biochemist Professor Dr. Dorothee Staiger from Bielefeld University explains what the three Nobel Prize winners have achieved and reports on the discoveries her research team has made together with collaborators. 'A Nobel Prize for the biological clock has long been overdue,' says Dorothee Staiger. What is so remarkable is that the prize has been granted to basic research - that is, to studies on fundamental concepts in nature. Whereas the...

Catalog of candidate genes involved in plant-microbe relationships Published Dec. 18, 2017 in Nature Genetics, a team led by researchers at Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have exploited a catalog of bacterial genomes to identify and characterize candidate genes that aid bacteria in adapting to plant environments, specifically genes involved in bacterial root colonization. This image depicts a phylogenetic tree of over 3,800 high quality and non-redundant bacterial genomes. Outer ring denotes the taxonomic group, central ring denotes the isolation source, and inner ring denotes the root-associated genomes within plant-associated genomes. Taxon names are color-coded based on phylum: green - Proteobacteria, red - Firmicutes, blue -Bacteroidetes, purple - Actinobacteria. Credit: Asaf Levy, JGI As the global population rises, estimated to hit nearly 10 billion by 2050, so does the need to ...