I’ve Seen The Last Two Stills Everywhere But I Feel Like It’s Important To Know He Was Talking About

I’ll say it again: Scientists have created a synthetic stingray that’s propelled by living muscle cells and controlled by light.

!

But the ultimate goal isn’t a cyborg sea monster - it’s a human heart.

“I want to build an artificial heart, but you’re not going to go from zero to a whole heart overnight,” says Kit Parker, a bioengineer and physicist at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. “This is a training exercise.”

Full, fascinating story here.

Matteo Farinella.

What are memories made of? Study sheds light on key protein

Ask a nonscientist what memories are made of and you’ll likely conjure images of childhood birthday parties or wedding days. Charles Hoeffer thinks about proteins.

For five years, the assistant professor of integrative physiology at CU Boulder has been working to better understand a protein called AKT, which is ubiquitous in brain tissue and instrumental in enabling the brain to adapt to new experiences and lay down new memories.

Until now, scientists have known very little about what it does in the brain.

But in a new paper funded by the National Institutes of Health, Hoeffer and his co-authors spell it out for the first time, showing that AKT comes in three distinct varieties residing in different kinds of brain cells and affecting brain health in very distinct ways.

The discovery could lead to new, more targeted treatments for everything from glioblastoma—the brain cancer Sen. John McCain has—to Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

“AKT is a central protein that has been implicated in a bevy of neurological diseases yet we know amazingly little about it,” Hoeffer said. “Our paper is the first to comprehensively examine what its different forms are doing in the brain and where.”

Discovered in the 1970s and known best as an “oncogene” (one that, when mutated, can promote cancer), AKT has more recently been identified as a key player in promoting “synaptic plasticity,” the brain’s ability to strengthen cellular connections in response to experience.

“Let’s say you see a great white shark and you are scared and your brain wants to form a memory of what’s going on. You have to make new proteins to encode that memory,” he said. AKT is one of the first proteins to come online, a central switch that turns on the memory factory.

But not all AKTs are created equal.

For the study, Hoeffer’s team silenced the three different isoforms, or varieties, of AKT in mice and observed their brain activity.

They made a number of key discoveries:

AKT2 is found exclusively in astroglia, the supportive, star-shaped cells in the brain and spinal cord that are often impacted in brain cancer and brain injury.

“That is a really important finding,” said co-author Josien Levenga, who worked on the project as a postdoctoral researcher at CU Boulder. “If you could develop a drug that targeted only AKT2 without impacting other forms, it might be more effective in treating certain issues with fewer side-effects.”

The researchers also found that AKT1 is ubiquitous in neurons and appears to be the most important form in promoting the strengthening of synapses in response to experience, aka memory formation. (This finding is in line with previous research showing that mutations in AKT1 boost risk of schizophrenia and other brain disorders associated with a flaw in the way a patient perceives or remembers experiences.)

AKT3 appears to play a key role in brain growth, with mice whose AKT3 gene is silenced showing smaller brain size.

“Before this, there was an assumption that they all did basically the same thing in the same cells in the same way. Now we know better,” Hoeffer said.

He notes that pan-AKT inhibitors have already been developed for cancer treatment, but he envisions a day when drugs could be developed to target more specific versions of the protein (AKT1 enhancers for Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, AKT2 inhibitors for cancer), leaving the others forms untouched, preventing side-effects.

More animal research is underway to determine what happens to behavior when different forms of the protein go awry.

“Isoform specific treatments hold great promise for the design of targeted therapies to treat neurological diseases with much greater efficacy and accuracy than those utilizing a one-size-fits-all approach,” the authors conclude. “This study is an important step in that direction.”

Top 10 Most Uncomfortable Physics Facts

While physics can show us amazing things about our universe, it doesn’t always agree with how we think things should work. Sometimes, physics can be very counter-intuitive, and often unsettling. So, here’s my list of physics facts that can be a bit unnerving.

10: Weight doesn’t matter

If it wasn’t for air resistance, everything would fall at exactly the same speed. If you let go of a hammer and a feather from the same height at the same time  on the Moon, they would hit the ground simultaneously. 

9: Gyroscopic precession

It doesn’t matter how much you know about physics; gyroscopes are weird. The way they seem to defy gravity makes you rethink everything you know about physics, despite being fairly simple toys. Still, it’s all just Newton’s laws of motion.

8: Neutrinos and dark matter

We like to think that we can interact with most of the world around us, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Neutrinos and dark matter are passing through your body right now, as if you weren’t even there. The fact that 65 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body every second is weird enough, who knows what we’ll learn about dark matter.

7: Photons are particles

Light travels like a wave, but can only interact like a particle. It can interfere and have a frequency, but it can only take and give energy in discrete quantities. It behaves like nothing else in our macroscopic world, and can be very difficult to imagine.

6: Electrons are waves

We’ve established how photons act like waves and particles, but surely massive particles act normally. Nope! Even electrons have wave-like properties. In fact, everything acts like a wave! Except these waves come in discrete quantities, which we’ll call particles. This won’t get confusing.

5: E=mc^2

Einstein’s most famous contribution to physics states that matter is simply another form of energy, which has very profound consequences. A wound-up Jack-in-a-box would weigh ever so slightly more than a released Jack-in-a-box, due to the potential energy stored within.

4: Time is relative

The core of special relativity states that time passes differently for different observers. If you took a trip to Alpha Centauri at 99% the speed of light, everyone on Earth would see the trip take 4.4 years, while you would only experience 7.5 months. Time travel is real!

