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Toxic ‘zombie’ cells seen for 1st time in Alzheimer’s

A type of cellular stress known to be involved in cancer and aging has now been implicated, for the first time, in Alzheimer’s disease. UT Health San Antonio faculty researchers reported the discovery in the journal Aging Cell.

The team found that the stress, called cellular senescence, is associated with harmful tau protein tangles that are a hallmark of 20 human brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury. The researchers identified senescent cells in postmortem brain tissue from Alzheimer’s patients and then found them in postmortem tissue from another brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy.

Cellular senescence allows the stressed cell to survive, but the cell may become like a zombie, functioning abnormally and secreting substances that kill cells around it. “When cells enter this stage, they change their genetic programming and become pro-inflammatory and toxic,” said study senior author Miranda E. Orr, Ph.D., VA research health scientist at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, faculty member of the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, and instructor of pharmacology at UT Health San Antonio. “Their existence means the death of surrounding tissue.”

Improvements in brain structure and function

The team confirmed the discovery in four types of mice that model Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers then used a combination of drugs to clear senescent cells from the brains of middle-aged Alzheimer’s mice. Such drugs are called senolytics. The drugs used by the San Antonio researchers are dasatinib, a chemotherapy medication that is U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved to treat leukemia, and quercetin, a natural flavonoid compound found in fruits, vegetables and some beverages such as tea.

After three months of treatment, the findings were exciting. “The mice were 20 months old and had advanced brain disease when we started the therapy,” Dr. Orr said. “After clearing the senescent cells, we saw improvements in brain structure and function. This was observed on brain MRI studies (magnetic resonance imaging) and postmortem histology studies of cell structure. The treatment seems to have stopped the disease in its tracks.”

“The fact we were able to treat very old mice and see improvement gives us hope that this treatment might work in human patients even after they exhibit symptoms of a brain disease,” said Nicolas Musi, M.D., study first author, who is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute at UT Health San Antonio. He also directs the VA-sponsored Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) in the South Texas Veterans Health Care System.

Typically, in testing an intervention in Alzheimer’s mice, the therapy only works if mice are treated before the disease starts, Dr. Musi said.

Tau protein accumulation is responsible

In Alzheimer’s disease, patient brain tissue accumulates tau protein tangles as well as another protein deposit called amyloid beta plaques. The team found that tau accumulation was responsible for cell senescence. Researchers compared Alzheimer’s mice that had only tau tangles with mice that had only amyloid beta plaques. Senescence was identified only in the mice with tau tangles.

In other studies to confirm this, reducing tau genetically also reduced senescence. The reverse also held true. Increasing tau genetically increased senescence.

Importantly, the drug combination reduced not only cell senescence but also tau tangles in the Alzheimer’s mice. This is a drug treatment that does not specifically target tau, but it effectively reduced the tangle pathology, Dr. Orr said.

“When we looked at their brains three months later, we found that the brains had deteriorated less than mice that received placebo control treatment,” she said. “We don’t think brain cells actually grew back, but there was less loss of neurons, less brain ventricle enlargement, improved cerebral blood flow and a decrease in the tau tangles. These drugs were able to clear the tau pathology.”

Potentially a therapy to be tested in humans

“This is the first of what we anticipate will be many studies to better understand this process,” Dr. Musi said. “Because these drugs are approved for other uses in humans, we think a logical next step would be to start pilot studies in people.”

The drugs specifically target—and therefore only kill—the senescent cells. Because the drugs have a short half-life, they are cleared quickly by the body and no side effects were observed.

Dasatinib is an oral medication. The mice were treated with the combination every other week. “So in the three months of treatment, they only received the drug six times,” Dr. Orr said. “The drug goes in, does its job and is cleared. Senescent cells come back with time, but we expect that it would be possible to take the drug again and be cleared out again. That’s a huge benefit—it wouldn’t be a drug that people would have to take every day.”

Dosage and frequency in humans would need to be determined in clinical trials, she said.

Next, the researchers will study whether cell senescence is present in traumatic brain injury. TBI is a brain injury that develops tau protein accumulation and is a significant cause of disability in both military and non-military settings, Dr. Orr said.

Two most important phenomens to live for: coffee and ISS in the space

Coffee in Space: Keeping Crew Members Grounded in Flight

Happy National Coffee Day, coffee lovers! 

On Earth, a double shot mocha latte with soymilk, low-fat whip and a caramel drizzle is just about as complicated as a cup of coffee gets. Aboard the International Space Station, however, even just a simple cup of black coffee presents obstacles for crew members.

Understanding how fluids behave in microgravity is crucial to bringing the joys of the coffee bean to the orbiting laboratory. Astronaut Don Pettit crafted a DIY space cup using a folded piece of overhead transparency film. Surface tension keeps the scalding liquid inside the cup, and the shape wicks the liquid up the sides of the device into the drinker’s mouth.

The Capillary Beverage investigation explored the process of drinking from specially designed containers that use fluid dynamics to mimic the effect of gravity. While fun, this study could provide information useful to engineers who design fuel tanks for commercial satellites!

