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Scientists Splice Material From Creature That Can Survive Outer Space Into Human Cells – Futurism

Posted: April 4, 2024 at 2:42 am

Image by Getty / Futurism

An almost-microscopic creature that's sturdy enough to survive the ravages of space may hold the key to human longevity, scientists have found in new research.

In a new study led by the University of Wyoming, an international team of researchers found that when looking into the incredible durability of the itty bitty tardigrade known affectionately as the "water bear" or "moss piglet" proteins from the creature might help slow aging in humans, too.

Part of what's made tardigrades so famous is that they can survive both boiling and freezing temperatures, which was why in 2007 a team of European scientists sent 3,000 of these half-millimeter-long little guys into space, and weren't so shocked when the majority of them survived.

When they're threatened by temperatures, radiation, or other dangerous conditions, water bears go into a self-protective state of suspended animation known as biostasis and it was that mechanism that interested molecular biologist and UW assistant professor Thomas Boothby, an expert in the field of tardigrades.

In the UW study, published in the journal Protein Science, the molecular biology team looked into a tardigrade protein known as CAHS D, which is key to the tiny animal's suspended animation process. Using lab-grown human kidney cells, the scientists found that when they introduced CAHS D to the human cells, it resulted in a gel-like consistency that could help scientists better understand tardigrade biostasis and eventually,perhaps help humans learn how to hack our own genes into performing better under stress, too.

"Amazingly, when we introduce these proteins into human cells, they gel and slow down metabolism, just like in tardigrades," Silvia Sanchez-Martinez, a senior research scientist at UW's molecular biology department and the lead author of the study, said in the school's statement. "Just like tardigrades, when you put human cells that have these proteins into biostasis, they become more resistant to stresses, conferring some of the tardigrades' abilities to the human cells."

Fascinatingly, once the researchers removed so-called "osmotic stress" factors from the human cells, which could include dehydrating or otherwise applying harsh conditions to them, they went back to normal and the gels conferred by the tardigrade proteins disappeared.

"When the stress is relieved," Boothby said in the UW press release, "the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism."

While there's certainly a long way to go before scientists figure out how to produce such biostasis effects in living humans, the findings are intriguing and just might be a pathway to finding how to survive the harshening conditions our of dying planet.

More on cells: Scientist Who Gene-Edited Human Babies Back in the Lab Again After Prison Release

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Scientists Splice Material From Creature That Can Survive Outer Space Into Human Cells - Futurism

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Pregnant Women’s Diet Affects Facial Features of Their Children, Scientists Find – Futurism

Posted: April 4, 2024 at 2:42 am

Image by Getty / Futurism

Do you have a big nose you despise? Or pointy features you find annoying?

Well, blame your mother and her late night pregnancy cravings for chocolate ice cream dusted with Flaming Hot Cheetos.

A new study in Nature Communications suggests that your mother's diet during pregnancy is asignificant factor in how your facial features are shaped due to a complex dance between gene expression and how much protein she ate while you were a fetus swimming inside her tummy putting a new spin on the phrase "you are what you eat."

An international team of scientists came to this conclusion by collecting and transcribing genes responsible for human facial formation, identifying from this cohort protein complexes called the mTORC1 pathway that they surmised could fine-tune the features of your face.

In order to see if the mTORC1 pathway does indeed influence facial features, the scientists took genetically modified mice and zebra fish where they could track mTORC1 activity and fed them varying diets.

From there, they found that a high protein diet influenced mTORC1 activity by leading to more prominent facial features, while lower protein diets led to smaller facial features.In sum, they wrote, material protein intake is correlated to "subtle, but distinct changes in the craniofacial shape of the embryos."

It makes sense, from a high-level view, that a mother's diet during pregnancy would play a role in how babies turn out looking. After all, we already know that when mothers drink alcohol during pregnancy, this leads to infants with certain features that indicate fetal alcohol syndrome.

Needless to say, though: if you're pregnant, just eat a reasonable diet and whatever your doctor recommends. It's not worth risking your health or that of your unborn child for some hypothetical face gains.

More on pregnancy: People Unexpectedly Getting Pregnant on Ozempic and Wegovy

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Pregnant Women's Diet Affects Facial Features of Their Children, Scientists Find - Futurism

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NASA’s First Artemis Moon Astronauts Will Bring Small Greenhouse to Lunar Surface – Futurism

Posted: April 4, 2024 at 2:42 am

Could we really grow food on the surface of the Moon? Astronaut Farmers

The first astronauts to walk the surface of the Moon in almost half a century will be bringing with them a mini-greenhouse to study how crops adapt to the harsh surrounding environment.

The device, which is part of NASA'sLunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF) investigation, could become "the first experiment to observe plant photosynthesis, growth, and systemic stress responses in space-radiation and partial gravity," according to a statement by the space agency.

