Science & Technology

Engineers develop a programmable "camouflaging" material

Diana Kenney
Marine Biological Laboratory
Thu, 12 Oct 2017 04:24 UTC

Woods Hole, Mass.-For the octopus and cuttlefish, instantaneously changing their skin color and pattern to disappear into the environment is just part of their camouflage prowess. These animals can also swiftly and reversibly morph their skin into a textured, 3D surface, giving the animal a ragged outline that mimics seaweed, coral, or other objects it detects and uses for camouflage.

This week, engineers at Cornell University report on their invention of stretchable surfaces with programmable 3D texture morphing, a synthetic "camouflaging skin" inspired by studying and modeling the real thing in octopus and cuttlefish. The engineers, along with collaborator and cephalopod biologist Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, report on their controllable soft actuator in the October 13 issue of Science.

Led by James Pikul and Rob Shepherd, the team's pneumatically activated material takes a cue from the 3D bumps, or papillae, that cephalopods can express in one-fifth of a second for camouflage, and then retract to swim away with minimal hydrodynamic drag. (See video below of live Octopus rebescens expressing its skin papillae.)

"Lots of animals have papillae, but they can't extend and retract them instantaneously as octopus and cuttlefish do," says Hanlon, who is the leading expert on cephalopod dynamic camouflage. "These are soft-bodied molluscs without a shell; their primary defense is their morphing skin."

Observatory in Argentina detects extragalactic cosmic rays reaching Earth, and will help in locating their source

Scienmag
Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

Fifty years ago, scientists discovered that the Earth is occasionally hit by cosmic rays of enormous energies. Since then, they have argued about the source of those ultra-high energy cosmic rays - whether they came from our galaxy or outside the Milky Way.

The answer is a galaxy or galaxies far, far away, according to a report published Sept. 22 in Science by the Pierre Auger Collaboration. The internationally run observatory in Argentina, co-founded by the late University of Chicago Nobel laureate James Cronin, has been collecting data on such cosmic rays for a more than a decade.

The collaboration found that the rate of such cosmic particles, whose energies are a million times greater than that of the protons accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider, is about six percent greater from one side of the sky than the other, in a direction where the distribution of galaxies is relatively high.

Largest digital survey of the visible Universe released by Pan-STARRS project astronomers

Scienmag
Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

The world's largest digital survey of the visible Universe, mapping billions of stars and galaxies, has been publicly released.

The data has been made available by the international Pan-STARRS project, which includes scientists from Queen's University Belfast, who have predicted that it will lead to new discoveries about the Universe.

Astronomers and cosmologists used a 1.8-metre telescope at the summit of Haleakalā, on Maui, Hawaii, to repeatedly image three quarters of the visible sky over four years.

New study suggests last common ancestor of humans and apes was much smaller than previously thought - about the size of a gibbon

Phys.org
Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

Gibbon similar to last common ancester humans apes

Our last common ancestor was swinging through the trees like a gibbon seven million years ago, new research has found. This means it was much smaller and nimbler than previously thought, giving scientists a fresh view of the dawn of human evolution

New research suggests that the last common ancestor of apes-including great apes and humans-was much smaller than previously thought, about the size of a gibbon. The findings, published today in the journal Nature Communications, are fundamental to understanding the evolution of the human family tree.

"Body size directly affects how an animal relates to its environment, and no trait has a wider range of biological implications," said lead author Mark Grabowski, a visiting assistant professor at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany who conducted the work while he was a postdoctoral fellow in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Anthropology. "However, little is known about the size of the last common ancestor of humans and all living apes. This omission is startling because numerous paleobiological hypotheses depend on body size estimates at and prior to the root of our lineage."

Among living primates, humans are most closely related to apes, which include the lesser apes (gibbons) and the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). These "hominoids" emerged and diversified during the Miocene, between about 23 million to 5 million years ago. Because fossils are so scarce, researchers do not know what the last common ancestors of living apes and humans looked like or where they originated.

