Amazing Science

Researchers in Argentina have discovered what they say is the oldest-known giant dinosaur and it’s altering the way paleontologists view the evolution of dinosaurs as a whole.

A study recently published in Nature indicates the newly-discovered Ingentia prima is three times the size of the largest previously discovered dinosaur species from the Triassic period and would have weighed up to nine tonnes as an adult.

With this discovery, researchers are now rethinking the evolution of dinosaurs, as they previously believed giant dinosaurs didn’t exist until 25 million years later.

"Before this discovery, gigantism was considered to have emerged during the Jurassic period, approximately 180 million years ago, but Ingentia prima lived at the end of the Triassic, between 210 and 205 million years ago,” Cecilia Apaldetti, researcher at the University of San Juan and the study’s principal author, said in a news release.

For most dinosaurs, gigantism proved to be an evolutionary survival tool, especially among herbivores who could use their size as a form of defence against predators.

The researchers say the Ingentia prima, which loosely translates to “first giant,” was a four-legged herbivore that grew cyclically, meaning it would grow quickly for stretches of time and then stop growing for similar stretches, kind of like a tree.

What was your first memory? It's never a memory of being a baby - most people's earliest memory is from when they were around three or four years old. But why can we not remember our infant memories? And are they really lost, or just forgotten?

A team of neuroscientists from the University of Toronto set out to investigate, using mice to identify when and how brains forget these memories. "Rapid forgetting has been attributed to the fact that children lack the cognitive tools to successfully consolidate and organise autobiographical memories at this early developmental stage," the team writes in the study.

"However, similar accelerated forgetting in infancy is also observed in non-human species, including mice, suggesting that a complete neurobiological account cannot be limited to purely human phenomena." The researchers trained infant mice to associate a particular box with a small zap to the foot. The mice lost memory of this zap within 15 days, which is nearly analogous to humans forgetting memories of their infancy at around seven years old.

The researchers then took a new set of infant mice and tagged the specific neurons active in the hippocampus when they were placed in the box and had their foot lightly zapped. Weeks afterwards, when the memory should have been forgotten, the researchers stimulated the tagged neurons using a precise method called optogenetics, and found the mice behaved as if they recognized the box once more.

"The memory recall was remarkable," says senior author Paul Frankland, a neurobiologist from the SickKids Research Institute, and the University of Toronto.

Earth’s oxygen levels rose and fell more than once hundreds of millions of years before the planetwide success of the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago, new research from the University of Washington shows.

The evidence comes from a new study that indicates a second and much earlier “whiff” of oxygen in Earth’s distant past — in the atmosphere and on the surface of a large stretch of ocean — showing that the oxygenation of the Earth was a complex process of repeated trying and failing over a vast stretch of time.

The finding also may have implications in the search for life beyond Earth. Coming years will bring powerful new ground- and space-based telescopes able to analyze the atmospheres of distant planets. This work could help keep astronomers from unduly ruling out “false negatives,” or inhabited planets that may not at first appear to be so due to undetectable oxygen levels.

“The production and destruction of oxygen in the ocean and atmosphere over time was a war with no evidence of a clear winner, until the Great Oxidation Event,” said Matt Koehler, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences and lead author of a new paper published the week of July 9 , 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

When Mayo Clinic scientists eliminated aging, dysfunctional cells from old mice, not only did the animals’ lifespan increase but so did their “healthspan.”

If creaky old humans were more like dilapidated old kitchens, rejuvenation would be as simple as replacing cracked and faded Formica with gleaming new granite. But perhaps, a booming new scientific field hypothesizes, biological renovation might be more possible than one might expect.

The field, called “senolytics,” studies compounds that might kill senescent cells, which have become dysfunctional due to aging yet, paradoxically, refuse to die. Research published on Monday suggests the approach might actually work one day: When scientists at the Mayo Clinic eliminated senescent cells from old mice, not only did the animals’ lifespan increase but so did their “healthspan.” That is, during their extra years of life they were spry, strong, and healthy, not frail, decrepit, and sick — as is the case with nearly half of people over 85.

“As a concept [for slowing or reversing aging], senolytics is completely valid,” said Felipe Sierra, director of the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Aging Biology. “This study is really impressive,” he added, and hardly an outlier: “A couple dozen senolytics have been identified and companies are working on it. This is a very hot area.”

