Amazing Science

The research ship Okeanos Explorer is sending an ROV into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, seeking out exotic sea animals and other curiosities. And, you can watch it live online.

Armchair oceanographers, take note: This week, the research ship Okeanos Explorer will send a remotely operated vehicle into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, seeking out exotic sea animals like the "walking" fish called a sea toad and other curiosities. And, you can have a front-row seat.

The ROV, called Deep Discoverer, will reach depths of 3.7 miles (6,000 meters) beneath the sea's surface. Its trip is scheduled to begin Thursday (Feb. 16), and you can watch it unfold online.

This expedition, which will run through September, is part of NOAA's CAPSTONE, or Campaign to Address Pacific monument Science, Technology, and Ocean Needs.

The project, in its third and final year, is aimed at collecting data from the deep ocean within marine-protected areas in the central and western Pacific Ocean, according to NOAA. The information will not only shed light on largely unexplored areas; it will also help others to make informed decisions regarding management of the protected areas and on the issue of deep-sea mining.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in infants with older siblings with autism, researchers from around the country were able to correctly predict 80 percent of those infants who would later meet criteria for autism at two years of age. The study, published Feb. 15 2017 in Nature, is the first to show it is possible to identify which infants – among those with older siblings with autism – will be diagnosed with autism at 24 months of age.

“Our study shows that early brain development biomarkers could be very useful in identifying babies at the highest risk for autism before behavioral symptoms emerge,” said senior author Joseph Piven, M.D., the Thomas E. Castelloe Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “Typically, the earliest an autism diagnosis can be made is between ages two and three. But for babies with older autistic siblings, our imaging approach may help predict during the first year of life which babies are most likely to receive an autism diagnosis at 24 months.”

This research project included hundreds of children from across the country and was led by researchers at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities (CIDD) at the University of North Carolina, where Piven is director. The project’s other clinical sites included the University of Washington, Washington University in St. Louis, and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Other key collaborators are McGill University, the University of Alberta, the University of Minnesota, the College of Charleston, and New York University.

“This study could not have been completed without a major commitment from these families, many of whom flew in to be part of this,” said first author Heather Hazlett, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine and a CIDD researcher. “We are still enrolling families for this study, and we hope to begin work on a similar project to replicate our findings.”

A large research synthesis, published in one of the world’s most influential scientific journals, has detected a decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world — a long-predicted result of climate change that could have severe consequences for marine organisms if it continues.

The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko and two colleagues from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, found a decline of more than 2 percent in ocean oxygen content worldwide between 1960 and 2010. The loss, however, showed up in some ocean basins more than others. The largest overall volume of oxygen was lost in the largest ocean — the Pacific — but as a percentage, the decline was sharpest in the Arctic Ocean, a region facing Earth’s most stark climate change.

The loss of ocean oxygen “has been assumed from models, and there have been lots of regional analysis that have shown local decline, but it has never been shown on the global scale, and never for the deep ocean,” said Schmidtko, who conducted the research with Lothar Stramma and Martin Visbeck, also of GEOMAR.

Ocean oxygen is vital to marine organisms, but also very delicate — unlike in the atmosphere, where gases mix together thoroughly, in the ocean that is far harder to accomplish, Schmidtko explained. Moreover, he added, just 1 percent of all the Earth’s available oxygen mixes into the ocean; the vast majority remains in the air.

Climate change models predict the oceans will lose oxygen because of several factors. Most obvious is simply that warmer water holds less dissolved gases, including oxygen. “It’s the same reason we keep our sparkling drinks pretty cold,” Schmidtko said. But another factor is the growing stratification of ocean waters. Oxygen enters the ocean at its surface, from the atmosphere and from the photosynthetic activity of marine microorganisms. But as that upper layer warms up, the oxygen-rich waters are less likely to mix down into cooler layers of the ocean because the warm waters are less dense and do not sink as readily.

Members of the public can search a newly released database of 1,600 stars to find signs of undiscovered exoplanets. The dataset, taken over two decades by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, comes with an open-source software package and an online tutorial.

