The secret of how salamanders successfully regrow body parts is being unravelled by University College London (UCL) researchers in a bid to apply it to humans.
For the first time, researchers have found that the “ERK pathway” must be constantly active for salamander cells to be reprogrammed, and hence able to contribute to the regeneration of different body parts.
The team identified a key… read more
Researchers at Duke University have found that taking food away from the C. elegans nematode worm triggers a state of arrested development: while the organism continues to wriggle about, foraging for food, its cells and organs are suspended in an ageless, quiescent state.
When food becomes plentiful again, the worm develops as planned, but can live twice as long as normal.
The results appear June 19… read more
In a bid to better understand the brain and also to create robotics limbs that behave more realistically, a team of three European universities has developed a highly accurate new model of how neurons behave when performing complex movements.
The results from the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) are published in the June 18 edition… read more
A simple, low-cost “super-resolution” optical device using a microsphere capable of imaging surfaces 75 nanometers wide has been developed by researchers at A*STAR Data Storage Institute in Singapore.
Optical-microscope resolution is limited to half the wavelength of light (due to the diffraction limit), so optical microscopes can’t normally resolve structures smaller than a few hundred nanometers.
A*STAR’s Boris Luk’yanchuk and his colleagues previously showed… read more
Neurogenesis, the self-repairing mechanism of the adult brain by creating new neurons, can help to preserve brain function in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Prion, and Parkinson’s, new research led by scientists at the University of Southampton has found.
The progressive degeneration and death of the brain, occurring in many neurodegenerative diseases, is often seen as an unstoppable and irrevocable process.
But now, a research team,… read more
SpaceX is targeted to launch the first satellite in the ORBCOMM OG2 mission on Friday, June 20th, 2014 at 6:08pm ET, with a back-up date of Saturday, June 21.
The launch from from Cape Canaveral will be webcast live beginning at 5:35 pm ET.
In this flight, the Falcon 9 rocket will deliver six next-generation OG2 satellites to an elliptical 750 x 615 km… read more
Washington State University researchers have used a super-cold cloud of atoms that behaves like a single atom, opening a new experimental path to potentially powerful quantum computing.
Physicist Peter Engels and his colleagues cooled about one million atoms of rubidium to 100 billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
There was no colder place in the universe, said Engels, unless someone was doing a similar experiment… read more
A novel camera system that can detect objects hidden by obstructions — without using a mirror — has been developed by scientists at the University of Bonn and the University of British Columbia.
It uses diffusely reflected, time-coded light to reconstruct the shape of objects outside of the field of view.
Scattered light as a source of information
In the researchers’ prototype system, a laser… read more
Elon Musk, chairman of SolarCity, America’s largest solar power provider, announced Tuesday with other SolarCity executives that the company plans to acquire Silevo, a solar panel technology and manufacturing company whose modules have “demonstrated a unique combination of high energy output and low cost.”
“Our intent is to combine what we believe is fundamentally the best photovoltaic technology with massive economies of scale to… read more
Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have designed a silver spherical nanoparticle encased in a shell coated with a peptide that enables it to target tumor cells.
The shell is etchable so those nanoparticles that don’t hit their target can be broken down and eliminated. The research findings appear in the journal Nature Materials.
The core of the nanoparticle employs a phenomenon called plasmonics. In plasmonics, nanostructured… read more
A new drug target to fight Alzheimer’s disease has been discovered by a Penn State research team.
The discovery also has potential for development as a novel diagnostic tool for Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common form of dementia and one for which no cure has yet been found.
A scientific paper describing the discovery was published in Nature Communications on June 13.
The… read more
Algae that survive in very low levels of light and are able to switch quantum coherence on and off have been discovered by a UNSW-led team of researchers.
The function for this effect, which occurs during photosynthesis, remains a mystery. But working out its role in a living organism could lead to technological advances, such as better organic solar cells and quantum-based electronic devices.
The research… read more
An almost century-old drug approved for treating sleeping sickness also restores normal cellular signaling in a mouse model of autism, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report.
The mice were the human biological age equivalent of 30 years old.
The drug, Suramin, was first synthesized in 1916 and is used to treat trypanosomiasis or African sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease.… read more
Our ability to make choices — and sometimes mistakes — might arise from random fluctuations in the brain’s background electrical noise, according to a recent study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis.
The brain has a normal level of “background noise,” Bengson said, as electrical activity patterns fluctuate across the brain. In the new study, decisions could be… read more
MIT neuroscientists have found that as monkeys learn to categorize different patterns of dots, two brain areas involved in learning — the prefrontal cortex and the striatum — synchronize their brain waves to form new communication circuits.
“We’re seeing direct evidence for the interactions between these two systems during learning, which hasn’t been seen before,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at… read more