The reason eliminating senescent cells might slow aging is that the old cells do not simply fail to pull their weight in the heart, bones, immune system, or elsewhere. They also actively pump out inflammatory compounds that both kill young cells and disable progenitor cells that give birth to new cells, explained Dr. James Kirkland of the Mayo Clinic, who led the research published in Nature Medicine.

New techniques are providing unprecedented views into human development — and raising ethical questions.

Researchers working on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts hunt for the same thing that their predecessors sought for decades—a sign that life arose, as Carl Sagan would say, on another humdrum planet around another humdrum star and rose up into something technologically advanced.

It could happen any day. A strange radio signal. A weird, brief flash in the night sky. A curiously behaving star with no natural explanation.

It could be anything, so SETI researchers are casting a wide net, tracking down as many promising leads as they can. But one thing they’ve started to realize is that if a civilization from another world follows a similar path to our own, then we may be dealing with a whole different form of brainpower. Not a little green person, Vulcan, or strange organism we aren’t yet fathoming, but an artificial intelligence.

To understand why the first intelligence we meet might be artificial, we have to go back to early efforts to look for life around other stars. SETI researchers started listening to the cosmos on the assumption that aliens might begin radio transmissions as a first advanced technological step if they’re at all like us. There’s reason to believe that, like our own path, getting from the era of radio to the computing era is a small jump.

“By 1900 you had radio; by 1945 you had computers,” Seth Shostak, senior scientist at the SETI Institute, says. “It seems to me that’s a hard arc to avoid.” And from there, it may just be a matter of getting those computers smaller and smaller as they get smarter and smarter. Automated processes learn to adapt on their own, and someday, rudimentary intelligence arrives, just as it has here.

“There’s currently an AI revolution, and we see artificial intelligence getting smarter and smarter by the day,” Susan Schneider, an associate professor of cognitive science and philosophy at the University of Connecticut who has written about the intersection of SETI and AI, says. “That suggests to me something similar may be going on at other points in the universe.”

Maybe the great filter comes and augmented aliens survive. Then their AI offspring take the wheel. Do a bunch of apes with noisy radio signals and the odd act of nuclear warfare really appeal to them—are they even actively looking for something like us? When it comes to that idea, Shostak says, “It’s not even dangerous (for the aliens). It’s uninteresting. It’s like me putting a sign up in my yard saying ‘attention all ants.’”

In this case, we’re the ants. We may not have the resources of an alien society, and if artificial intelligence is supposed to search for signs of far, far advanced technology, we’re barely a blip on their radar. “Earth is actually a relatively young planet so some astrobiologists think if there are civilizations out there, they may be vastly more advanced than us. Sure, we got radio. Then we got computers. Then Moore’s Law turned digital computers into increasingly efficient machines, year-by-year. Machines improved very quickly—much, much more quickly than Darwin's life forms,” Shostak says.

Meanwhile, the aliens from the older planets get more advanced. So does their AI. Maybe it becomes the most dominant lifeform on the planet. It takes over its planet, then its star. It sends itself out into the universe in general—or it’s content to stay home for whatever reason. It’s plentiful and abundant and highly advanced, and when it comes across Earth, it doesn’t see anything particularly special. An alien AI may be just a few thousand years ahead of us, technologically, but it may still be advanced enough to grow disinterested in finding ants.

We might be like cats or goldfish compared to humans and they may not want to have anything to do with us. Our goldfish status could put us in a weird place. We may be just as likely to encounter biological life on a scale unimaginable to us right now, or we may make contact with their probes before we find them. We may find a semi-intelligent Bracewell beacon from afar, or one may swoop through our backyard, its AI trained to home in on the fingerprints of our civilization. We may find robots sent by the aliens, or we may find out robots are the aliens.

At a base level, its possible to imagine that our first meeting with intelligent life beyond Earth might not be with something living and breathing, but with a different kind of fellow explorer—who just might happen to be a machine.

For toddlers, playing with toys is not all fun-and-games—it’s an important way for them to learn how the world works. Using a similar methodology, researchers from UC Berkeley have developed a robot that, like a child, learns from scratch and experiments with objects to figure out how to best move them around. And by doing so, this robot is essentially able to see into its own future.

