15173
The best science facts, news, discoveries, videos and more! Daily! Official Chat: @EverythingScience_Chat Contact: @DigitisedRealitySupport Links: @DigitisedRealityHub
Human CO2 emissions put Arctic on track to be ice-free by 2050
For each metric ton of carbon dioxide released, a queen mattress‒sized chunk of sea ice vanishes
The average American’s carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for shrinking Arctic sea ice by nearly 50 square meters each year.
That’s the implication of a new study that finds that each additional metric ton of CO₂ released into the atmosphere directly results in a 3-square-meter loss of sea ice cover at summer’s end — comparable to losing a chunk of ice with a footprint a bit smaller than a two-seat Smart car.
Globally, humans are responsible for the release of some 36 billion metric tons of CO₂ each year. With another trillion metric tons, the Arctic Ocean will have a completely iceless summer — possibly the first in 125,000 years. That threshold could be crossed before 2050, Notz and Julienne Stroeve of University College London estimate online November 3 in Science. Many previous studies projected that summertime ice would stick around for years longer.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
A Long-Lost Gas Cloud Will Slam into Our Galaxy in 30 Million Years
A massive cloud of gas will crash into the Milky Way in about 30 million years, but there's no real danger to our home galaxy, NASA says.
New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the gas, called Smith's Cloud, was cast from the Milky Way long ago. A new NASA video describes the cloud's discovery in 1963 and what researchers know.
"We don't fully understand the Smith Cloud's origin," Andrew Fox, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who led the research, said in a statement from NASA. "There are two leading theories. One is that it was blown out of the Milky Way, perhaps by a cluster of supernova explosions. The other is that the Smith Cloud is an extragalactic object that has been captured by the Milky Way." Fox's team examined the cloud using Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, and saw evidence of sulfur, which absorbs ultraviolet light from the cores of three galaxies lying beyond the cloud. The team found that the amount of sulfur in Smith's Cloud is the same as that found in the outer disk of the Milky Way, suggesting that both objects came from the same family.
Image
Source
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
What Is Dark Matter? Prime Candidate Gets Profiled
The search for elusive dark matter may have just gotten a big boost.
Scientists have calculated the predicted mass of the axion, a hypothetical particle that some astronomers think may be the main constituent of dark matter. The new finding should greatly aid the hunt for axions, and could therefore help solve the longstanding dark-matter mystery, study team members said.
"The results we are presenting will probably lead to a race to discover these particles," study co-author Zoltan Fodor, of Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary, said in a statement.
Dark matter apparently neither absorbs nor emits light, which explains its name. Though astronomers can't observe dark matter directly, they strongly suspect that the stuff exists based on its gravitational effects. For example, there is not nearly enough "normal" matter within galaxies to explain their rapid rotation, astronomers say.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Americans say they're more afraid of clowns than climate change
Seriously, guys?
The US is in the middle of a so-called 'clown attack' epidemic right now, and a new survey by the good folks at Vox has just revealed that it's not just media hype - people are actually really, really freaked out about it.
In fact, the poll showed that Americans admit to being more scared of clowns than they are of climate change, terrorism, and even death.
That's despite the fact that we currently just lived through the 12th hottest month on record in a row - an entire year of record-breaking temperatures - and our melting glaciers are now ticking time bombs threatening to wash entire villages away.
But, we get it, clowns are creepy. Since August, there have been more than 100 'suspicious' clown sightings reported across the US, with many of those not leading to arrests. But apparently just the sight of these clowns is enough to terrify people.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Most of the Great Barrier Reef above this line is now dead
The worst case scenario has happened.
It's been six months since Australia's Great Barrier Reef experienced its worst coral bleaching event on record in March, when more than 93 percent of the reef turned white due to unseasonably warm ocean temperatures.
Researchers have now gone back to assess the long-term damage to see how well the reefs have bounced back, and it's not good news. The survey has shown that most of the corals above Port Douglas - which is around a third of the Great Barrier Reef - are now dead.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
What would a parallel universe even look like?
They could be bumping into us right now.
If you consider that the Milky Way galaxy has a radius of 100,000 light-years (1 light-year is 9.5 trillion km), and it’s estimated that there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the Universe, we’re living in an unfathomably gigantic place.