Researchers discover secret of perovskite crystal's strong photoluminescence

Scienmag
Sun, 15 Oct 2017 18:17 UTC

A little-studied member of the perovskite family of materials could find use in a range of electronic devices, after researchers at KAUST discovered the secret of its strong photoluminescence.

Perovskites are a wide group of materials that are known to have remarkable optical and electronic properties. Perovskites with the general formula ABX3, and particularly the perovskite methylammonium lead trihalide, have attracted almost all the research attention thanks to their great promise as low-cost, high-efficiency solar cell materials.

Other members of the perovskite family and perovskite derivatives are also worthy research subjects, says Michele De Bastiani, a postdoctoral researcher in Osman Bakr's group at KAUST.

De Bastiani and his colleagues have been testing Cs4PbBr6, a perovskite of the A4BX6 branch of the family. This material is noted for its strong photoluminescence-the ability to absorb light at one wavelength and re-emit it at another.

The material's potential applications include color-converting coatings on LED light bulbs, lasers and photodetectors. But to be able to fine-tune the material's optoelectric properties for each application, researchers need to solve the mystery of why the perovskite photoluminesces so strongly.

New technology can prevent GM organisms from breeding with their natural counterparts

PhysOrg
Thu, 12 Oct 2017 17:31 UTC

A major obstacle to applying genetic engineering to benefit humans and the environment is the risk that organisms whose genes have been altered might produce offspring with their natural counterparts, releasing the novel genes into the wild. Now, researchers from the University of Minnesota's BioTechnology Institute have developed a promising way to prevent such interbreeding. The approach, called "synthetic incompatibility," effectively makes engineered organisms a separate species unable to produce viable offspring with their wild or domesticated relatives.

Comment: Will this new species be able breed with others of it's kind?

Synthetic incompatibility has applications in controlling or eradicating invasive species, crop pests and disease-carrying insects as well as preventing altered genes from escaping from genetically modified crops into other plant populations. The results were published online today in the journal Nature Communications.

The technology uses a new class of molecular tools called "programmable transcription factors" that make it possible to control which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off in an organism. If an engineered organism mates with a wild counterpart, the transcription factors render the offspring unable to survive by activating genes that cause their cells to die.

"This approach is particularly valuable because we do not introduce any toxic genes," said Maciej Maselko, a postdoctoral scholar from Smanski's lab who performed the work. "The genetic incompatibility results from genes already in the organism being turned on at the wrong place or time."

Quantum physicists say that living in a matrix is impossible

Bryan Nelson
Mother Nature Network
Sun, 01 Oct 2017 17:20 UTC

It's a question that philosophers have been asking since the dawn of philosophy itself: What's real? Is the world as we perceive it really the world? And how can we know one way or another?

The latest version of this age-old conundrum, popularized in the 1999 sci-fi film "The Matrix," puts things in modern technological terms: Could reality be nothing more than a computer simulation?

This is, technically, merely a theoretical question. No computer around today has the computing power to simulate the entire universe, not even close. But could such a super-super-supercomputer even be possible? Might you be unknowingly lying in a gel-filled pod somewhere with circuits in your head, while an ultra-powerful artificial intelligence feeds off the electrical pulses surging between neurons in your brain?

Thankfully, the plot of "The Matrix" is not only implausible, it's actually impossible. At least, that's according to a pair of quantum physicists, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin, from the University of Oxford and the Hebrew University in Israel. They crunched the numbers and found that the computing power needed to simulate the universe all the way down to the quantum level would require a memory built from more atoms than there are in the universe itself.

Comment: Do we live in the Matrix?

Researchers use gene therapy to combat weight gain and insulin resistance in mice

Science Mag
Sun, 15 Oct 2017 17:14 UTC

"By increasing BMP4, we can increase the metabolic rate, but we only see this in initially lean mice. Overweight mice proved to have a BMP4 resistance, which is also an important finding," says Jenny Hoffmann, first author of the article and active at the Lundberg Laboratory for Diabetes Research.