A robotic learning system developed by researchers at Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences visualizes the consequences of its future actions to discover ways of moving objects through time and space. Called Vestri, and using technology called visual foresight, the system can manipulate objects it’s never encountered before, and even avoid objects that might be in the way.

Most importantly, the system learns from a tabula rasa, using unsupervised and unguided exploratory sessions to figure out how the world works. That’s an important advance because the system doesn’t require an army of programmers to code in every single possible physical contingency which, given how complicated and varied the world is, would be a hideously onerous (and even intractable) task.

In future, scaled-up versions of this self-learning predictive system could make robots more adaptable in factory and residential settings, and help self-driving vehicles anticipate future events on the road.

The discovery changes our understanding of the basic mechanism of photosynthesis and should rewrite the textbooks. It will also tailor the way we hunt for alien life and provide insights into how we could engineer more efficient crops that take advantage of longer wavelengths of light.

The discovery, published today in Science, was led by Imperial College London, supported by the BBSRC, and involved groups from the ANU in Canberra, the CNRS in Paris and Saclay and the CNR in Milan.

The vast majority of life on Earth uses visible red light in the process of photosynthesis, but the new type uses near-infrared light instead. It was detected in a wide range of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) when they grow in near-infrared light, found in shaded conditions like bacterial mats in Yellowstone and in beach rock in Australia.

As scientists have now discovered, it also occurs in a cupboard fitted with infrared LEDs in Imperial College London.

Engineers have created an electronic 'skin' in an effort to restore a real sense of touch for amputees using prosthetics.

Amputees often experience the sensation of a "phantom limb" -- a feeling that a missing body part is still there. That sensory illusion is closer to becoming a reality thanks to a team of engineers at the Johns Hopkins University that has created an electronic skin.

When layered on top of prosthetic hands, this e-dermis brings back a real sense of touch through the fingertips. "After many years, I felt my hand, as if a hollow shell got filled with life again," says the anonymous amputee who served as the team's principal volunteer tester.

Made of fabric and rubber laced with sensors to mimic nerve endings, e-dermis recreates a sense of touch as well as pain by sensing stimuli and relaying the impulses back to the peripheral nerves.

"We've made a sensor that goes over the fingertips of a prosthetic hand and acts like your own skin would," says Luke Osborn, a graduate student in biomedical engineering. "It's inspired by what is happening in human biology, with receptors for both touch and pain.

"This is interesting and new," Osborn said, "because now we can have a prosthetic hand that is already on the market and fit it with an e-dermis that can tell the wearer whether he or she is picking up something that is round or whether it has sharp points."

The work -- published June 20 in the journal Science Robotics - shows it is possible to restore a range of natural, touch-based feelings to amputees who use prosthetic limbs. The ability to detect pain could be useful, for instance, not only in prosthetic hands but also in lower limb prostheses, alerting the user to potential damage to the device.

Human skin contains a complex network of receptors that relay a variety of sensations to the brain. This network provided a biological template for the research team, which includes members from the Johns Hopkins departments of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Neurology, and from the Singapore Institute of Neurotechnology.

Indiana University scientists have made the first direct observation of a key step in the process that bacteria use to rapidly evolve new traits, including antibiotic resistance. Using methods invented at IU, researchers recorded the first images of bacterial appendages -- over 10,000 times thinner than human hair -- as they stretched out to catch DNA. These DNA fragments can then be incorporated into bacteria's own genome through a process called DNA uptake or "horizontal gene transfer."

The work is reported in Nature Microbiology. "Horizontal gene transfer is an important way that antibiotic resistance moves between bacterial species, but the process has never been observed before, since the structures involved are so incredibly small," said senior author Ankur Dalia, an assistant professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology.

"It's important to understand this process, since the more we understand about how bacteria share DNA, the better our chances are of thwarting it," he added. Nearly 1 million people are affected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year, according to the World Health Organization. WHO has found evidence of these strains in nearly 490,000 people with tuberculous and 500,000 people with other infectious diseases.

A soon-to-be-published study supports the development of arbovirus vaccines targeting mosquito salivary proteins rather than the viruses present in their saliva.

