In the last year, there has been a surge in proteins developed by AI that will eventually be used in the treatment of everything from snakebites to cancer. What would normally take decades for a scientist to create — a custom-made protein for a particular disease — can now be done in seconds. For the…
The plasma near Jupiter’s poles is capable of unusual behaviour NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Oleksuik © CC NC SA The cosmic neighbourhood of Jupiter is one of the more peculiar places in the solar system, and the plasmas that reside there are no exception. They ripple with a never-before-seen type of wave. Robert Lysak at the University of…
It’s been recognized for some time that Alzheimer’s disease affects brain regions differently and that tau — a protein known to misbehave — plays an important role in the disease. Normally, tau helps stabilize neurons, but in Alzheimer’s disease, it begins to misfold and tangle inside neurons. It spreads across the brain forming toxic clumps…
What can lemurs tell us about inflammation and aging, aka “inflammaging” in humans? That’s the question Elaine Guevara, a biological anthropologist who studies the evolution of life history and aging in primates, set out to understand. In newly published research on age-related inflammation in ring-tailed and sifaka lemurs, Guevara discovered that perhaps we should rethink…
Solutions to plastic waste from creating cleaner products to cleaning up ocean litter. Source link
An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this portion of the Milky Way galaxy NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia). One of the big challenges in communicating about space and space-time is that the universe is so large the scales are very difficult to imagine. Even just trying to get a sense…
The trajectory of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passes through the solar system NASA/JPL-Caltech An interstellar object currently passing through our solar system might be one of the oldest comets we have ever seen, originating from a star billions of years older than our own. Comet 3I/ATLAS was spotted earlier this month near the orbit…
Smooth horsetail plants have segmented stems piemags/nature/Alamy A strange plant that has existed since animals first walked on land can distil water to an extreme degree, making it look more like water from meteorites than regular water from Earth. As well as being key to understanding ecosystems today, the plant’s fossilised remains could shed light…
Focusing solely on achieving weight loss for people with a high body mass index (BMI) may do more harm than good, argue experts in The BMJ. Dr Juan Franco and colleagues say, on average, people with high weight will not be able to sustain a clinically relevant weight loss with lifestyle interventions, while the potential…
New preliminary research suggests that a combination of higher atmospheric CO2 and hotter temperatures contribute to a reduction in nutritional quality in food crops, with serious implications for human health and wellbeing. Most research into the impact of climate change on food production has focused on crop yield, but the size of the harvest means…