The search for planets beyond our solar system is about to gain some new recruits. Just recently, a team that includes MIT and is led by the Carnegie Institution for Science has released the largest collection of observations made with a technique called radial velocity, to be used for hunting exoplanets. The huge dataset, taken over two decades by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, is now available to the public, along with an open-source software package to process the data and an online tutorial.

By making the data public and user-friendly, the scientists hope to draw fresh eyes to the observations, which encompass almost 61,000 measurements of more than 1,600 nearby stars.

“This is an amazing catalog, and we realized there just aren’t enough of us on the team to be doing as much science as could come out of this dataset,” says Jennifer Burt, a Torres Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “We’re trying to shift toward a more community-oriented idea of how we should do science, so that others can access the data and see something interesting.”

Burt and her colleagues have outlined some details of the newly available dataset in a paper to appear in The Astronomical Journal. After taking a look through the data themselves, the researchers have detected over 100 potential exoplanets, including one orbiting GJ 411, the fourth-closest star to our solar system. “There seems to be no shortage of exoplanets,” Burt says. “There are a ton of them out there, and there is ton of science to be done.”

Oral administration of a cocktail of three viruses, all of which specifically kill cholera bacteria, prevents infection and cholera-like symptoms in animal model experiments, report scientists from Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM) and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts inNature Communications on Feb. 1. The findings are the first to demonstrate the potential efficacy of bacteria-killing viruses—known as bacteriophages, or phages—as an orally administered preventive therapy against an acute gastrointestinal bacterial disease.

“While phage therapy has existed for decades, our study is proof-of-principle that it can be used to protect against infection and intervene in the transmission of disease,” said senior study author Andrew Camilli, Ph.D., Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of molecular biology and microbiology at TUSM. “We are hopeful that phages can someday be a tool in the public health arsenal that helps decrease the global burden of cholera, which affects up to four million people around the world each year.”

In previous work, Camilli and colleagues searched for phages that are specific for Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera—a potentially lethal infectious disease marked by severe diarrhea and dehydration. While phages that kill V. cholerae are abundant in nature, the team identified three strains that uniquely retained the ability to kill V. cholerae within the small intestine, the site of infection in humans. These phages function by targeting bacterial surface receptors normally involved in infectiousness, making them ideal therapeutic candidates—to develop resistance, cholera bacteria must acquire mutations in these receptors, which cause the bacteria to become less infectious.

Nasa is considering launching a mission to search for aliens on Europa. Jupiter's icy moon is currently considered one of the most likely objects in the solar system to harbour life, and Nasa has set out a report detailing the potential scientific value of sending a lander there in the near future.

"Europa may hold the clues to one of Nasa's long standing goals – to determine whether or not we are alone in the universe," the report said. "The highest-level science goal of the mission presented here is to search for evidence of life on Europa."

Scientists largely agree that Europa has a subsurface liquid ocean beneath its icy crust. This ocean is thought to be saline and in contact with the moon's rocky surface, providing conditions right for microbial life to exist.

The Nasa report, put together by the space agency's Planetary Science Division, outlines the scientific priorities of a lander mission to Europa, as well as the engineering required to complete it. After searching for aliens, other goals include assessing the moon's habitability and characterising the surface and subsurface for future robotic missions.

Should it go ahead, a Europa Lander would be the first Nasa mission primarily dedicated to the search for extraterrestrials since the Viking Mars spacecraft in the 1970s.

A research team of physicists from Harvard University has developed new hand-held spectrometers capable of the same performance as large, benchtop instruments. The researchers' innovation explained this week in APL Photonics ("Ultra-compact visible chiral spectrometer with meta-lenses"), derives from their groundbreaking work in meta-lenses.

The hand-held spectrometers offer real promise for applications ranging from health care diagnostics to environmental and food monitoring.

Improved delivery vector better penetrates the inner ear, also restores balance in a mouse model of Usher syndrome.