But what if this was just a fraction of what’s truly out there? What if our Universe is just one of many, and they’re all bouncing off of each other like mind-numbingly gargantuan marbles, each with their own weird laws of physics?
Welcome to the multiverse, where our Universe could be just one of the infinite numbers of universes that were spawned by the Big Bang.
Video
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Tesla shows off solar roof tiles
Roof tiles with built-in solar panels have been unveiled by Tesla chief executive Elon Musk.
The tiles, made from glass, are intended to be a more attractive way to add solar panels to homes, compared with currently-used solar technology.
The launch took place in Universal Studios, Los Angeles, on what used to be the set for the television show Desperate Housewives.
It comes with Tesla due to take over struggling energy firm Solar City.
Some of the electric carmaker's investors have expressed concern over the takeover, suggesting it is a Tesla-funded bail-out of a company Mr Musk has a vested interest in as its biggest shareholder.
No price was given for the tiles, which come in a variety of colours and styles, though Mr Musk did say it would be cheaper than fitting a traditional roof and then adding solar on top.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Gut instinct drives battery boost
Scientists have designed a new prototype battery that mimics the structure of the human intestines.
In humans, villi are used to absorb the products of digestion and increase the surface area across which this process can take place.
In the new lithium-sulphur battery, a layer of material with a villi-like structure, made from tiny zinc oxide wires, is placed on the surface of one of the battery's electrodes.
This can trap fragments of the active material when they break off, keeping them accessible for ongoing reactions and allowing the material to be reused.
"It's a tiny thing, this layer, but it's important," said study co-author Dr Paul Coxon from the University of Cambridge's department of materials science and metallurgy.
"This gets us a long way through the bottleneck which is preventing the development of better batteries."
The researchers say that, if hurdles to commercial development can be overcome, lithium-sulphur batteries could have five times the energy density of the lithium-ion batteries used in smartphones and other electronics.
But as lithium-sulphur batteries discharge, sulphur molecules transform into chain-like structures known as poly-sulphides.
As the devices undergo several charge-discharge cycles, bits of the poly-sulphide go into the battery's electrolyte (the electrically-conducting solution), so that over time the battery loses active material.
"This is the first time a chemically functional layer with a well-organised nano-architecture has been proposed to trap and reuse the dissolved active materials during battery charging and discharging," said lead author Teng Zhao, a PhD student from Cambridge.
"By taking our inspiration from the natural world, we were able to come up with a solution that we hope will accelerate the development of next-generation batteries."
The device is currently a proof of principle; commercially-available lithium-sulphur batteries are still some years away.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Archaeologists have found the first ever fossilised dinosaur brain, and it's surprisingly complex
Dinosaurs have a fearsome reputation for their hunting abilities but less so when it comes to their intelligence. This is partly due to the fact that many species have long been thought to have had relatively small brains, their heads full of protective tissue that supposedly left little room for grey matter.
But the recent discovery of the first recorded fossilised brain tissue could help challenge that image.
The fossilised brain was found by a collector on a beach near Bexhill in Sussex, England. It preserves brain tissue of a large herbivorous dinosaur similar to Iguanodon, one of the first dinosaur species to be identified.
Found among rocks laid down during the early Cretaceous Period around 133 million years ago, the fossil is an endocast, formed as layers of sediment gradually filled up the skull.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
ExoMars '96 Percent' Successful Despite Lander Crash: ESA
The ExoMars 2016 mission gets a solid "A" thus far despite the failure of its Schiaparelli lander to touch down softly on the Red Planet, European Space Agency (ESA) officials said.
Schiaparelli stopped communicating with its handlers less than a minute before its planned touchdown Wednesday morning (Oct. 21). While ExoMars team members are still analyzing the lander's data, early indications suggest that Schiaparelli fired its thrusters for an insufficient amount of time toward the end of the descent and slammed into the Martian surface hard — an interpretation bolstered by photos of the apparent crash site taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
But ESA is accentuating the positive, and there definitely was good news on Wednesday as well. For example, the mission's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) began circling Mars that morning after acing a make-or-break, 139-minute-long engine burn.
