Biology

When a patient goes into a clinic for an ultrasound of their stomach, they lie down on crinkly paper atop an exam table. A clinician spreads a thick goo on their abdomen, then presses a small probe into it to send acoustic waves into the patient’s body. These waves bounce off their soft tissues and body fluids, returning to the probe to be translated into a 2D image. As the probe moves over the person’s stomach, a blurry black-and-white picture appears onscreen for the clinician to read.While ultrasound technology is a…

Other animals on the farm, too, may be vulnerable to wildfire smoke. Horses have massive lungs—the animals are born to run and suck in loads of air in the process. “We don’t know for sure, but horses could be one of the most sensitive species to smoke of all mammals,” says Kent E. Pinkerton, director of the Center for Health and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. “The volume of air that they’re taking in, that is basically laden with particles in the air that they’re breathing, could really be quite…

Even though the researchers only used a RBD from one version of Covid, their vaccine generated a robust polyclonal response—meaning it created multiple antibody types, rather than just one. To Saunders, this is part of the approach’s charm: Creating many antibody types is beneficial, he says, because one that is extremely effective against a certain variant might not be as effective against another. Or vice versa: A previously weak antibody could better neutralize a newer variant. “Some of those antibodies are going to be…

If we can use mycelium composites to build structures that change how we live on this planet, Hendrikx began to think we could also change how we leave it. Traditional means of disposing of the dead—burial in wood and metal caskets, or cremation—leave an indelible mark on the planet, polluting the soil or the air. A mycelium casket, Hendrikx thought, would in theory allow the dead to enrich the soil, turning polluted cemeteries into flourishing forests.The Living Cocoon is more than a casket. For Hendrikx, it is the first…

“Each one of those kinds of pyrite is telling us something different about our planet, its origin, about life, and how it’s changed through time,” said Hazen.For that reason, the new papers classify minerals by “kind,” a term that Hazen and Morrison define as a combination of the mineral species with its mechanism of origin (think volcanic pyrite versus microbial pyrite). Using machine learning analysis, they scoured data from thousands of scientific papers and identified 10,556 distinct mineral kinds.Morrison and Hazen…

The relatively small universe of human genes could grow by up to one-third, if a concerted effort to search for new genes that encode short proteins is successful. Many known miniproteins have already been shown to play key roles in cellular metabolism and disease, so the international effort to catalog new ones and determine their functions, announced last week in Nature Biotechnology, could shed light on a vast array of biochemical processes and provide targets for novel…

There are three ways to die: of injury, disease, or old age. Over time, humans have gotten better at avoiding the first two, but as we get older, senescence—the gradual deterioration of bodily functions with age—is inevitable. Some species seem to do better than others, though: Take the hydra, a tiny freshwater creature that some scientists have deemed potentially immortal. Last year, a naked mole rat made headlines for turning 39, five times the typical lifespan for similarly sized rodents. And just a few months ago, a…

Erin Bjorvik was born and raised in the Chicagoland area before attending the University of Arizona where she graduated with a bachelor's in science. She also obtained her certification in veterinary technology from UArizona in 2010. Erin has spent her veterinary career focusing on emergency and critical care medicine. She is passionate about excellence in patient care and safety, as well as infection control and antimicrobial stewardship.In 2018, Erin co-authored the Infection, Control, and Biosecurity…

But this chemical defense creates a big problem for sea cucumbers: They need to avoid killing themselves with their own toxins. And that means their own cells can’t contain cholesterol, the target that the saponins bind to and pierce. Instead, they have evolved two kinds of cholesterol alternatives: lathosterol and 9(11) sterols, which probably fulfill the same function of maintaining cell membrane stability. The scientists believe that the sea cucumbers’ ability to make saponins—and these saponin-resistant…

Since leptin is released by fat cells, scientists believe its presence in the blood is likely to signal to the brain that the animal is in an environment where food is ample and there’s no need to conserve energy. The new work suggests that low levels of leptin alert the brain to the malnourished state of the body, switching the brain into low-power mode.“These results are unusually satisfying,” said Julia Harris, a neuroscientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “It is not so common to obtain such a beautiful…