Lifeboat Foundation

The animal brain consists of tens of billions of neurons or nerve cells that perform complex tasks like processing emotions, learning, and making judgments by communicating with each other via neurotransmitters. These small signaling molecules diffuse—move from high to low concentration regions—between neurons, acting as chemical messengers.

Scientists believe that this diffusive motion might be at the heart of the brain’s superior function. Therefore, they have aimed to understand the role of specific neurotransmitters by detecting their release in the brain using amperometric and microdialysis methods. However, these methods provide insufficient information, necessitating better sensing techniques.

To this end, scientists developed an optical imaging method wherein protein probes change their fluorescence intensity upon detecting a specific neurotransmitter. Recently, a group of researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology in Japan led by Professor Yasuo Yoshimi has taken this idea forward. They have successfully synthesized fluorescent molecularly imprinted polymeric nanoparticles (fMIP-NPs) that serve as probes to detect specific neurotransmitters–serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine.

A team of researchers led by the University of Innsbruck have observed a quantum tunneling effect in experiments that build off 15 years of research into such reactions and marks the slowest charged particle reaction ever observed until now. But while such chemical reactions have only been theoretical up to this point, can it be achieved in real-world experiments?

“It requires an experiment that allows very precise measurements and can still be described quantum-mechanically,” said Dr. Roland Wester, who is a professor of theoretical *physics at the University of Innsbruck, and lead author of the study. “The idea came to me 15 years ago in a conversation with a colleague at a conference in the United States.”

Super-resolution microscopy methods are essential for uncovering the structures of cells and the dynamics of molecules. Since researchers overcame the resolution limit of around 250 nanometers (while winning the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their efforts), which had long been considered absolute, the methods of microscopy have progressed rapidly.

Now a team led by LMU chemist Prof. Philip Tinnefeld has made a further advance through the combination of various methods, achieving the highest resolution in three-dimensional space and paving the way for a fundamentally new approach for faster imaging of dense molecular structures. The new method permits axial resolution of under 0.3 nanometers.

The researchers combined the so-called pMINFLUX method developed by Tinnefeld’s team with an approach that utilizes special properties of graphene as an energy acceptor. pMINFLUX is based on the measurement of the fluorescence intensity of molecules excited by laser pulses. The method makes it possible to distinguish their lateral distances with a resolution of just 1 nanometer.

Another part of that wariness arises because, to date, no one has independently reproduced Dias’ team’s results. This lack of verification was raised by Jorge Hirsch of the University of California, San Diego, in the last talk of the session in which Dias and his team spoke. Hirsch argued that those claiming to have created high-temperature superconducting hydrides suffered from “confirmation bias,” cherry-picking evidence to support their agenda. (Hirsch has been an outspoken critic of Dias’ work.) As the last question of the session, Dias asked Hirsch, “Could you also have confirmation bias?” “Maybe,” Hirsch replied.

After the session, a few attending researchers—all collaborators of Dias—spoke with Physics Magazine, telling us that they disagreed with Hirsch’s cherry-picking conclusion. One of them, Russell Hemley of the University of Illinois Chicago confirmed Pasan’s claim that they have replicated the 2020 carbonaceous sulfur hydride—as reported in an arXiv paper that the team recently posted [3].

Dias’ group still needs to more precisely characterize NLH’s chemical composition, Pasan said. The samples also appear to consist of two phases, an observation that they need to investigate. Ultimately, they plan to innovate upon this material to create a superconductor at ambient pressure and temperature conditions, a goal that Pasan said he thinks is feasible. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the community has much of the latter still to gather.

Did peptides precede life on Earth? Should we be looking for their biosignatures on Mars?

If you think of DNA in correspondence terms, it writes instructions. RNA picks up the instructions and delivers them to a recipient in the cell. The instructions contain a recipe and what follows is the filling of it producing a protein molecule explicitly designed for the required task.

But before all of the above ever could have happened there had to be something with simpler chemistry. A research team at Rutgers University believes that what first emerged was probably a peptide containing the element nickel. They have named it Nickelback, not to be confused with a Canadian rock band of the same name. This Nickelback peptide consists of two bound nickel atoms which exhibit both stability and activity in terms of reacting with surrounding chemistry. Such a peptide is capable of redox reactions that transfer electrons from one chemical substance to another and is essential as the first stage on the way to life.

Continue reading “How Life First Started Here On Earth With A Peptide” »

Perhaps, human consciousness can be fully understood one day.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins and Cambridge universities have created the first-ever map of the wiring patterns of every neuron in the fruit fly larval brain.

Neurons in an organism’s nervous system, including the brain, are linked to one another by synapses.

Continue reading “Scientists create first detailed map of insect brain with 3,016 neurons” »

HydrogenPro.

HydrogenPro’s electrolyzer will be assembled and installed in the coming weeks, according to a press release published by Chemical Engineering on Wednesday.

A team of Rutgers scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism—a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth—has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life.

The research, published in Science Advances, has important implications in the search for extraterrestrial life because it gives researchers a new clue to look for, said Vikas Nanda, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) at Rutgers.

Based on laboratory studies, Rutgers scientists say one of the most likely chemical candidates that kickstarted life was a simple peptide with two nickel atoms they are calling “Nickelback” not because it has anything to do with the Canadian rock band, but because its backbone nitrogen atoms bond two critical nickel atoms. A peptide is a constituent of a protein made up of a few elemental building blocks known as amino acids.

Researchers have developed a new model inspired by recent biological discoveries that shows enhanced memory performance. This was achieved by modifying a classical neural network.

Computer models play a crucial role in investigating the brain’s process of making and retaining memories and other intricate information. However, constructing such models is a delicate task. The intricate interplay of electrical and biochemical signals, as well as the web of connections between neurons and other cell types, creates the infrastructure for memories to be formed. Despite this, encoding the complex biology of the brain into a computer model for further study has proven to be a difficult task due to the limited understanding of the underlying biology of the brain.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have made improvements to a widely utilized computer model of memory, known as a Hopfield network, by incorporating insights from biology. The alteration has resulted in a network that not only better mirrors the way neurons and other cells are connected in the brain, but also has the capacity to store significantly more memories.