"The importance of TGO and EDM can be described as 80 percent versus 20 percent, respectively. Since we obtained at least 80 percent of the data during the descent, the overall success rate can be calculated as follows: 80+20x0.8 = 96 percent. All in all, a very positive result," ESA Director General Jan Woerner wrote in a blog post today (Oct. 21).
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
'Alien Megastructure' Star Targeted by $100 Million SETI Search
If intelligent aliens actually do live around Tabby's star, astronomers are determined to find them.
The Breakthrough Listen initiative, which will spend $100 million over the next 10 years to hunt for signals possibly produced by alien civilizations, is set to begin studying Tabby's star with the 330-foot-wide (100 meters) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, project team members announced Tuesday (Oct. 25).
"The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it's the largest, most sensitive telescope that's capable of looking at Tabby's star given its position in the sky," Breakthrough Listen co-director Andrew Siemion, who also directs the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
"We've deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly," Siemion added.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by: @EverythingScience
Vaginal vs Clitoral orgasm: What's the difference?
It's still science 😉
No, the Universe is not expanding at an accelerated rate, say physicists
Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding - it was expanding at an accelerating rate.
The discovery led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that our Universe is dominated by a mysterious force called dark energy, and altered the standard model of cosmology forever. But now physicists say this discovery might have been false, and they have a much larger dataset to back them up.
When Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt measured all the data for known Type 1a supernovae, recorded by the Hubble space telescope and a number of large ground-based telescopes, they found something incredibly strange.
As the Royal Swedish Academy explained on the morning of the Nobel Prize announcement in Stockholm:
"In a Universe which is dominated by matter, one would expect gravity eventually should make the expansion slow down. Imagine then the utter astonishment when two groups of scientists ... discovered that the expansion was not slowing down, it was actually accelerating.
By comparing the brightness of distant, far-away supernovae with the brightness of nearby supernovae, the scientists discovered that the far-away supernovae were about 25 percent too faint. They were too far away. The Universe was accelerating. And so this discovery is fundamental and a milestone for cosmology. And a challenge for generations of scientists to come."
The find was backed up by data collected separately on things like clustering galaxies and the cosmic microwave background - the faint afterglow of the Big Bang.
And earlier this year, NASA and ESA scientists found that the Universe could be expanding around 8 percent faster than originally thought.
Brought to you by: @EverythingScience
Image
Full story
First peek under clouds reveals Jupiter’s surprising depths
Jupiter’s clouds have deep roots. The multicolored bands that wrap around the planet reach hundreds of kilometers down into the atmosphere, NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveals, providing an unprecedented peek into the giant planet’s interior.
“Whatever’s making those colors and stripes still exists pretty far down,” planetary scientist Scott Bolton, head of the Juno mission, said October 19 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. “That came as a surprise to many scientists.” Until now, researchers weren’t sure if Jupiter’s stripes were just blemishes atop the clouds or extended farther inward. The bands reach at least 350 to 400 kilometers beneath the cloud deck, Bolton reported in a news conference.
Juno arrived at Jupiter on July 4 and made its first up-close investigation of the planet on August 27. Coming within 5,000 kilometers of the cloud tops, Juno recorded the intensity of radio waves emanating from the planet. Different frequencies come from different depths; low frequencies originate from deep in the atmosphere while high frequencies originate higher up.
“Deep down, Jupiter is similar but also very different than what we see on the surface,” said Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Some bands broaden while others vanish. “We can’t tell what all of it means yet, but it’s telling us hints about the deep dynamics and chemistry of Jupiter’s atmosphere.”
Brought to you by: @EverythingScience
Image
Source
MICE SQUEAK BY EXPELLING AIR AT SUPERSONIC SPEED
The animal kingdom's mating rituals are almost as weird as humanity's: Frogs are out there inventing new sex positions, ocean crabs are embracing polygamy, and female bonobos are faking it to play the field.
The modest mouse, however, might be the most metal of them all. They're singing to soulmates using a mechanism similar to a supersonic jet engine, according to new research published in Current Biology.
