Science Trends

Memories in the brain concept (stock image). Why is it that you can remember the name of your childhood best friend that you haven't seen in years yet easily forget the name of a person you just met a moment ago? In other words, why are some memories stable over decades, while others fade within minutes? Using mouse models, Caltech researchers have now determined that strong, stable memories are encoded by "teams" of neurons all firing in synchrony, providing redundancy that enables these memories to persist over time. The research has implications for understanding how memory might be affected after brain damage, such as by strokes or Alzheimer's disease. The work was done in the laboratory of Carlos Lois, research professor of biology, and is described in a paper that appears in the August 23 of the journal  Science . Lois is also an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. Led by postdocto...

\ Australopithecus anamensis   is the earliest-known species of Australopithecus and widely accepted as the progenitor of 'Lucy's' species,   Australopithecus afarensis . Until now,   A. anamensis   was known mainly from jaws and teeth. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and their colleagues have discovered the first cranium of   A. anamensis   at the paleontological site of Woranso-Mille, in the Afar Region of Ethiopia. The 3.8 million-year-old fossil cranium represents a time interval between 4.1 and 3.6 million years ago, when  A. anamensis  gave rise to  A. afarensis . Researchers used morphological features of the cranium to identify which species the fossil represents. "Features of the upper jaw and canine tooth were fundamental in determining that MRD was attributable to  A. anamensis ," said Melillo. "I...

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These images show the steadily improving view of the Moon’s gamma-ray glow from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Each 5-by-5-degree image is centered on the Moon and shows gamma rays with energies above 31 million electron volts, or tens of millions of times that of visible light. At these energies, the Moon is actually brighter than the Sun. Brighter colors indicate greater numbers of gamma rays. This image sequence shows how longer exposure, ranging from two to 128 months (10.7 years), improved the view. If our eyes could see high-energy radiation called gamma rays, the Moon would appear brighter than the Sun! That's how NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has seen our neighbor in space for the past decade. Gamma-ray observations are not sensitive enough to clearly see the shape of the Moon's disk or any surface features. Instead, Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) detects a prominent glow centered on the Moon's position in the sky. Mario ...

Scientists say they have created the world’s first human-monkey hybrid in a laboratory in China. The researchers, who want to use animals to create organs for human life-saving transplants, say creating the hybrid was an important step. And they pledged to continue their experiments using primates. The team revealed that they had injected human stem cells capable of creating any type of tissue into a monkey embryo. The experiment was stopped before the embryo was old enough to be born. But the scientists – who were Spanish but held the trial in China to get round a ban on such procedures at home – said a human-monkey hybrid could have potentially been born. The embryo had first been genetically modified to deactivate genes that control organ growth. Ethical concerns were raised over the trial, partly over fears that human stem cells could migrate to the brain. Angel Raya, of the Barcelona Regenerative Medicine Centre, said...

Painful encounters with ants don’t stem from their bite; it’s their venom-delivering stingers. Now, in a video posted online this week, a researcher has recorded the first ever close-up look   at how these stingers work. Ant stingers are slimmer than the width of a human hair. After biting down on their target to secure themselves, the insects swing their abdomens forward to get their stingers in place. Not all species have stingers (some spray toxic acid), but the feature—passed down from an ancient wasp ancestor—is more common than not. By laying out a thin wax film for ants to puncture with their stingers, Adrian Smith, a biologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, was able to capture the insects’ microscopic movements at speeds faster than the blink of an eye. The video above features—in order—the trap-jaw ant ( Odontomachus ruginodis ) and the Florida harvester ant ( Pogonomyrmex badius ).

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has published a paper in  Science  that details a new technique allowing anyone to 3D bioprint tissue scaffolds out of collagen, the major structural protein in the human body. This first-of-its-kind method brings the field of tissue engineering one step closer to being able to 3D print a full-sized, adult human heart. The technique, known as Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels (FRESH), has allowed the researchers to overcome many challenges associated with existing 3D bioprinting methods, and to achieve unprecedented resolution and fidelity using soft and living materials. Each of the organs in the human body, such as the heart, is built from specialized cells that are held together by a biological scaffold called the extracellular matrix (ECM). This network of ECM proteins provides the structure and biochemical signals that cells need to carry out their normal function. However, until now it ha...

The 'Super Earth' Scientists have characterised the first potentially habitable world outside our own solar system located about 31 light-years away. The super-Earth planet — named GJ 357 d — was discovered in early 2019 owing to NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a mission designed to comb the heavens for exoplanets, according to the research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "This is exciting, as this is humanity's first nearby super-Earth that could harbour life — uncovered with help from TESS, our small, mighty mission with a huge reach," said Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University in the US and a member of the TESS science team. The exoplanet is more massive than our own blue planet, and Kaltenegger said the discovery will provide insight into Earth's heavyweight planetary cousins. "With a thick atmosphere, the planet GJ 357 d could maintain liquid water on its surfac...