In the summer of 2015, a team at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School reported restoring rudimentary hearing in genetically deaf mice using gene therapy. Now the Boston Children's research team reports restoring a much higher level of hearing -- down to 25 decibels, the equivalent of a whisper -- using an improved gene therapy vector developed at Massachusetts Eye and Ear.

The new vector and the mouse studies are described in two back-to-back papers in Nature Biotechnology. While previous vectors have only been able to penetrate the cochlea's inner hair cells, the first Nature Biotechnology study showed that a new synthetic vector, Anc80, safely transferred genes to the hard-to-reach outer hair cells when introduced into the cochlea (see images). This study's three Harvard Medical School senior investigators were Jeffrey R. Holt PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital; Konstantina Stankovic, MD, PhD, of Mass. Eye and Ear and Luk H. Vandenberghe, PhD, who led Anc80's development in 2015 at Mass. Eye and Ear's Grousbeck Gene Therapy Center.

"We have shown that Anc80 works remarkably well in terms of infecting cells of interest in the inner ear," says Stankovic, an otologic surgeon at Mass. Eye and Ear and associate professor of otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School. "With more than 100 genes already known to cause deafness in humans, there are many patients who may eventually benefit from this technology."

The second study, led by Gwenaëlle Géléoc, PhD, of the Department of Otolaryngology and F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children's, used Anc80 to deliver a specific corrected gene in a mouse model of Usher syndrome, the most common genetic form of deaf-blindness that also impairs balance function.

"This strategy is the most effective one we've tested," Géléoc says. "Outer hair cells amplify sound, allowing inner hair cells to send a stronger signal to the brain. We now have a system that works well and rescues auditory and vestibular function to a level that's never been achieved before."

Two recently developed approaches in DNA self-assembly, DNA origami (1–11) and single-stranded tile (SST) (12–15), are capable of producing finite-size mega-Dalton structures by encoding programmable DNA complementarity. In DNA origami approach, a long scaffold (e.g. M13 viral genome) is folded, by hundreds of short synthetic strands with distinct sequences, into a complex structure. More recently, SSTs, uniquely sequenced short synthetic strands serving as tiles, are designed to self-assemble into finite-size 2-dimensional (2-D) and 3-dimensional (3-D) shapes with comparable complexity to that of DNA origami structures.

Tracing back to the earlier development in the DNA nanotechnology, there reveals that similar structural elements appeared in DNA origami and SST structures can also be found in those self-assembled from multi-stranded tiles, including junction tiles (16–31), planar tiles (31–42) and other tiles (43–58). Among a vast collection of tiles that have been developed, double crossover (DX) tile (32,33) was the first rigid tile introduced to the field. It was one of the early milestones in the field that successfully showed the feasibility of using rigid tile to build 2-D lattice.

In a recent study, scientists have designed finite-size lattices with different DX tiles. Four species of DX tiles were used to construct four different types of finite-size lattices respectively. One of four types was also constructed hierarchically in two consecutive steps, with the first step to form individual tiles separately and the second step to form the desired lattice from the mixture of individual tiles. Furthermore, a larger lattice with more component tiles and the corresponding patterns were built. Lastly, infinite-size AB stripe lattices were formed with unpurified DNA strands.

An extinct tortoise species that accidentally tumbled into a water-filled limestone sinkhole in the Bahamas about 1,000 years ago has finally made its way out, with much of its DNA intact.

As the first sample of ancient DNA retrieved from an extinct tropical species, this genetic material could help provide insights into the history of the Caribbean tropics and the reptiles that dominated them, said University of Florida ornithologist David Steadman. It could also offer clues to the region’s future, as the tropics undergo significant transformation due to climate change.

“This is the first time anyone has been able to put a tropical species into an evolutionary context with molecular data,” said Steadman, an ornithology curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus and co-author of the study discussing the finding. “And being able to fit together the tortoise’s evolutionary history together will help us better understand today’s tropical species, many of which are endangered.”

It may be possible to slow the progression of type 1 diabetes, according to a new pilot study that used an experimental therapy that centers on the immune system.

