Scientists have used gene therapy to regenerate damaged nerve fibres in the eye, in a discovery that could aid the development of new treatments for glaucoma, one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide.
Axons - nerve fibres - in the adult central nervous system (CNS) do not normally regenerate after injury and disease, meaning that damage is often irreversible. However, over the past decade there have been a number of discoveries that suggest it may be possible to stimulate regeneration.

In a study published today in Nature Communications, scientists tested whether the gene responsible for the production of a protein known as Protrudin could stimulate the regeneration of nerve cells and protect them from cell death after an injury.

The team, led by Dr Richard Eva, Professor Keith Martin and Professor James Fawcett from the John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair at the University of Cambridge, used a cell culture system to grow brain cells in a dish. They then injured their axons using a laser and analysed the response to this injury using live-cell microscopy. The researchers found that increasing the amount or activity of Protrudin in these nerve cells vastly increased their ability to regenerate.

Nerve cells in the retina, known as retinal ganglion cells, extend their axons from the eye to the brain through the optic nerve in order to relay and process visual information. To investigate whether Protrudin might stimulate repair in the injured CNS in an intact organism, the researchers used a gene therapy technique to increase the amount and activity of Protrudin in the eye and optic nerve. When they measured the amount of regeneration a few weeks after a crush injury to the optic nerve, the team found that Protrudin had enabled the axons to regenerate over large distances. They also found that the retinal ganglion cells were protected from cell death.

The researchers showed that this technique may help protect against glaucoma, a common eye condition. In glaucoma, the optic nerve that connects the eye to the brain is progressively damaged, often in association with elevated pressure inside the eye. If not diagnosed early enough, glaucoma can lead to loss of vision. In the UK, round one in 50 people over the age of 40, and one in ten people over the age of 75 is affected by glaucoma.

For the first time, we have tracked a strange blast of radio waves - called a fast radio burst - back to its source, solving a major cosmic mystery. The burst came from a magnetar, which is a neutron star with a strong magnetic field.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are incredibly powerful flashes of radio waves that mostly come from distant galaxies. Since the first one was discovered in 2007, many explanations for them have been put forward. However, because they tend to come from so far away, there was never enough evidence to determine what exactly was making them. Some FRBs have been tracked back to their host galaxies, but their source hasn't been pinpointed.

In April, astronomers found an FRB coming from within our own galaxy for the first time, allowing them to take a closer look. Several teams of researchers examined the area where it arose and found that the burst originated from a magnetar called SGR 1935+2154. While magnetars have been a favoured contender to explain FRBs, this is the first evidence that they can produce radio waves at high enough energies to account for the signals.

Inspired by a parasitic worm that digs its sharp teeth into its host's intestines, Johns Hopkins researchers have designed tiny, star-shaped microdevices that can latch onto intestinal mucosa and release drugs into the body.

David Gracias, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering, and Johns Hopkins gastroenterologist Florin M. Selaru, M.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center, led a team of researchers and biomedical engineers that designed and tested shape-changing microdevices that mimic the way the parasitic hookworm affixes itself to an organism's intestines.

Made of metal and thin, shape-changing film and coated in a heat-sensitive paraffin wax, "theragrippers," each roughly the size of a dust speck, potentially can carry any drug and release it gradually into the body.

The team published results of an animal study this week as the cover article in the journal Science Advances.

Gradual or extended release of a drug is a long-sought goal in medicine. Selaru explains that a problem with extended-release drugs is they often make their way entirely through the gastrointestinal tract before they've finished dispensing their medication.

Scientists are seeing the Australian platypus in a whole new light. Under an ultraviolet lamp, this bizarre-looking creature appears even more peculiar than normal, glowing a soft, greenish-blue hue instead of the typical brown we're used to seeing.

The recent discovery has not been found in any other monotreme species, and it has scientists wondering: Have we been overlooking an ancient world of fluorescent fur?

"Biofluorescence has now been observed in placental New World flying squirrels, marsupial New World opossums, and the monotreme platypus of Australia and Tasmania," the authors write.

"These taxa, inhabiting three continents and a diverse array of ecosystems, represent the major lineages of Mammalia."

Asthma impacts millions of children already at a young age. Children growing up on a farm have a lower risk of developing asthma than children not living on a farm. The mechanisms behind this protective farm effect on childhood asthma are largely unknown. A group of researchers from Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Dr. von Hauner Children's Hospital of Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (LMU) clarified how the children's gut microbiome is involved in the protection process.

We are born into an environment full of small organisms called microbiota. Within the first minutes and hours of our lives, they start challenging but also educating our immune system. The largest immune organ is our gut, where maturation of the immune system and maturation of the colonizing bacteria, the gut microbiome, go hand in hand. After profound perturbations in the first year of life, the maturation process, the composition of the gut microbiome gradually stabilizes and accompanies us for our lives. Previous research of the Munich scientists showed an asthma-protective effect by a diverse environmental microbiome, which was particularly pronounced in farm children. The question now was whether this effect could be attributed to the maturation process of the early gut microbiome.