This sound isn't new to scientists. They have known that mice and rats use their ultrasonic squeaks to call mates and defend their turf. The way they do it, however, has been up for debate: Is it more like blowing through a tiny flute, or strumming a super-taught guitar string? In fact, it's neither. "I found the standing hypothesis without proper evidence or poorly tested, and set out to do so with a team of experts," Coen Elemans, senior author on the study from the University of Southern Denmark told Popular Science
The team used high-speed imaging of the vocal folds from 15 excised mouse larynges to find that the mice enact a "glottal jet" of air aimed at the inner wall of the larynx. The vocal cords remain motionless. "Interestingly this mechanism is known only to produce sound in supersonic flow applications, such as vertical takeoff and landing with jet engines, or high-speed subsonic flows, such as jets for rapid cooling of electrical components and turbines," Anurag Agarwal, co-author and head of the Aero-acoustics laboratories at the University of Cambridge, UK noted in a release.
Brought to you by: @EverythingScience
Image
Full Story
The Canadian military is investigating a mysterious sound from the bottom of the Arctic
A mysterious noise appears to be coming from the bottom of the sea near Nunavut in Canada, and local hunters are anxious, saying it’s been scaring the wildlife away.
Described as a "ping", "hum", or "beep", the sound has been emanating from the Arctic for months, and the locals have gotten so desperate, they’ve asked the military to get involved. An active investigation is now underway.
If the sound does actually exist - and let’s be clear, researchers have not confirmed that at this stage - the big concern is that it’s harming the wildlife.
Because unlike that strange, low-pitched sound researchers detected from the Caribbean Sea back in June, this doesn't appear to be natural.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
A new Alzheimer's drug just hit a major milestone in a human clinical trial
This could be the first new treatment in a decade.
A new drug that targets toxic amyloid proteins in the brain - one of the main hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease - has produced such promising results in a small clinical trial, it’s now being assessed in two larger trials involving 3,500 patients.
If the drug, which is taken in tablet form, can be proven to slow the devastating mental decline that’s associated with Alzheimer’s, it could be the first treatment to enter the market in more than 10 years.
In the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, amyloid proteins accumulate and clump up, sitting between the neurons as dense, toxic clusters called plaques.
Together with neurofibrillary tangles - the other key indicator of the disease - they cause disruptions to the transportation of essential nutrients around the brain, which is thought to bring on the cognitive decline and memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
So we now have to sit and wait some more to see if the drug can live up to its promise. But, as Hardy told The Guardian, "Conveying some excitement isn't the wrong thing to do in this case."
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Scientists have built a Nightmare Machine to generate the scariest images ever
We’re supposed to be building robots and AI for the good of humankind, but scientists at MIT have pretty much been doing the opposite - they’ve built a new kind of AI with the sole purpose of generating the most frightening images ever.
Just in time for Halloween, the aptly named Nightmare Machine uses an algorithm that 'learns' what humans find scary, sinister, or just downright unnerving, and generates images based on what it thinks will freak us out the most.
"There have been a rising number of intellectuals, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, raising alarms about the potential threat of superintelligent AI on humanity," one of the team, Pinar Yanardag Delul, told Digital Trends.
"In the spirit of Halloween and following the traditional MIT hack culture, we wanted to playfully commemorate humanity’s fear of AI, which is a growing theme in popular culture."
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
The oldest mummies in the world are turning into black slime
A collection of mummified human remains found in northern Chile has been turning into black slime due to rising humidity levels, and Chilean researchers are at a loss for how to stop it.
More than 100 of these mummies - which are at least 7,000 years old - have started to turn gelatinous, and local officials have applied to the United Nations' cultural agency, UNESCO, to have them recognised as a world heritage site.
Of course, getting approval won’t save the mummies on its own, but the researchers hope that increased attention from the international community will help them find solutions to the black goo.
The goo is thought to be the result of colonies of bacteria thriving in the mummified skin.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
We might finally know the weird reason Earth experiences an ice age every 100,000 years
Until now, that is.
Earth is in a pretty unique state of climate change at the moment, but for the past 1 million years, almost like clockwork, our planet has moved in and out of an ice age every 100,000 years.
The only problem is, researchers have never really been able to figure out why. In fact, they've been so puzzled by the mysterious phenomenon, they've labelled it the '100,000 year problem'. But now a new study might finally have the solution.
