As proteins perform complicated tasks inside a cell, they rarely act alone.
Now, researchers have added structural information for almost 2 million protein complexes to the AlphaFold Database.
In an ambitious collaboration, researchers added 1.8 million high-confidence protein complex structure predictions to the AlphaFold Database, accelerating molecular biology research.
Northwestern University engineers have developed the first modular robots with athletic intelligence. They can be combined and recombined in the wild, recover from injury and keep moving no matter what’s thrown at them.
Called “legged metamachines,” the creations are made from autonomous, Lego-like modules that snap together into an endless number of configurations. Each module by itself is a complete robot with its own motor, battery and computer. Alone, a module can roll, turn and jump. But the real agility and indestructibility emerges when the modules combine.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Look up on a clear night and you’ll see the streaks of our new space age. What you don’t see is the growing fallout for the atmosphere that keeps us alive.
A wave of satellite launches and reentries is changing the chemistry and physics of the middle and upper atmosphere.
Studies warn of ozone depletion, stratospheric heating and new metal aerosols from burning spacecraft. The pace is accelerating fast and unless we redesign how we use and retire satellites, we risk swapping one environmental problem (congestion in Earth orbit from too many spacecraft) for another (an atmosphere seeded with rocket soot and satellite ash).
When at rest, the mind becomes preoccupied with self-generated thoughts, commonly known as mind-wandering. While the social, autobiographical, and temporal features of these thoughts have been extensively studied, little is known about how frequently the wandering mind turns toward the interoceptive and somatic body. To map this underexplored component of “body-wandering,” we conducted a large-scale neuroimaging study in 536 healthy participants, expanding a retrospective multidimensional experience sampling approach to include probes targeting visceral and somatomotor thoughts. Our findings reveal a robust interindividual dimension of body-wandering characterized by negative affect, high autonomic arousal, and a reduction in socially oriented thoughts.
Now online! STING signaling modulation by COPII cargo recognition: Lyu et al. identify the STING-ER-exit motif and the mechanism of its recognition by the COPII vesicle cargo-binding protein SEC24C. This study reveals how STING achieves controlled rather than constitutive ER exit and how COPII cargo recognition of STING can be modulated to control STING signaling.
A new study from the Salk Institute maps how the aging brain changes at the epigenetic level — cell type by cell type.
The researchers created one of the most detailed single-cell atlases yet of the aging mouse brain, spanning 8 brain regions, 36 cell types, and hundreds of thousands of cells. They found major age-related changes in DNA methylation, chromatin structure, and gene activity, with some of the strongest changes appearing in non-neuronal cells.
This kind of work matters because it moves brain aging closer to mechanism — not just describing decline, but identifying the molecular regulatory shifts that may drive vulnerability to neurodegenerative disease.
Highlights Salk researchers create epigenetic atlas of cell type-specific changes in the aging mouse brain The atlas represents eight different brain regions and 36 different cell types, and shows clear epigenetic differences associated with different ages The new resource—available publicly on Amazon Web services—can be used to unravel age-related contributions to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS LA JOLLA—Neurodegenerative diseases affect more than 57 million people globally. The incidence of these diseases, from Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s to ALS and beyond, is expected to double every 20 years. Though scientists know aging is a major risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases, the full mechanisms behind aging’s impact remain unclear.
The spectrum of cosmic neutrinos can unmask the types of astrophysical sources that produce these and other high-energy particles. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, whose detectors lie buried in Antarctic ice, has been measuring cosmic neutrinos since 2010. Early data releases suggested that the neutrino spectrum is a single falling power law, which is consistent with simple models relating cosmic neutrinos to cosmic rays. But now, after 14 years of observation, IceCube’s data show evidence for a break, or knee-like downward bend, in the spectrum at an energy of around 30 tera-electron-volts [1, 2]. Such a break could evince a mix of neutrino sources.
Cosmic neutrinos are predominantly generated whenever high-energy cosmic rays collide with other particles. The neutrino spectrum can therefore reveal information about how and where cosmic rays are accelerated. If the acceleration takes place exclusively in shock environments, where collisions produce neutrinos, the neutrino spectrum would be a single power law. However, the latest analysis of neutrino data by the IceCube Collaboration has uncovered a more complex spectrum. The researchers sifted through a decade’s worth of neutrino observations using improved models of both backgrounds and detector uncertainties. The results show a spectrum break with a statistical confidence of 4 sigma (where 5 sigma constitutes a bona fide detection).
The break could mean that neutrinos come from more than one source class, with each class having a different way of accelerating cosmic rays, says collaboration member Vedant Basu from the University of Utah. He also points out that the observed shape of the neutrino spectrum is consistent with predictions based on the properties of the diffuse gamma-ray background, supporting models that assume the two types of particles originate from the same sources.