Arbovirus infections represent 17% of all communicable diseases in humans, causing one billion cases and one million deaths annually. An arbovirus is a virus that is transmitted by insects to a vertebrate host, mainly mammals. The most common vectors of the arbovirus are mosquitos, ticks, and sandflies.

The most prevalent mosquito-borne viruses are dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, Zika, and chikungunya. These viruses have been responsible for emerging and re-emerging outbreaks and epidemics in the last years, thus representing a huge global health burden. Among all vector-borne viruses, Dengue is the most clinically significant arbovirus, infecting 390 million people each year with nearly 100 million symptomatic infections.

There are currently only vaccines for three arbovirus infections

Currently, vaccines exist for only three arbovirus infections: tick-borne encephalitis, Japanese encephalitis, and yellow fever. Dengue virus vaccines have been tested, but due to the complexity within the four dengue subgroups and genetic similarities with Zika virus, further studies must be conducted.

Since the development of viral protein-based vaccines has not been successful due to the intricacies of the vector-arbovirus-host interactions, some studies have supported the use of salivary proteins to develop “universal” arbovirus vaccines.

American researchers recently conducted a review study and its manuscript will bepublished soon in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. In their article, the authors review the literature and encourage the research and development of such vaccines.

With the aid of a particle accelerator, scientists are bringing back ghosts from the past, revealing portraits hidden underneath the tarnished surface of two roughly 150-year-old silver photographic plates.

Researchers used an accelerator called a synchrotron to produce strong, but nondamaging beams of X-rays to scan the damaged photographs, called daguerreotypes, and map their chemical composition. This allowed chemist Madalena Kozachuk of Western University in London, Canada, and colleagues to trace mercury deposits in the plates and create digital copies of the hidden images, the team reports June 22 in Scientific Reports. One image revealed a woman; the other, a man who had been completely obscured by tarnish. 

An early form of photography, daguerreotypes were popular from the 1840s through the 1860s. Photographers crafted the images by making a silver-coated copper plate and treating it with iodine vapor to generate a light-sensitive surface. Subjects sat still for the several minutes required to expose the plate and create an image. Then photographers treated the plate with heated mercury vapor and a gold solution to develop the image, forming tiny silver-mercury-gold particles where light struck the plate during the exposure process. These particles make up the image, reflecting white light. Lighter parts of an image, such as the woman’s hands and collar, have a higher density of these particles.

The researchers used mercury to map the contours of the original images, because that metal remains fixed in place under years of cloudy tarnish. The scans revealed where the original particles were, letting researchers reconstruct the image.

Scanning the roughly 8-by-7-centimeter daguerreotypes, provided by the National Gallery of Canada, was time-consuming, taking about eight hours per square centimeter. 

University of Utah physicists and collaborators have discovered that superconducting nanowires made of MoGe alloy undergo quantum phase transitions from a superconducting to a normal metal state when placed in an increasing magnetic field at low temperatures. The study is the first to uncover the microscopic process by which the material loses its superconductivity; the magnetic field breaks apart pairs of electrons, called Cooper pairs, which interact with other Cooper pairs and experience a damping force from unpaired electrons present in the system.

The findings are fully explained by the critical theory proposed by coauthor Adrian Del Maestro, associate professor at the University of Vermont. The theory correctly described how the evolution of superconductivity depends on critical temperature, magnetic field magnitude and orientation, nanowire cross sectional area, and the microscopic characteristics of the nanowire material. This is the first time in the field of superconductivity that all details of QPT predicted by a theory were confirmed on real objects in the lab.

“Quantum phase transitions may sound really exotic, but they are observed in many systems, from the center of stars to the nucleus of atoms, and from magnets to insulators,” said Andrey Rogachev, associate professor at the U and senior author of the study.“ By understanding quantum fluctuations in this simpler system, we can talk about every detail of the microscopic process and apply it to more complicated objects.”

The study published online July 9, 2018 in Nature Physics.

A decisive property of the Higgs boson is its affinity to mass. The heavier a particle is, the stronger the Higgs boson will couple to it. While physicists have firmly established this property for heavy W and Z bosons (force carriers), more data are needed to measure the Higgs boson coupling to the heavy fermions (matter particles).