New research suggests that our oceans might regularly suck more CO2 out of the atmosphere every 100,000 years, allowing the planet to get cold enough to trigger an ice age.
The '100,000 year problem' stems from the fact that around 1 million years ago, Earth started experiencing ice ages - vast ice sheets covering North America, Europe, and Asia - every 100,000 years.
Before this point, which is known the mid-Pleistocene transition, our planet's ice ages used to occur at intervals of every 40,000 years, which made a lot more sense to scientists.
That's because Earth's angular tilt also wobbles in a 40,000 year cycle, which means every 40,000 years, the planet experiences colder than usual summer months because of the way it's tilted towards the Sun.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Elon Musk unveils Solar Roof and showcases plans for Solar City and Tesla
Elon Musk announces that Tesla will build and sell its own line of solar panels with integrated batteries. Coupled with the also unveiled PowerWall 2, it will allow residential homeowners to replace their entire roof with solar panels, making it much simpler for homes to be entirely powered by solar power.
Check out the full video shared below
REX for @Fizikx and @EverythingScience
Google AI invents its own cryptographic algorithm; no one knows how it works
Neural networks seem good at devising crypto methods; less good at codebreaking.
Google Brain has created two artificial intelligences that evolved their own cryptographic algorithm to protect their messages from a third AI, which was trying to evolve its own method to crack the AI-generated crypto. The study was a success: the first two AIs learnt how to communicate securely from scratch.
The Google Brain team (which is based out in Mountain View and is separate from Deep Mind in London) started with three fairly vanilla neural networks called Alice, Bob, and Eve. Each neural network was given a very specific goal: Alice had to send a secure message to Bob; Bob had to try and decrypt the message; and Eve had to try and eavesdrop on the message and try to decrypt it. Alice and Bob have one advantage over Eve: they start with a shared secret key (i.e. this is symmetric encryption).
Importantly, the AIs were not told how to encrypt stuff, or what crypto techniques to use: they were just given a loss function (a failure condition), and then they got on with it. In Eve's case, the loss function was very simple: the distance, measured in correct and incorrect bits, between Alice's original input plaintext and its guess. For Alice and Bob the loss function was a bit more complex: if Bob's guess (again measured in bits) was too far from the original input plaintext, it was a loss; for Alice, if Eve's guesses are better than random guessing, it's a loss. And thus an adversarial generative network (GAN) was created.
The results were... a mixed bag. Some runs were a complete flop, with Bob never able to reconstruct Alice's messages. Most of the time, Alice and Bob did manage to evolve a system where they could communicate with very few errors. In some tests, Eve showed an improvement over random guessing, but Alice and Bob then usually responded by improving their cryptography technique until Eve had no chance (see graph).
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
(Pictured below)The setup of the crypto system. P = input plaintext, K = shared key, C = encrypted text, and PEve and PBob are the computed plaintext outputs.
Physics tweak solves five of the biggest problems in one go!
"Dubbed SMASH, the model is based on the standard model of particle physics, but has a few bits tacked on. The standard model is a collection of particles and forces that describes the building blocks of the universe. Although it has passed every test thrown at it, it can’t explain some phenomena.
For example, we don’t understand dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 84 per cent of the universe’s mass. Nor why there is more matter than antimatter. Nor why the universe grew so rapidly in its youth during a period known as inflation. The list continues.
So something is still missing from the standard model. “Presumably we need some new particles,” says Mikhail Shaposhnikov at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. “The question is, how many new particles do we need?”
REX for @Fizikx and @EverythingScience
Consciousness could be a side effect of 'entropy', say researchers
It's impressive enough that our human brains are made up of the same 'star stuff' that forms the Universe, but new research suggests that this might not be the only thing the two have in common.
Just like the Universe, our brains might be programmed to maximise disorder - similar to the principle of entropy - and our consciousness could simply be a side effect.
The quest to understand human consciousness - our ability to be aware of ourselves and our surroundings - has been going on for centuries. Although consciousness is a crucial part of being human, researchers still don't truly understand where it comes from, and why we have it.
But a new study, led by researchers from France and Canada, puts forward a new possibility: what if consciousness arises naturally as a result of our brains maximising their information content? In other words, what if consciousness is a side effect of our brain moving towards a state of entropy?