The capillary beverage cup allows astronauts to drink much like they would on Earth. Rather than drinking from a shiny bag and straw, the cup allows the crew member to enjoy the aroma of the beverage they’re consuming.

On Earth, liquid is held in the cup by gravity. In microgravity, surface tension keeps the liquid stable in the container.

The ISSpresso machine brought the comforts of freshly-brewed coffees and teas to the space station. European astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti enjoyed the first cup of espresso brewed using the ISSpresso machine during Expedition 43.

Now, during Expedition 53, European astronaut Paolo Nespoli enjoys the same comforts. 

Astronaut Kjell Lindgren celebrated National Coffee Day during Expedition 45 by brewing the first cup of hand brewed coffee in space.

We have a latte going on over on our Snapchat account, so give us a follow to stay up to date! Also be sure to follow @ISS_Research on Twitter for your daily dose of space station science.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

PINning down future problems

Study finds hackers could use brainwaves to steal passwords

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham suggest that brainwave-sensing headsets, also known as EEG or electroencephalograph headsets, need better security after a study reveals hackers could guess a user’s passwords by monitoring their brainwaves.

EEG headsets are advertised as allowing users to use only their brains to control robotic toys and video games specifically developed to be played with an EEG headset. There are only a handful on the market, and they range in price from $150 to $800.

Nitesh Saxena, Ph.D., associate professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and Ph.D. student Ajaya Neupane and former master’s student Md Lutfor Rahman, found that a person who paused a video game and logged into a bank account while wearing an EEG headset was at risk for having their passwords or other sensitive data stolen by a malicious software program.

“These emerging devices open immense opportunities for everyday users,” Saxena said. “However, they could also raise significant security and privacy threats as companies work to develop even more advanced brain-computer interface technology.”

Saxena and his team used one EEG headset currently available to consumers online and one clinical-grade headset used for scientific research to demonstrate how easily a malicious software program could passively eavesdrop on a user’s brainwaves. While typing, a user’s inputs correspond with their visual processing, as well as hand, eye and head muscle movements. All these movements are captured by EEG headsets. The team asked 12 people to type a series of randomly generated PINs and passwords into a text box as if they were logging into an online account while wearing an EEG headset, in order for the software to train itself on the user’s typing and the corresponding brainwave.

“In a real-world attack, a hacker could facilitate the training step required for the malicious program to be most accurate, by requesting that the user enter a predefined set of numbers in order to restart the game after pausing it to take a break, similar to the way CAPTCHA is used to verify users when logging onto websites,” Saxena said.

The team found that, after a user entered 200 characters, algorithms within the malicious software program could make educated guesses about new characters the user entered by monitoring the EEG data recorded. The algorithm was able to shorten the odds of a hacker’s guessing a four-digit numerical PIN from one in 10,000 to one in 20 and increased the chance of guessing a six-letter password from about 500,000 to roughly one in 500.

EEG has been used in the medical field for more than half a century as a noninvasive method for recording electrical activity in the brain. Electrodes are placed on the surface of the scalp to detect brain waves. An EEG machine then amplifies the signals and records them in a wave pattern on graph paper or a computer. EEG can be combined with a brain-computer interface to allow a person to control external devices. This technology was once highly expensive and used mostly for scientific research, like the production of neuroprosthetic applications to help disabled patients control prosthetic limbs by thinking about the movements. However, it is now being marketed to consumers in the form of a wireless headset and is becoming popular in the gaming and entertainment industries.

“Given the growing popularity of EEG headsets and the variety of ways in which they could be used, it is inevitable that they will become part of our daily lives, including while using other devices,” Saxena said. “It is important to analyze the potential security and privacy risks associated with this emerging technology to raise users’ awareness of the risks and develop viable solutions to malicious attacks.”

One potential solution proposed by Saxena and his team is the insertion of noise anytime a user types a password or PIN while wearing an EEG headset.

Smart ink adds new dimensions to 3-D printing

Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed a smart ink that turns 3D-printed structures into objects that can change shape and color. The innovation promises to add even more functionality to 3D printing and could pave the way to a new generation of printed material.

The advancement in the area of form-changing intelligent printing - also known as 4D printing - provides a low-cost alternative to printing precision parts for uses in areas ranging from biomedicine to the energy industry.

“This technique gives life to 3D-printed objects,” said Chenfeng Ke, an assistant professor of chemistry at Dartmouth. “While many 3D-printed structures are just shapes that don’t reflect the molecular properties of the material, these inks bring functional molecules to the 3D printing world. We can now print smart objects for a variety of uses.”

Many 3D printing protocols rely on photo-curing resins and result in hard plastic objects with rigid, but random molecular architectures. The new process allows designers to retain specific molecular alignments and functions in a material and converts those structures for use in 3D printing.

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Researchers Find New DNA Structure in Living Human Cells

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According to Breaking Science News

A team of scientists from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Universities of New South Wales and Sydney has identified a new DNA structure — called the intercalated motif (i-motif) — inside living human cells.

Deep inside the cells in our body lies our DNA. The information in the DNA code — all 6 billion A, C, G and T letters — provides precise instructions for how our bodies are built, and how they work.