Scannable barcodes, QR codes and RFID tags may soon be surpassed by DNA-based tagging technology.

Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research in the US say they have developed a fast, reliable and inexpensive system of molecular tagging that uses DNA sequences as identification.

Smaller and lighter than conventional tags, this method can be used to track objects that are too small or too numerous to be tagged with existing technology.

The system, dubbed "Porcupine", is described in a paper in the journal Nature Communications.

"Molecular tagging is not a new idea, but existing methods are still complicated and require access to a lab, which rules out many real-world scenarios," explains Washington's Kathryn Doroschak, the lead author.

"We designed the first portable, end-to-end molecular tagging system that enables rapid, on-demand encoding and decoding at scale, and which is more accessible than existing molecular tagging methods."

While more conventional tagging systems rely on radio waves (RFID) or printed lines (barcodes), Porcupine's tags are composed of predefined sequences of synthetic DNA strands called molecular bits, or "molbits".

In the initial prototype system, there are 96 molbits, which can then be combined to create billions of unique combinations.

US researchers have developed a way to control and measure atoms that are so close together they are impossible to distinguish by optical means.

When atoms get cosy - that is, within a few billionths of a metre of each other - they exhibit interesting quantum mechanical behaviour. At this scale, their spins begin to exert an influence on each other, and two or more atoms can become entangled: a strange quantum phenomenon where the atoms will thereafter mirror each other's properties instantly, even if they are kilometres or light-years apart.

Entanglement is key for future technologies like quantum computing - but first, scientists must observe and understand these tightly-packed atoms. Conventional microscopes are unable to distinguish between atoms that are just nanometers apart, just as our eyes are often unable to spatially resolves two distant stars that are close together in the night sky.

Researchers from Princeton University have now demonstrated a technique to resolve such atoms. In a paper published in the journal Science, they describe using a finely tuned laser to excite closely spaced erbium atoms in a crystal.

Each atom responds slightly differently to different wavelengths, re-emitting the light at unique frequencies that subtly change according to an atom's spin state.

Writing in the journal Science, Skoglund and colleagues report how they sequenced 27 ancient dog nuclear genomes from canines found in Europe, the near east and Siberia, dating from 800 to 11,000 years old.

The results reveal that by the end of the last ice age there were at least five genetically distinct groups of dogs in existence - suggesting the origins of our canine companions stretch back even further. However, all the groups appear to have descended from a single common ancestor, suggesting domestication may have occurred from a single population of ancient wolves.

The researchers made further revelations when they compared their results with DNA from modern dogs, finding that breeds that originated in Europe, such as the German shepherd or Irish terrier, all appear to be descended from a roughly 50/50 mix of two of the ancient groups - those from the Levant and northern Europe.

Australian bees are known for pollinating plants on beautiful sunny days, but a new study has identified two species that have adapted their vision for night-time conditions for the first time.

The study by a team of ecology researchers has observed night time foraging behaviour by a nomiine (Reepenia bituberculata) and masked (Meroglossa gemmata) bee species, with both developing enlarged compound and simple eyes which allow more light to be gathered when compared to their daytime kin.

Published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research, the researchers explain that this improved low-light ability could potentially also exist in other Australian species secretly active at night, with their image processing ability best observed through high-resolution close-up images.

The hard part of connecting a gooey, thinking brain to a cold, one-ing and zero-ing computer is getting information through your thick skull — or mine, or anyone's. The whole point of a skull, after all, is keeping a brain safely separate from [waves hands at everything].

So if that brain isn't yours, the only way to tell what's going on inside it is inference. People make very educated guesses based on what that brain tells a body to do — like, if the body makes some noises that you can understand (that's speech) or moves around in a recognizable way. That's a problem for people trying to understand how the brain works, and an even bigger problem for people who because of injury or illness can't move or speak. Sophisticated imaging technologies like functional magnetic resonance can give you some clues. But it'd be great to have something more direct. For decades, technologists have been trying to get brains to interface with computer keyboards or robot arms, to get meat to commune with silicon.

On Wednesday, a team of scientists and engineers showed results from a promising new approach. It involves mounting electrodes on an expandable, springy tube called a stent and threading it through a blood vessel that leads to the brain. In tests on two people, the researchers literally went for the jugular, running a stent-tipped wire up that vein in the throat and then into a vessel near the brain's primary motor cortex, where they popped the spring. The electrodes snuggled into the vessel wall and started sensing when the people's brains signaled their intention to move — and sent those signals wirelessly to a computer, via an infrared transmitter surgically inserted in the subjects' chests. In an article published in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery, the Australian and US researchers describe how two people with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig's disease) used such a device to send texts and fool around online by brain-control alone.

"Self-expanding stent technology has been well demonstrated in both cardiac and neurological applications to treat other disease. We just use that feature and put electrodes on top of the stent," says Thomas Oxley, an interventional neurologist and CEO of Synchron, the company hoping to commercialize the technology. "It's fully implantable. Patients go home in a couple of days. And it's plug-and-play."