Science
Friday, March 29, 2024
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A group of scientists has taken the first important steps towards creating the Human Cell Atlas—a complete inventory of our staggeringly diverse cells.  Steve McCarroll announced earlier in 2016 that his team had discovered the gene that most powerfully drives our risk of schizophrenia. Known as C4, it was previously viewed as an immune-system gene, but clearly, it also does something in the brain.

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A 10th of children have a "monkey-like" immune system that stops them developing AIDS, a study of Oxford University suggests. The study, in Science Translational Medicine, found the children's immune systems were "keeping calm", which prevented them being wiped out.An untreated HIV infection will kill 60% of children within two and a half years, but the equivalent infection in monkeys is not fatal. The findings could lead to new immune-based therapies for HIV infection. The virus eventually wipes out the immune system, leaving the body vulnerable to other infections, what is known as acquired human immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).  The researchers analysed the blood of 170 children from South Africa who had HIV, had never had antiretroviral therapy and yet had not developed AIDS.

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Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing humankind, and as the stakes are raised, many are proposing ambitious solutions – from pumping dust into the atmosphere to escaping to space.

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But what if instead of trying to fix the world, we fixed ourselves? That's the question posed by Matthew Liao, director of the Bioethics Program at New York University, and his colleagues. "We tried to think outside the box," says Liao. "What hasn't been suggested with respect to addressing climate change?"

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Yacht "Maiken" was traveling in the south Pacific when the crew came across a strange sight. It looked as though sand was floating on top of the water, until the realized it was volcanic stone.

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From far it looked like it was sand in the water, and the sand was floating ON TOP of the waves... Look at these photos and try to imagine the feeling, the thrill of experiencing this phenomenon close-up.

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For millions of Americans with heart disease and failure, a breakthrough development could save their lives. More than half a million people die in the United States from heart failure each year, thousands of them while awaiting a transplant. But with the release of a new scientific paper comes a potential solution to the deficiency: growing new ones.

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That's exactly what a team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) set out to do. Their work, published this week in the journal Circulation Research, proves the idea has the potential to be a game changer. Using skin cells reprogrammed into stem cells, the researchers were able to generate functional heart tissue.