“Rett syndrome is a severe disorder in girls for which there currently is no available disease-specific treatment,” says lead author Lieselot Carrette, Ph.D., a research fellow in the laboratory of senior author Jeannie T. Lee, MD, Ph.D., MGH Department of Molecular Biology. “Targeting the ultimate cause of the disease would be expected to have better outcomes than addressing its many downstream effects.” Lee adds, “The approach described in our work takes advantage of the fact that every patient carries a cure within her own cells....

To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction — and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots. The same team that built the first living robots (“Xenobots,” assembled from frog cells — reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth” — that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves....

The discovery may offer a glimpse into the life story of the universe’s great beacons. Quasars are massive, luminous objects that draw their energy from black holes. Until now, scientists have been unable to study both the bright and dim phases of a quasar in a single source. As described in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal, Yale-led researchers spotted a quasar that had dimmed by a factor of six or seven, compared with observations from a few years earlier....

MicroRNAs may be tiny — as few as 20 genetic letters, compared to 3 billion in the DNA of a human — but they play a major role in biology, helping to determine which genes are expressed or silenced. In the last 10 years, researchers at Yale and elsewhere have shown they play a major role in formation and spread of tumors. However, their potential as a target for cancer therapy has not been realized because of a daunting problem that has held back clinical applications of gene therapy: How can you target minute pieces of genetic material locked safely inside the membranes of billions of cells?...

In this study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Heping Zhang of the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH) collaborated with scientists from throughout China and monitored 2,157 women who were undergoing their first in-vitro fertilization cycle and were randomly assigned either fresh or frozen embryos. Researchers found that women using frozen embryos had a live birth rate of 48.7%, versus a live birth rate of 50.2% for women in the fresh-embryo group....

Researchers that claimed that the GFAJ-1 bacterium had a preference for arsenic instead of phosphorous in its DNA have been somewhat refuted. A new study shows that the GFAJ-1 microbe actually goes to extreme lengths to grab any traces of phosphorous it can find. This clears up one of the lingering questions, from a controversial study published in the journal Science, that claimed that the GFAJ-1 microbe could thrive in the high-arsenic conditions of Mono Lake in California without metabolizing phosphorous, an element that’s essential to all forms of known life....

Scientists have recently discovered the mechanism by which a minuscule change in 3 atoms in a protein molecule can affect immune signaling in cells. This ‘butterfly effect’ is used by the bacterium, Shigella flexneri, to survive within the host cells that it infects. Ranabir Das’ team at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, has found that a tiny change in the protein UBC13, caused by a bacterial enzyme, creates a cascade of small atomic alterations that add up until they prevent UBC13 from binding to a partner protein, TRAF6....

Many people beat the summer heat by cranking the air conditioning. However, air conditioners guzzle power and spew out millions of tons of carbon dioxide daily. They’re also not always good for your health—constant exposure to central A/C can increase risks of recirculating germs and causing breathing problems. There’s a better alternative, say a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia, Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley and the Singapore-ETH Centre....

Quasars are ignited by monster black holes voraciously feeding on infalling matter, unleashing a torrent of radiation. The Milky Way and Andromeda have such black holes at their hearts, which are now sleeping giants. That is, until the big bang-up. The duo will be as deadly then as it is dazzling. Blistering radiation from the quasar pair might sterilize the surfaces of planets, wiping out innumerable extraterrestrial civilizations. This tale of “death star” dueling quasars looming in the sky might seem like a scene out of a science fiction movie....

By folding DNA into a virus-like structure, MIT researchers have designed HIV-like particles that provoke a strong immune response from human immune cells grown in a lab dish. Such particles might eventually be used as an HIV vaccine. The DNA particles, which closely mimic the size and shape of viruses, are coated with HIV proteins, or antigens, arranged in precise patterns designed to provoke a strong immune response. The researchers are now working on adapting this approach to develop a potential vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, and they anticipate it could work for a wide variety of viral diseases....