These interactions, known as Yukawa couplings, are very interesting as they proceed through a quite different mechanism than the coupling to force-carrying bosons in the Standard Model. In certain new physics models, Yukawa couplings deviate from their Standard Model predictions. Analyses of the LHC Run 2 dataset are resulting in the first in-depth studies of these interactions, as seen in the recent ATLAS observation of a Higgs boson produced with a top-quark pair.

Decay to heaviest lepton

The ATLAS Collaboration has just released a measurement of the cross section of the Higgs boson decaying to a pair of taus, the heaviest known leptons. The new result is an unambiguous observation of this decay with a significance of 6.4 standard deviations. To achieve this, physicists combined 13 TeV data taken in 2015-2016 with earlier 7 and 8 TeV data. It confirms previous analyses of this channel, including initial evidence seen by ATLAS in 2013, the combined ATLAS and CMS observation published in 2016, and a recent CMS measurement.

The measured total production cross section of 3.7 picobarns, with an uncertainty of 28%, is well in agreement with the Standard Model prediction, but leaves also room for new physics contributions to be unveiled with more data. The result also disentangles the two most common Higgs production mechanisms: so-called gluon-gluon fusion and weak boson fusion. Again, within uncertainties, these measurements are fully consistent with the Standard Model.

More than 350 years ago, the English natural philosopher Robert Hooke looked through a microscope at a thin slice of cork and discovered that it was made of small, box-like compartments, which he named “cells.” From that moment on, Hooke and countless inquisitive minds after him strove for a better view of these fundamental building blocks of life. And now, the window into the cellular world has become a lot clearer.

In a new study in the April 20, 2018 issue of Science, researchers from Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus, Harvard Medical School, and collaborating institutions report the development of a microscope capable of capturing, in unprecedented detail, 3-D images and videos of cells inside living organisms. Adapting a technique used by astronomers to study distant stars, the research team, led by Nobel laureate and Janelia group leader Eric Betzig, showcased the new technology by generating a series of stunning movies: cancer cells crawling through blood vessels, spinal nerve cells wiring up into circuits, immune cells cruising through a zebrafish’s inner ear, and much more.

The resolution of the microscope is stunning and so powerful it can even capture subcellular details such as the dynamics of miniscule bubbles known as vesicles, which transport molecular cargo through to the cell. “This is the miracle of being able to see what we have never been able to see before. It’s simply incredible,” said study co-author Tomas Kirchhausen, HMS professor of cell biology, and the Springer Family Chair of pediatrics and a senior investigator at Boston Children’s Hospital.

• CRISPR-Cas9 shows promise for correcting genetic defects in a reliable manner 
• Using the gene-editing system to 'fix' embryos has caused ethical controversy and it is unclear whether or not it is safe
• New research from Weill Cornell University suggests that DNA in sperm could be fixed with CRISPR using a brief but powerful electrical shock  

AI will help bring novel therapies to market at lightning speeds, at much lower cost, and with no requirement for massive infrastructure and investments.

What if we could generate novel molecules to target any disease, overnight, ready for clinical trials? Imagine leveraging machine learning to accomplish with 50 people what the pharmaceutical industry can barely do with an army of 5,000.

It’s a trillion-dollar opportunity that can help billions of patients. The worldwide pharmaceutical market, one of the slowest monolithic industries to adapt, surpassed $1.1 trillion in 2016. In 2018, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies alone are projected to generate over $355 billion in revenue.

At the same time, it currently costs more than $2.5 billion (sometimes up to $12 billion) and takes over 10 years to bring a new drug to market. Nine out of 10 drugs entering Phase I clinical trials will never reach patients.

As the population ages, we don’t have time to rely on this slow, costly production rate. Some 12 percent of the world population will be 65 or older by 2030, and “diseases of aging” like Alzheimer’s will pose increasingly greater challenges to society.

But a world of pharmaceutical abundance is already emerging. As artificial intelligence converges with massive datasets in everything from gene expression to blood tests, novel drug discovery is about to get >100X cheaper, faster, and more intelligently targeted.