Of course, that's only if NASA's crewed Artemis 3 mission to the lunar surface, tentatively slated for 2026, goes according to plan.

The experiment could help shed light on how growing food in space could allow us to feed ourselves on journeys to the Moon and beyond an integral aspect of space exploration that could soon be put to the test.

As Space.com points out, it technically wouldn't be the first time plants have made it to the lunar surface. In 2019, China sent cotton seeds to the far side of the Moon as part of its Chang'e 4 mission. The seeds sprouted days later, making it the first biological experiment of any kind on the surface of another world.

Apart from LEAF, NASA also selected two other science experiments destined for the surface of the Moon. The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS) will involve placing a small autonomous seismometer suite designed to detect moonquakes.

And the Lunar Dielectric Analyzer (LDA) is designed to measure the surrounding lunar dust's ability to conduct electricity, something that's key to our search for lunar ice.

"These three scientific instruments will be our first opportunity since Apollo to leverage the unique capabilities of human explorers to conduct transformative lunar science," said deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASAs Science Mission Directorate Joel Kearns in the statement.

But before astronauts make it to the lunar surface, NASA and its commercial partners, including SpaceX, still have much work ahead of them. The mission will involve a crew of astronauts traveling to lunar orbit aboard an Orion capsule. Two of the four crew members then travel down to the lunar surface below aboard a SpaceX Starship which,it's worth pointing out, has yet to make it to space and back in one piece.

Nonetheless, the mission could mark a historic first step in our renewed efforts to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface and bringing a piece of home in the form of some plants only makes sense.

More on Artemis 3: NASA Reportedly Forced to Push Back Moon Landing After SpaceX Fails to Deliver Starship

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NASA's First Artemis Moon Astronauts Will Bring Small Greenhouse to Lunar Surface - Futurism

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The James Webb’s Beautiful Images Actually Arrive in Black and White – Futurism

Posted: April 4, 2024 at 2:42 am

"We're just trying to enhance things to make it more scientifically digestible and also engaging." So Chic

This just in: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a Tumblr girl, actually.

Since its launch in 2022, the JWST has dazzled the masses with spectacular photos of interstellar sights like the pillars of creation, exploding stars, and checks notes squirting moons.

While the public sees those images are seen in striking color, though, that's not actually how the JWST captures them. As Space.com reports, images snapped by the advanced telescope first arrive to researchers in black and white, and are then colored back on Earth by scientists who use data to make a well-educated guess as to what the cosmic bodies in the pictures might look like in the spectrum of visible light.

In other words, we have a pretty goodideaof what these astrological sights might look like to the naked human eye but we still don't know for certain.

"The quickest answer is, we don't know," science visuals developer Alyssa Pagan, one of the researchers who adds color to JWST at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), told Space.com. "We are using that relationship with wavelengths and the color of light, and we're just applying that to the infrared."

As Space.com notes, the JWST "sees" using infrared waves, which are outside the range of human vision. Infrared not only gives the JWST the power to see deeper into space, but also allows it to capture imagery and information that we couldn't possibly glean by peering through a regular optical telescope.

This is one of the ways that the Webb telescope differs from its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which like humans "sees" via visual light.

"The rainbow of light that the human eye can see is a small portion of the total range of light, known in science as the electromagnetic spectrum," reads the Webb's web(b)site," adding that telescopes "engineered to detect light outside the visible range" can "show us otherwise hidden regions of space."

But while the JWST's infrared vision is transforming the field of astronomy as we speak, the downside is the lack of visual color in its resulting photos. Thankfully, though, we have Pagan and the other folks at STScI, who work to infuse some extra zest into the telescope's groundbreaking cosmic snapshots, inviting viewers to engage with a bit more wonder than they might with a black and white image.

"We're just trying to enhance things," the researcher told Space.com, "to make it more scientifically digestible and also engaging."

More on space: We May Have "Misunderstood the Universe," Nobel Prize Winner Says

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AI Companies Running Out of Training Data After Burning Through Entire Internet – Futurism

Posted: April 4, 2024 at 2:42 am

This manufactured problem seeks manufactured solutions. Mass Shortage

As AI companies keep building bigger and better models, they're running down a shared problem: sometime soon, the internet won't be big enough to provide all the data they need.

As theWall Street Journal reports, some companies are looking for alternative sources of data training now that the internet is growing too small, with things like publicly-available video transcripts and even AI-generated "synthetic data" as options.

While there are some companies, such as Dataology, which was formed by ex-Meta and Google DeepMind researcher Ari Morcos, looking into ways to train larger and smarter models with less data and resources, most big companies are looking into novel and controversial means of data training.