Entropy is basically the term used to describe the progression of a system from order to disorder. Picture an egg: when it's all perfectly separated into yolk and white, it has low entropy, but when you scramble it, it has high entropy - it's the most disordered it can be.
This is what many physicists believe is happening to our Universe. After the Big Bang, the Universe has gradually been moving from a state of low entropy to high entropy, and because the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy can only increase in a system, it could explain why the arrow of time only ever moves forwards.
So researchers decided to apply the same thinking to the connections in our brains, and investigate whether they show any patterns in the way they choose to order themselves while we're conscious.
Image
Full Story
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Trip to Mars Could Throw Off Astronauts' Balance
After months in space, your crew has finally made it to Mars, but there's a nasty readjustment awaiting all of them.
Living in zero gravity during the Earth-Mars transit will have some pretty harsh side effects, but most urgently they'll have to readjust to gravity again. And those first few days on Mars will be busy as the first Mars explorers get their bearings, prepare their habitat for the stay and begin thinking about setting up experiments.
You can therefore see why NASA is so intent on figuring out how to help astronauts stay healthy and happy after long stays in space so they can adjust quickly for life on Mars. We already know that a six-month stay on the International Space Station wreaks havoc with bone and muscles, but at least when the space station crew return to Earth they have a team of medical professionals to look after them. The first Mars astronauts will have no such luxury.
Brought to you by @EverythingScience
Image
Full Story
MRSA uses decoys to evade a last-resort antibiotic
The superbug MRSA uses decoys to evade a last-resort antibiotic, reveals new research. The findings suggest potential new ways of tackling the bacteria, such as interfering with the decoys.
The findings, from scientists at Imperial College London, suggest potential new ways of tackling the bacteria, such as interfering with the decoys.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is responsible for thousands of deaths around the world each year. However, because the bacteria are resistant to many different antibiotics, treatment options are limited, and often ineffective.
One of the few antibiotics that can be used against MRSA is a drug of last resort known as daptomycin. However nearly a third of MRSA infections are not cured by this drug, leaving patients with a poor prognosis.
But until now scientists didn't know how MRSA managed to survive daptomycin treatment.
In the latest findings, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, a team from Imperial discovered that MRSA releases decoy molecules that allow them to escape being killed by the antibiotic.
Brought to you by: @EverythingScience
Image
Full Story
Elon Musk Talks SpaceX Mars Colony Ships and More in Reddit AMA
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk provided some additional details Oct. 23 about a Mars transportation system he unveiled last month, including plans to test in the near future one of its key technologies.
- REX
Join @Fizikx and @EverythingScience for more highlights!
Recent Supernova analysis shows feeble evidence for the existence of Dark Energy
As New statistical analysis casts doubt on accelerating expansion of the universe.
for @Fizikx & @EverythingScience
Virus triggers immune proteins to aid enemy
Crucial immune system proteins that make it harder for viruses to replicate might also help the attackers avoid detection, three new studies suggest. When faced with certain viruses, the proteins can set off a cascade of cell-to-cell messages that destroy antibody-producing immune cells. With those virus-fighting cells depleted, it’s easier for the invader to persist inside the host’s body.
The finding begins to explain a longstanding conundrum: how certain chronic viral infections can dodge the immune system’s antibody response, says David Brooks, an immunologist at the University of Toronto not involved in the research. The new studies, all published October 21 in Science Immunology, pin the blame on the same set of proteins: type 1 interferons.
Normally, type 1 interferons protect the body from viral siege. They snap into action when a virus infects cells, helping to activate other parts of the immune system. And they make cells less hospitable to viruses so that the foreign invaders can’t replicate as easily.
But in three separate studies, scientists tracked mice’s immune response when infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, or LCMV. In each case, type 1 interferon proteins masterminded the loss of B cells, which produce antibodies specific to the virus that is being fought. Normally, those antibodies latch on to the target virus, flagging it for destruction by other immune cells called T cells. With fewer B cells, the virus can evade capture for longer.
The proteins’ response “is driving the immune system to do something bad to itself,” says Dorian McGavern, an immunologist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md., who led one of the studies.
Brought to you by:
@EverythingScience
Image
Source