One of the hottest startups I know in this area is Insilico Medicine. Leveraging AI in its end-to-end drug pipeline, Insilico Medicine is extending healthy longevity through drug discovery and aging research. Their comprehensive drug discovery engine uses millions of samples and multiple data types to a) discover signatures of disease and b) identify the most promising targets for billions of molecules. These molecules either already exist or can be generated de novo with the desired set of parameters.

Insilico’s CEO Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov recently joined me on an Abundance Digital webinar to discuss the future of longevity research. Just recently, Insilico announced the completion of a strategic round of funding led by WuXi AppTec’s Corporate Venture Fund, with participation from Pavilion Capital, Juvenescence, and my venture fund BOLD Capital Partners.

What they’re doing is extraordinary, and it’s an excellent lens through which to view converging exponential technologies.

As a chameleon shifts its color from turquoise to pink to orange to green, nature's design principles are at play. Complex nano-mechanics are quietly and effortlessly working to camouflage the lizard's skin to match its environment.

Inspired by nature, a Northwestern University team has developed a novel nanolaser that changes colors using the same mechanism as chameleons. The work could open the door for advances in flexible optical displays in smartphones and televisions, wearable photonic devices and ultra-sensitive sensors that measure strain.

"Chameleons can easily change their colors by controlling the spacing among the nanocrystals on their skin, which determines the color we observe," said Teri W. Odom, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "This coloring based on surface structure is chemically stable and robust."

The research is published in the journal Nano Letters. The same way a chameleon controls the spacing of nanocrystals on its skin, the Northwestern team's laser exploits periodic arrays of metal nanoparticles on a stretchable, polymer matrix. As the matrix either stretches to pull the nanoparticles farther apart or contracts to push them closer together, the wavelength emitted from the laser changes wavelength, which also changes its color. "Hence, by stretching and releasing the elastomer substrate, we could select the emission color at will," Odom said.

The resulting laser is robust, tunable, reversible and has a high sensitivity to strain. These properties are critical for applications in responsive optical displays, on-chip photonic circuits and multiplexed optical communication.

Scientists at MIT and elsewhere have analyzed data from K2, the follow-up mission to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, and have discovered nearly 80 possible exoplanets amid some 50,000 stars.

The search is considered a successful “dress rehearsal” for the exoplanet hunter TESS.

In a paper that appears in The Astronomical Journal, the scientists report the discovery of nearly 80 new planetary candidates, including a particular standout: a likely planet that orbits the star HD 73344, which would be the brightest planet host ever discovered by the K2 mission.

The planet appears to orbit HD 73344 every 15 days, and based on the amount of light that it blocks each time it passes in front of its star, scientists estimate that the planet is about 2.5 times the size of the Earth and 10 times as massive. It is also likely incredibly hot, with a temperature somewhere in the range of 1,200 to 1,300 degrees Celsius, or around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- about the temperature of lava from an erupting volcano.

The planet lies at a relatively close distance of 35 parsecs, or about 114 light years from Earth. Given its proximity and the fact that it orbits a very bright star, scientists believe the planet is an ideal candidate for follow-up studies to determine its atmospheric composition and other characteristics. "We think it would probably be more like a smaller, hotter version of Uranus or Neptune," says Ian Crossfield, an assistant professor of physics at MIT who co-led the study with graduate student Liang Yu.

The new analysis is also noteworthy for the speed with which it was performed. The researchers were able to use existing tools developed at MIT to rapidly search through graphs of light intensity called "lightcurves" from each of the 50,000 stars that K2 monitored in its two recent observing campaigns. They quickly identified the planetary candidates and released the information to the astronomy community just weeks after the K2 mission made the spacecraft's raw data available. A typical analysis of this kind takes between several months and a year.

Scientists seeking to unlock secrets of cellular aging have identified a gene that triggers senescence, a phenomenon in which cells stop dividing. The gene, called CD36, is unusually active in older, senescent cells. Heightening CD36 activity also caused young, healthy cells to stop dividing, with the effect also spreading to nearby cells in the same petri dish.

Senescence is a natural occurrence in the life of a cell, and researchers have sought to learn about it for a couple of reasons. First, it's connected to old age: Senescent cells are thought to contribute to heart disease, arthritis, cataracts and a bevy of other age-linked conditions. Second, a lack of senescence is a hallmark of cancer cells, which bypass this process to replicate in an uncontrolled manner.

