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Category: biological

In the quest to take the “forever” out of “forever chemicals,” bacteria might be our ally. Most remediation of per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) involves adsorbing and trapping them, but certain microbes can actually break apart the strong chemical bonds that allow these chemicals to persist for so long in the environment.

Now, a University at Buffalo-led team has identified a strain of bacteria that can break down and transform at least three types of PFAS, and perhaps even more crucially, some of the toxic byproducts of the bond-breaking process.

Published in this month’s issue of Science of the Total Environment, the team’s study found that Labrys portucalensis F11 (F11) metabolized over 90% of perfluorooctane (PFOS) following an exposure period of 100 days. PFOS is one of the most frequently detected and persistent types of PFAS and was designated hazardous by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year.

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Artificial neural networks, central to deep learning, are powerful but energy-consuming and prone to overfitting. The authors propose a network design inspired by biological dendrites, which offers better robustness and efficiency, using fewer trainable parameters, thus enhancing precision and resilience in artificial neural networks.

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about an intriguing experiment that created endosymbiosis.
Links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08010-x.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9040847/
Previous videos: https://youtu.be/GkuAzdS-VwA


#symbiosis #biology #life.

0:00 Endosymbiosis in a nutshell.
1:50 Examples.
3:00 Fungal endosymbiosis.
5:35 Questions that need answering.
6:10 Incredible new experiment.
6:48 What fungus was used.
8:00 What the experiment was trying to do.
9:30 Successful union and reproduction.
11:15 Major discoveries 13:00 Conclusions.

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Continue reading “Groundbreaking Experiment Forced Organisms To Become Symbiotic” | >

Swiss researchers claim to have devised a functional living battery powered by the combined efforts of two types of fungi – all in a biodegradable, non-toxic 3D-printed package. I’ll give you a second to wrap your head around that outrageous statement before diving into the details.

That’s from a team at Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), a Dübendorf-based research institute whose innovations have found their way into Omega watches, quick-drying sports bras, and top British soccer team Arsenal’s artificial turf.

While we’ve seen work on bacteria-powered batteries before, the researchers note this is the first time two types of fungi have been brought together to create a working fuel cell. And to be clear, this is indeed more of a fuel cell than a battery, as it’s utilizing the fungal metabolism to convert nutrients from microbes into energy.

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Researchers at the John Innes Centre have identified a biological mechanism that helps plant roots create a more hospitable environment for beneficial soil microbes. This breakthrough has the potential to promote more sustainable farming practices by reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers.

Most major crops currently rely on nitrate and phosphate fertilizers, but excessive fertilizer use can have harmful environmental consequences. By leveraging the natural, mutually beneficial relationships between plant roots and soil microbes to improve nutrient uptake, it may be possible to significantly cut down on the use of inorganic fertilizers.

Researchers in the group of Dr Myriam Charpentier discovered a mutation in a gene in the legume Medicago truncatula that reprogrammes the signaling capacity of the plant so that it enhances partnerships with nitrogen fixing bacteria called rhizobia and arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi (AMF) which supply roots with phosphorus.

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Gould’s thesis has sparked widespread debate ever since, with some advocating for determinism and others supporting contingency. In his 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, science fiction author Ray Bradbury recounted how a time traveler’s simple act of stepping on a butterfly in the age of the dinosaurs changed the course of the future. Gould made a similar point: “Alter any early event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.”

Scientists have been exploring this problem through experiments designed to recreate evolution in the lab or in nature, or by comparing species that have emerged under similar conditions. Today, a new avenue has opened up: AI. In New York, a group of former researchers from Meta — the parent company of social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — founded EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup focused on biology. The EvolutionaryScale Model 3 (ESM3) system created by the company is a generative language model — the same kind of platform that powers ChatGPT. However, while ChatGPT generates text, ESM3 generates proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life.

ESM3 feeds on sequence, structure, and function data from existing proteins to learn the biological language of these molecules and create new ones. Its creators have trained it with 771 billion data packets derived from 3.15 billion sequences, 236 million structures, and 539 million functional traits. This adds up to more than one trillion teraflops (a measure of computational performance) — the most computing power ever used in biology, according to the company.

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Vector Institute’s Remarkable 2024 | Geoffrey Hinton — Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?

In this profound keynote, Vector co-founder Geoffrey Hinton explores the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence and its potential to surpass human intelligence. Drawing from decades of expertise, Hinton shares his growing concerns about AI’s existential risks while examining fundamental questions about consciousness, understanding, and the nature of intelligence itself.

Geoffrey Hinton is one of the founding fathers of deep learning and artificial neural networks. He was a Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google until 2023 and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. In 2024 Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Key Topics Covered:

Continue reading “Geoff Hinton — Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence? | Vector’s Remarkable 2024” | >

If Earth’s life survives the Anthropocene, it will eventually face another existential threat from space.

As the Sun brightens with age, it will inevitably interfere with our planet’s finicky carbon cycle, triggering a depletion of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the point where plants will starve.

Luckily, this won’t happen until at least 1.6 billion years from now, suggests new research from University of Chicago geophysicist RJ Graham and colleagues. That potentially doubles the projected lifespan of Earth’s plants and animals.

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An international team of scientists has uncovered a fascinating piece of the evolutionary puzzle: the origin of the ventral nerve cord, a vital part of the central nervous system, in ecdysozoan animals—a group that includes insects, nematodes, and priapulid worms. Their study, published in Science Advances

<em> Science Advances </em> is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It serves as an open-access platform featuring high-quality research across the entire spectrum of science and science-related disciplines. Launched in 2015, the journal aims to publish significant, innovative research that advances the frontiers of science and extends the reach of high-impact science to a global audience. “Science Advances” covers a broad range of topics including, but not limited to, biology, physics, chemistry, environmental science, and social sciences, making it a multidisciplinary publication.

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More cool designs are on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3QFIrFX
Alternatively, PayPal donations can be sent here: http://paypal.me/whatdamath.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about new discoveries about bacterial communication.
Links:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj1539
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2025/january/cyanob…formation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prochlorococcus.

The Ocean Teems With Networks of Interconnected Bacteria


Previous video:

#biology #bacteria #biofilm.

0:00 Bacterial communication.
0:35 Cyanobacteria complexity.
3:00 Most prominent bacterium in the ocean.
4:10 Bizarre discoveries of nanotubes.
5:25 Possible explanations and studies trying to figure it out.
6:15 Recent study finds interspecies communication.
8:10 Entirely new way to communicate or a trade network?
9:30 Questions and future studies.
10:50 Conclusions.

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Continue reading “Surprising Bacterial Communication We’ve Never Seen Before” | >