In a Policy Forum, Bartha Maria Knoppers and Henry Greely propose the use of “substantially human” as a legal boundary to describe living organisms that are human in their characteristics, but not entirely so. It would help courts, scientists and physicians to be flexible in the legal determinations of emerging biotechnologies of the future, they say. While both the law and ethics view living human beings and their constituent parts (e....

University of Queensland researcher Dr. Kayvan Etebari has been studying how palm-loving coconut rhinoceros beetles have been accelerating their invasion. “We thought we’d outsmarted them,” Dr. Etebari said. “In the 1970s, scientists from Australia and elsewhere found that coconut rhinoceros beetles could be controlled with a beetle virus from Malaysia. “This virus stopped the beetle in its tracks and, for the last 50 years or so, it more-or-less stayed put – that is, until now....

“TESS spends nearly a month at a time imaging one portion of the sky. With no day or night breaks and no atmospheric interference, we have a very uniform, long-duration set of observations,” said Tony Farnham, a research scientist in the UMD Department of Astronomy and the lead author of the research paper. “As comets orbit the Sun, they can pass through TESS’ field of view. Wirtanen was a high priority for us because of its close approach in late 2018, so we decided to use its appearance in the TESS images as a test case to see what we could get out of it....

The project, known as the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative (1KP), brought together nearly 200 plant biologists to sequence and analyze genes from more than 1,100 plant species spanning the green tree of life. A summary of the team’s findings published on October 23, 2019, in Nature. “In the tree of life, everything is interrelated,” said Gane Ka-Shu Wong, lead investigator of 1KP and professor in the University of Alberta’s department of biological sciences....

Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the “Habitable Zones” of their stars, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet’s surface. The new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal, include one such particularly rare planet. Officially named KIC-7340288 b, the planet discovered by Kunimoto is just 1 ½ times the size of Earth — small enough to be considered rocky, instead of gaseous like the giant planets of the Solar System — and in the habitable zone of its star....

Early studies of the brain determined that there wasn’t much you could do as an adult to improve brain health and cognitive function. Most believed that brain development took place in early childhood and that once you reached a certain age, you just worked with what you had. We now know that this isn’t true. While the early years are when the brain is at its most plastic and ripe for learning and growing, the brain never stops working to create new pathways, connections, and new brain cells....

The study, led by Scott Evans, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geosciences at the Virginia Tech College of Science, shows the earliest mass extinction of about 80 percent of animals across this interval. “This included the loss of many different types of animals, however those whose body plans and behaviors indicate that they relied on significant amounts of oxygen seem to have been hit particularly hard,” Evans said....

“We saw more frequent and severe ED visits due to cannabis poisoning in children under 10 following the legalization of cannabis, and the legalization of edible cannabis products appears to be a key factor,” said lead author Dr. Daniel Myran, a family physician, public health and preventive medicine specialist, and postdoctoral fellow at The Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa Department of Family Medicine. The research team looked at all ED visits in Ontario during three periods; pre-legalization, after flower-based cannabis products and oils were legalized in October 2018, and after commercial cannabis edibles (e....

New research helps understand how plate tectonics powers life on Earth. Plate tectonics are responsible for the deep-carbon and deep-water cycles.Arrangement of continents has changed sea level in the past.The evolution of life is modified by tectonics — continents are rafts with evolving species that mix when continents combine.A growing focus on renewable and low-carbon technologies will mean we need to find more copper and other resources. To find these deposits our new models of plate tectonics will help reduce the environmental footprint of mineral exploration and extraction....

The archaeologists discovered 13 full and fragmented projectile points, ranging from 0.5 to 2 inches and razor-sharp. The points, carbon-dated to approximately 15,700 years ago, predate the Clovis fluted points by 3,000 years found throughout North America and the previously found points at the Cooper’s Ferry site in Idaho by 2,300 years. The findings were recently published in the journal Science Advances. “From a scientific point of view, these discoveries add very important details about what the archaeological record of the earliest peoples of the Americas looks like,” said Loren Davis, an anthropology professor at OSU and head of the group that found the points....