She recently earned her PhD in medicine with a thesis focused on BMP4, Bone Morphogenetic Protein 4, and how it regulates white, beige and brown fat in the body. White fat cells store and release fat, brown fat cells burn fat and produce heat, and beige fat cells, which are located within the white fat, can burn fat upon activation. BMP4 has important functions during fetal development, but has proven to play an especially important role in the development of fat cells.

In one of the studies, cells from human fat biopsies were used and the other two studies used adult mice that were given BMP4 gene therapy. In the current study, the mice were given a high-fat, more energy-rich diet, at the same time that they were injected with a harmless virus that carried BMP4, which targets the liver and spreads from there.

Advantages of breast feeding: Explanation of a molecular mechanism

Scienmag
Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC

Background

Oxytocin is a peptide hormone important in interpreting and reading another person's mind and in establishing good communication with others. It is therefore considered to be indispensable to the development of the social brain. Oxytocin synthesized in the brain is secreted into the entire brain and into the blood.

Mother's milk contains various nutrients, including oxytocin, which is derived from the blood. The digestive tract forms a barrier to avoid uptake of undesirable macromolecules, the gut closure, soon after birth. Therefore, it was thought that oxytocin would not be freely permeable from the digestive tract. On the other hand, the oxytocin level in the blood of babies drinking mother's milk has been found to be elevated, suggesting oxytocin could somehow be transported even in the presence of such a barrier.

Breast feeding has been recommended by the WHO since 2007 because of its positive effects on babies' short-term and long term health, but breast-feeding for 12 months has been decreasing. On the other hand, production of powdered milk has increased year after year, forming a 7 trillion dollar market worldwide. In the United States, 13% of babies are born prematurely, and the number of babies around the globe who are born prematurely or with a very low body weight is approximately 15 million annually. The importance is now recognized of giving those babies colostrum and raising them with mother's milk.

Thus, the importance of breast feeding is now well recognized; however, information about oxytocin, which is necessary for development of the social brain for communication with others, has been fragmentary. Oxytocin in the mother's blood is transferred to the milk. It was thought that the uptake of oxytocin from mother's milk through the digestive tract should take place although the underlying mechanisms remained unknown.

Comment: See also: Research suggests: Modern parenting may hinder brain development

'Waste product' of the retina fuels part of the eyes

Elizabeth Pennisi
Science
Fri, 13 Oct 2017 02:33 UTC

One man's trash is another man's treasure, even at the level of the cell. That's where-according to new research-a waste product of the retina fuels part of the eye that powers the rods and cones that help us sense light. Without this waste, that part of the eye "steals" glucose from the retina, leading to the death of retinal cells and likely vision loss. The finding could help explain why eyesight degenerates with age-and in diseases such as macular degeneration and diabetes.

"It's almost a revolutionary concept" that there is such a tight coupling between the two parts of the eye, says Stephen Tsang, a retina specialist at Columbia University who was not involved in the work.

Rods and cones are very active, and they need a lot of energy to do their jobs. Exactly how they get this energy has long been a mystery. In previous studies, researchers showed that a layer of cells beneath the retina, the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), ferries glucose from the blood to the retina. But it was unclear why the RPE didn't keep the glucose for itself.

After a decade of study, biochemist James Hurley at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues have now shown that the retina's rods and cones burn the glucose, convert leftovers into a fuel called lactate, and then feed that back to the RPE. "There is a growing consensus that no cell exists on its own in complex tissues like the retina," says Martin Friedlander, an ophthalmologist at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, who was not involved with the new work.

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Science & Technology

Engineers develop a programmable "camouflaging" material

Observatory in Argentina detects extragalactic cosmic rays reaching Earth, and will help in locating their source

Largest digital survey of the visible Universe released by Pan-STARRS project astronomers

New study suggests last common ancestor of humans and apes was much smaller than previously thought - about the size of a gibbon

Researchers discover secret of perovskite crystal's strong photoluminescence

New technology can prevent GM organisms from breeding with their natural counterparts

Quantum physicists say that living in a matrix is impossible

Researchers use gene therapy to combat weight gain and insulin resistance in mice

Advantages of breast feeding: Explanation of a molecular mechanism

'Waste product' of the retina fuels part of the eyes

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