The iconic ‘double helix’ shape of DNA has captured the public imagination since 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick famously uncovered the structure of DNA.

However, it’s now known that short stretches of DNA can exist in other shapes, in the laboratory at least — and scientists suspect that these different shapes might play an important role in how and when the DNA code is ‘read.’

“When most of us think of DNA, we think of the double helix. This research reminds us that totally different DNA structures exist — and could well be important for our cells,” said co-lead author Dr. Daniel Christ, from the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and St Vincent’s Clinical School at the University of New South Wales.

“The i-motif is a four-stranded ‘knot’ of DNA,” added co-lead author Dr. Marcel Dinger, also from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the University of New South Wales.

“In the knot structure, C letters on the same strand of DNA bind to each other — so this is very different from a double helix, where ‘letters’ on opposite strands recognize each other, and where Cs bind to Gs [guanines].”

Although researchers have seen the i-motif before and have studied it in detail, it has only been witnessed in vitro — that is, under artificial conditions in the laboratory, and not inside cells. In fact, they have debated whether i-motif DNA structures would exist at all inside living things — a question that is resolved by the new findings.

To detect the i-motifs inside cells, Dr. Christ, Dr. Dinger and their colleagues developed a precise new tool — a fragment of an antibody molecule — that could specifically recognize and attach to i-motifs with a very high affinity.

Until now, the lack of an antibody that is specific for i-motifs has severely hampered the understanding of their role.

Crucially, the antibody fragment didn’t detect DNA in helical form, nor did it recognize ‘G-quadruplex structures’ (a structurally similar four-stranded DNA arrangement).

With the new tool, the team uncovered the location of ‘i-motifs’ in a range of human cell lines.

Using fluorescence techniques to pinpoint where the i-motifs were located, the study authors identified numerous spots of green within the nucleus, which indicate the position of i-motifs.

The scientists showed that i-motifs mostly form at a particular point in the cell’s ‘life cycle’ — the late G1 phase, when DNA is being actively ‘read.’

They also showed that i-motifs appear in some promoter regions — areas of DNA that control whether genes are switched on or off — and in telomeres, ‘end sections’ of chromosomes that are important in the aging process.

“We think the coming and going of the i-motifs is a clue to what they do. It seems likely that they are there to help switch genes on or off, and to affect whether a gene is actively read or not,” said study first author Dr. Mahdi Zeraati, also from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the University of New South Wales.

“We also think the transient nature of the i-motifs explains why they have been so very difficult to track down in cells until now,” Dr. Christ added.

“It’s exciting to uncover a whole new form of DNA in cells — and these findings will set the stage for a whole new push to understand what this new DNA shape is really for, and whether it will impact on health and disease,” Dr. Dinger said.

The team’s results appear in the journal Nature Chemistry.

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This article and images were originally posted on [Breaking Science News] April 24, 2018 at 03:11PM. Credit to Author and Breaking Science News | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day

Fish-Inspired Material Changes Color Using Nanocolumns

Inspired by the flashing colors of the neon tetra fish, researchers have developed a technique for changing the color of a material by manipulating the orientation of nanostructured columns in the material.

“Neon tetras can control their brightly colored stripes by changing the angle of tiny platelets in their skin,” says Chih-Hao Chang, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper on the work.

“For this proof-of-concept study, we’ve created a material that demonstrates a similar ability,” says Zhiren Luo, a Ph.D. student at NC State and first author of the paper. “Specifically, we’ve shown that we can shift the material’s color by using a magnetic field to change the orientation of an array of nanocolumns.”

The color-changing material has four layers. A silicon substrate is coated with a polymer that has been embedded with iron oxide nanoparticles. The polymer incorporates a regular array of micron-wide pedestals, making the polymer layer resemble a LEGO® brick. The middle layer is an aqueous solution containing free-floating iron oxide nanoparticles. This solution is held in place by a transparent polymer cover.

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Science gets one horsepower fast

Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA

In a first, researchers converted a movie into a DNA sequence and inserted it into bacteria. They hope to someday use the technology to record cell behavior.

It was one of the very first motion pictures ever made: a galloping mare filmed in 1878 by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was trying to learn whether horses in motion ever become truly airborne.

More than a century later, that clip has rejoined the cutting edge. It is now the first movie ever to be encoded in the DNA of a living cell, where it can be retrieved at will and multiplied indefinitely as the host divides and grows.

The advance, reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature by researchers at Harvard Medical School, is the latest and perhaps most astonishing example of the genome’s potential as a vast storage device.

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It`s hunting season!

NASA’s incredible exoplanet-hunting telescope is about to launch

There is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It's TESS, short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which, if all goes well, will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

It’s been a hard month for space telescopes. First we learned that Kepler is running out of fuel, signaling the end of its second life as an exoplanet hunter. Then we got word that the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope faces yet another delay.

But there is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It’s TESS—short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. If all goes well, the new telescope will launch on Monday evening aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s a relatively small satellite, but researchers have giant hopes for what it might discover. It has the potential to identify thousands of new planets, hundreds of rocky worlds like Earth, and dozens of planets hanging out in their star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on the surface), all within our own little corner of the galaxy.

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