OpenAI, for instance, has per theWSJ's sources discussed training GPT-5 on transcriptions from public YouTube videos even as its own chief technology officer, Mira Murati, struggles to answer questions about whether its Sora video generator was trained using YouTube data.

Synthetic data, meanwhile, has been the subject of ample debate in recent months after researchers found last year that training an AI model on AI-generated data would be a digital form of "inbreeding" that would ultimately lead to "model collapse"or "Habsburg AI."

Some companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic,which was formed by OpenAI in 2021 in efforts to build a safer and more ethical AI than those of their former employer, are seeking to head that off by creating supposedly higher-quality synthetic data though of course, neither is letting press in on the secret sauce of what exactly that would entail.

Indeed, Anthropic admitted when announcing its Claude 3 LLM that the model was trained on "data we generate internally," and in an interview with WSJ, chief company scientist Jared Kaplan said that he thinks there are good use cases for synthetic data as well.

While concerns about AI running out of data seem to have been spooking researchers for some time, researcher Pablo Villalobos told the newspaper that although his firm, Epoch, has estimated that AI will run out of usable training data within the next few years, there's no reason for panic.

"The biggest uncertainty," Villalobos said, "is what breakthroughs youll see."

Then again, there is another obvious solution to this manufactured problem: AI companies could simply stop trying to create bigger and better models, given that aside from the training data shortage, they also use tons of electricity and expensive computing chips that require the mining of rare-earth minerals.

More on AI training: Microsoft and OpenAI Reportedly Building $100 Billion Secret Supercomputer to Train Advanced AI

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Russian Assassination Unit Linked to Havana Syndrome – Futurism

Posted: April 4, 2024 at 2:42 am

Image by Getty / Futurism

New reports claim to have found a potential origin for the mysterious "Havana Syndrome" that's said to have affected American and Canadian agents but questions remain about whether the US government agrees.

In a five-year investigation conducted with the help of Germany's Der Spiegel and the independent Russian exile outfit The Insider, CBS' 60 Minutes reports that the strange neurological symptoms associated with Havana Syndrome seem to be linked to a secretive Russian "assassination unit."

Named for the first reported instances in 2016 occurring near the US embassy in Havana, Cuba, these "anomalous health incidents," as the American military calls them, have been said to affect personnel in China, Germany, Austria, and Vietnam, asAxios helpfully rounded up.

As reports indicate, spies and diplomats from the US and Canada have reported a constellation of bizarre symptoms, ranging from ear-ringing and hearing loss to vertigo and cognitive dysfunction, with little in common about the sufferers save for their top-secret government jobs.

Since then, there have been all kinds of potential explanations for the symptoms, with the prevailing theory being that it was some sort of directed microwave or acoustic attack. Those theories have been complicated by the government's own repeated denials that the syndrome was caused by foreign attacks.

This new reporting, which comes just two weeks after a pair of studies by government scientists that found Havana Syndrome had no long-lasting effects in the brains of sufferers, suggests that attacks may have occurred even earlier than previously reported though details about the who and why are still murky.

Indeed, as the trifecta of outlets report, a similar set of symptoms happened to at least four Americans in Frankfurt in 2014 and also to three agents who'd been stationed in Ukraine but the "hits," as the reports call them, only occurred after they'd left that country.

AsThe Insider detailed in its own report about the investigation, an American named Mark Lenzi claimed that he and his family had all suffered similar attacks, which that outlet describes as "something akin to a strong energy beam." That man and his whole family, who'd previously been in Guangzhou, China, all failed brain injury tests and were compensated "more than a million dollars because of our diagnosed traumatic brain injuries," he told the outlet.

What's more, the outlet claims that as recently as July 2023, a Department of Defence official was said to be hit with a similar energy attack during a NATO summit in Lithuania that was also attended by President Joe Biden.

Although The Insider is said to have identified officials associated with "Unit 29155," the alleged assassination unit that's said to be part of Russia's GRU state intelligence agency, the outlet explains these links primarily with call logs, car rentals, arrests, and hearsay. While there certainly are patterns demonstrated by the exile outlet, the evidence it provides is tenuous enough to provide ample plausible deniability which is exactly what the Kremlin did when asserting that it has nothing to do with Havana syndrome.

"This is not a new topic at all; for many years the topic of the so-called 'Havana syndrome' has been exaggerated in the press," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the press in the wake of the new reporting, "and from the very beginning it was linked to accusations against the Russian side."

Although an ex-Pentagon official did tellThe Insider that he believed Russia was behind these attacks, the US government itself has not responded to the latest reports. We've reached out to the DOD, but thus far the official silence only serves to further complicate the already-complex debacle of Havana syndrome.

More on Russia: Russia Warns of Potential Military Strike on SpaceX Satellites

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Russian Assassination Unit Linked to Havana Syndrome - Futurism

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