The new study -- published online on June 20, 2018 in Molecular Omics, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry -- illuminates genes involved in cellular senescence, and highlights one in particular that seems tightly associated with this crucial biological process.

In experiments, University at Buffalo researchers discovered that a gene called CD36 is unusually active in older, senescent cells.

What's more, scientists were able to cause young, healthy cells to stop dividing by heightening CD36 activity within those cells.

The effect spread to nearby cells, with almost all of the cells in a petri dish showing signs of senescence when only a small fraction of those cells -- about 10 to 15 percent -- were overexpressing CD36. New cells placed in the growth medium (a soupy substance) that previously housed the senescent cells also stopped replicating.

"What we found was very surprising," says Ekin Atilla-Gokcumen, PhD, an assistant professor of chemistry in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "Senescence is a very complex process, and we didn't expect that altering expression of one gene could spark it, or cause the same effect in surrounding cells."

The results point to CD36 as an exciting topic of future research. The gene's exact role in senescence remains a mystery: Scientists know that the gene guides the body in building a protein of the same name that sits on the surface of cells, but this protein's functions are still being studied. Proposed activities include helping cells import lipids, and influencing how these lipids are used within cells.

Physicists working at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the US say they have passed another important milestone in their quest for nuclear fusion energy. They have shown that the fusion energy generated by the laser implosion of a deuterium-tritium fuel capsule is twice that of the kinetic energy of the implosion. By further trebling the fusion energy, they say they will be close to the long-sought goal of an overall net energy gain.

The $3.5bn NIF trains 192 pulsed laser beams on to the inner surface of a centimetre-long hollow metal cylinder known as a hohlraum. Inside is a fuel capsule, which is a roughly 2 mm-diameter hollow sphere containing a thin deuterium-tritium layer. Each pulse lasts just a few nanoseconds and the lasers can deliver about 1.8 MJ of energy. This powerful blast causes the capsule to implode rapidly, creating immense temperatures and pressures inside a central “hot spot”, where fusion reactions occur.

The long-term goal is that the energy of neutrons given off by fusion can generate electricity. Before this is possible, NIF must show that it is possible to achieve ignition – the point at which fusion reactions generate at least as much energy delivered by the laser system. This involves self-sustaining reactions, in which the alpha particles that are also emitted during fusion give off enough heat to initiate further fusion.

Storing billions of tonnes of CO2 underground would be a “safe and effective” way to help limit the effects of climate change, a new study says.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a process whereby CO2 is “captured” from the air and then transported to a storage site – which could be, for example, a depleted oil or gas field or a deep rock reservoir beneath the sea.

Though the technology is currently restricted to a few small pilot projects, many view its large-scale development as an essential step to limiting the effects of future climate change. In its most recent assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that avoiding dangerous climate change would cost twice as much without CCS.

One barrier to the development of CCS is the costs associated with directly capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. Another barrier is the fear that, once underground, stored CO2 could leak out into the atmosphere. It is this second barrier that is addressed by the new research, which is published in Nature Communications.

To address the question of leakage, the researchers developed a new model – known as the Storage Security Calculator – which looks at what would happen if 12bn tons of CO2 were injected under the ground and left for 10,000 years. The 12bn-ton target reflects the EU’s ambition for CO2 storage by 2050.

The findings suggest that – providing a suitable storage site is chosen – the risk of CO2 leakage would be minimal, says lead author Dr Juan Alcalde, a geologist at the University of Aberdeen. In a video filmed at the sidelines of this year’s European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly, he explains the study’s main findings to Carbon Brief.

Three new members have been isolated and added to the Pandoravirus family by researchers at the Structural and Genomic Information Laboratory (CNRS/Aix‐Marseille Université), working with partners at the Large Scale Biology Laboratory (CEA/Inserm/Université Grenoble‐Alpes) and at CEA-Genoscope. This strange family of viruses, with their giant genomes and many genes with no known equivalents, surprised the scientists when they were discovered a few years ago. In the 11 June 2018 edition of Nature Communications, researchers offer an explanation: pandoviruses appear to be factories for new genes – and therefore new functions. From freaks of nature to evolutionary innovators, giant viruses continue to shake branches on the tree of life!