3: The (not so empty) vacuum

Something can be created from nothing, as long as it goes right back to being nothing quickly. In seemingly empty space, particles pop in and out of existence all the time as a result of the uncertainty principle. Not to mention, space is inflating at an accelerated rate due to “dark energy”. To the vacuum, the law of conservation of energy is more of a suggestion.

2: c is the fastest speed

Another important point in special relativity is that nothing could ever go faster than light. This doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, but the math doesn’t lie. To even get something with mass to travel at the speed of light would require infinite energy. Even if you somehow get around this, there are just too many mathematical problems with superluminal travel. Like it or not, the universe has a speed limit.

1: The cat is dead and alive

How could it not be this? The nature of quantum mechanics allows for objects to take on two seemingly contradictory states in a ‘superposition’. An electron can be in two places at once, or in a more extreme example, a cat can be both dead and alive. Of course, this weird property goes away once someone makes an observation. It’s as if there are tiny physics trolls messing with nature whenever we’re not looking.

Of course, there’s plenty more unsettling physics facts, like the space-bending nature of general relativity, or the “spooky action at a distance” that is quantum entanglement, but these are my top 10. I’d like to hear any unsettling physics facts you think I’ve missed, though!

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Fucking SCIENCE

18 Science Facts We Didn't Know at The Start of 2017

We've learned so much already.

1. Lungs don’t just facilitate respiration - they also make blood. Mammalian lungs produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, which equates to the majority of platelets circulating the body.

2. It is mathematically possible to build an actual time machine - what’s holding us back is finding materials that can physically bend the fabric of space-time.

3. Siberia has a colossal crater called the ‘doorway to the underworld’, and its permafrost is melting so fast, ancient forests are being exposed for the first time in 200,000 years.

4. The world’s first semi-synthetic organisms are living among us - scientists have given rise to new lifeforms using an expanded, six-letter genetic code.

5. Vantablack - the blackest material known to science - now comes in a handy ‘spray-on’ form and it’s the weirdest thing we’ve seen so far this year.

6. It’s official: time crystals are a new state of matter, and we now have an actual blueprint to create these “impossible” objects at will.

7. A brand new human organ has been classified, and it’s been hiding in plain sight this whole time. Everyone, meet your mesentery.

8. Carl Sagan was freakishly good at predicting the future - his disturbingly accurate description of a world where pseudoscience and scientific illiteracy reigns gave us all moment for pause.

9. A single giant neuron that wraps around the entire circumference of a mouse’s brain has been identified, and it appears to be linked to mammalian consciousness.

10. The world’s rarest and most ancient dog isn’t extinct after all - in fact, the outrageously handsome New Guinea highland wild dog appears to be thriving.

11. Your appendix might not be the useless evolutionary byproduct after all. Unlike your wisdom teeth, your appendix might actually be serving an important biological function - and one that our species isn’t ready to give up just yet.

12. After 130 years, we might have to completely redraw the dinosaur family tree, thanks to a previously unimportant cat-sized fossil from Scotland.

13. Polycystic ovary syndrome might actually start in the brain, not the ovaries.

14. Earth appears to have a whole new continent called Zealandia, which would wreak havoc on all those textbooks and atlases we’ve got lying around.

15. Humans have had a bigger impact on Earth’s geology than the infamous Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago, and now scientists are calling for a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene - to be officially recognised.

16. Turns out, narwhals - the precious unicorns of the sea - use their horns for hunting. But not how you’d think.

17. Human activity has literally changed the space surrounding our planet - decades of Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio communications have accidentally formed a protective, human-made bubble around Earth.

18. Farmers routinely feed red Skittles to their cattle, because it’s a cheap alternative to corn. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Way brothers 

STOP SCROLLING!

Please read this if you want to make a sick boy happy. Lorenzo Snippe is a 9-year-old boy from the Netherlands who is very sick. In 2016 he was diagnosed with leukemia and in 2017 with x-ald. On the third (3) of February is his tenth (10) birthday, and it will probably be his last. Because he can’t get any visitors due to being so sick, his parents have asked people in this news article to send him a happy birthday postcard as soon as possible. 

If you’re able to, please send him a postcard wishing him a happy birthday and tell him where you’re from! If you can’t, please reblog this post to make sure it will reach as many people as possible! His address is: 

Prinses Wilhelminastraat 22 

7753 TM Dalerpeel 

The Netherlands 

He really loves animals, so it would be great if you could send a postcard with an animal on it or something like that! 

Don’t send him or his family rude things and don’t use his address for other things than described in this post!

Este mes

Siento una soledad frio y terrible sin el calor de tu corazon,

La culpa fue mia, pero me duele sin tu amor

Quisiera haberte dicho esto el 2 de este mes, pero me dolia demasiado escribirlo

Perdi el amor de alguien increible y maravillosa, y honestamente no se que hacer sin ti.

Puedo decir todo esto ahora, porque ya te estas alejando de mi, y aunque lo lamento, yo se que es lo mejor. 

Quiero ser mejor, porque algun dia, en algun futuro, yo espero encontrate y amarte otravez. Y cuando ese dia ocurre, espero que tu tambien quieras lo mismo. 

Te amo con una furia y dolor y no puedo explicar.

Espero que estes contenta, amor, y aunque ya no lo crees por la manera que he estado actuando, te extrano, nada va cambiar eso.