In the new study, researchers in Sweden tested a new method to train the immune system to stop attacking the body's own insulin-producing cells, according to the findings published today (Feb. 15) in the New England Journal of Medicine. With only six participants, the study was small, but experts called these early results exciting.

In people with type I diabetes, the immune system mistakenly recognizes certain proteins in beta cellsas foreign invaders and wages a war against them. Once the beta cells have been killed, the pancreas produces little or no insulin, the hormone that regulates how the body absorbs sugar from the blood to use for energy. As a result, patients need to follow lifelong treatments ― such as insulin injections ― to keep their blood sugar levels at normal ranges.

In vitro three-dimensional neural spheroid models have an in vivo-like cell density, and have the potential to reduce animal usage and increase experimental throughput. The aim of a recent study is to establish a spheroid model to study the formation of capillary-like networks in a three-dimensional environment that incorporates both neuronal and glial cell types, and does not require exogenous vasculogenic growth factors.

A group of scientists created self-assembled, scaffold-free cellular spheroids using primary-derived postnatal rodent cortex as a cell source. The interactions between relevant neural cell types, basement membrane proteins, and endothelial cells were characterized by immunohistochemistry. Transmission electron microscopy was used to determine if endothelial network structures had lumens.

What was found was that endothelial cells within cortical spheroids assembled into capillary-like networks with lumens. Networks were surrounded by basement membrane proteins, including laminin, fibronectin and collagen IV, as well as key neurovascular cell types.

Existing in vitro models of the cortical neurovascular environment study monolayers of endothelial cells, either on transwell inserts or coating cellular spheroids. These models are not well suited to study vasculogenesis, a process hallmarked by endothelial cell cord formation and subsequent lumenization.

The neural spheroid is a new model to study the formation of endothelial cell capillary-like structures in vitro within a high cell density three-dimensional environment that contains both neuronal and glial populations. This model can be applied to investigate vascular assembly in healthy or disease states, such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, or neurodegenerative disorders.

University of Utah mathematicians propose a theoretical framework to understand how waves and other disturbances move through materials in conditions that vary in both space and time. The theory, called “field patterns,” published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Field patterns are characteristic patterns of how disturbances react to changing conditions. Because field patterns exhibit characteristics of both propagating waves and localized particles, field pattern theory may answer some of the questions posed by quantum mechanics, in which objects can be treated as both particles and waves. First author Graeme Milton further posits that field patterns could describe the natures of the fundamental components of matter in the universe. “When you open the doors to a new area,” Milton says, “you don’t know where it will go.”

For an example of field patterns, think of a chessboard. The black squares represent one material and the white squares represent another material with different properties. The horizontal dimension (side to side) represents space, and the vertical dimension (forward and back) represents time. Instead of white and black squares, the chessboard is made of two materials of different refractive properties that bend light differently. As a disturbance, such as a pulse of laser light, moves forward in time, it spreads out over space, encountering boundaries between materials in space and then in time as the materials switch properties/colors with each successive row.

Field patterns can describe the propagation of the pulse along characteristic lines with a fixed slope in each square, which is governed by the refractive properties of each square. The characteristic lines branch at the checkerboard square boundaries.

Ever wonder what it’s like to have an “eagle eye?” Surgeons and spies alike may soon find out, thanks to a new camera lens that works the same way eagle­—and human—eyes do, despite being no bigger than a grain of salt. With spy gadgets in mind, scientists started working on the microlens a few years ago, but this new version features improvements to the lens’s field of view and focusing ability. Their latest version—cast in plastic with a 3D printer—acts like an eagle eye, they report today in Science Advances.

The camera uses four lenses instead of one, each set at different focal lengths and mounted on an image-reading microchip that compiles data from all four lenses into a single image. These microlenses work by mimicking something called foveated vision, which allows many predators to see a wide field of view at low resolution and focus on a single object at high resolution at the same time. Humans can do this because our fovea, a small pit at the back of our eye packed with color-sensing cells called cones, is the only place where light hits the cones directly, which amps up clarity. Eagles have really deep foveae with lots of cones, which is why “eagle eye” is used to describe great vision. But the chip still has some limitations: Its resolution is low, and the chip is too bulky for some kinds of surgery. It also takes several hours to 3D-print each individual lens. But once those limitations are smoothed out, lenses this small could be used to go inside our veins, perhaps, or spy on culprits as supersmall surveillance drones.

The applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) have been growing dramatically in recent a few years. According to IDC, the transportation sector will be among the first to see a significant growth from the IoT, and the global IoT market in the transportation sector is expected to reach $195 billion by 2020.

The smart IoT is dramatically accelerating the pace of innovation and transforming the way of operations in transportation and infrastructure. The ubiquitous deployment of smart, connected sensors and things, combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics, can enable us to gather insightful knowledge, make real-time and even predictive computing to help us reaching better decisions and developing better plans to improve the safety, efficiency, and reliability of smart transportation. Here are some important applications of the IoT in intelligent transportation systems and smart cities described.

Google's artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind is pitting AI agents against one another to test how they interact with each other and how they would react in various "social dilemmas". In a new study, researchers said they used two video games – Wolfpack and Gathering – to examine how AI agents change the way they behave based on the environment and situation they are in using social sciences and game theory principles.

"The question of how and under what circumstances selfish agents cooperate is one of the fundamental questions in the social sciences," DeepMind researchers wrote in a blog post. "One of the simplest and most elegant models to describe this phenomenon is the well-known game of Prisoner's Dilemma from game theory."

Scientists have discovered a cell in the retina that may cause myopia when it dysfunctions. The dysfunction may be linked to the amount of time a child spends indoors and away from natural light.  

“This discovery could lead to a new therapeutic target to control myopia,” said Greg Schwartz, lead investigator and assistant professor of ophthalmology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. 

More than a billion people in the world have myopia, whose incidence is rising and is linked to how much time people spend indoors as children.

The newly discovered retinal cell — which is highly sensitive to light — controls how the eye grows and develops. If the cell instructs the eye to grow too long, images fail to be focused on the retina, causing nearsighted vision and a lifetime of corrective glasses or contact lenses. 

“The eye needs to stop growing at precisely the right time during childhood,” Schwartz said. It has long been long known the retina contains a signal to focus the image in the eye, and this signal is important for properly regulating eye growth during childhood. “But for years no one knew what cell carried the signal,” Schwartz said. “We potentially found the key missing link, which is the cell that actually does that task and the neural circuit that enables this important visual function.”

Schwartz named the cell, “ON Delayed,” in reference to its slow responses to lights becoming brighter. The cell was unique among many other cell types tested in its exquisite sensitivity to whether an image was in focus. He described the neural circuit as the diagram that reveals how this cell is wired to other cells in the retina to acquire this unique sensitivity.

Microfluidics, electronics and inkjet technology underlie a newly developed all-in-one biochip from Stanford that can analyze cells for research and clinical applications.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a way to produce a cheap and reusable diagnostic "lab on a chip" with the help of an ordinary inkjet printer. At a production cost of as little as 1 cent per chip, the new technology could usher in a medical diagnostics revolution like the kind brought on by low-cost genome sequencing, said Ron Davis, PhD, professor of biochemistry and of genetics and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center.

A study describing the technology will be published online Feb. 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Davis is the senior author. The lead author is Rahim Esfandyarpour, PhD, an engineering research associate at the genome center. The inexpensive lab-on-a-chip technology has the potential to enhance diagnostic capabilities around the world, especially in developing countries. Due to inferior access to early diagnostics, the survival rate of breast cancer patients is only 40 percent in low-income nations -- half the rate of such patients in developed nations. Other lethal diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, also have high incidence and bad patient outcomes in developing countries. Better access to cheap diagnostics could help turn this around, especially as most such equipment costs thousands of dollars.

"Enabling early detection of diseases is one of the greatest opportunities we have for developing effective treatments," Esfandyarpour said. "Maybe $1 in the U.S. doesn't count that much, but somewhere in the developing world, it's a lot of money."