Phages in mucus aid immune system by killing invading bacteria.
…animal mucus — whether from humans, fish or corals — is loaded with bacteria-killing viruses called phages. These protect their hosts from infection by destroying incoming bacteria. In return, the phages are exposed to a steady torrent of microbes in which to reproduce.
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Nanowerk LLC Nanotechnology technique controls blood sugar in diabetics for days at a time Nanowerk LLC (Nanowerk News) In a promising development for diabetes treatment, researchers have developed a network of nanoscale particles that can be…
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UCT professor wins international award for TB work Health24.com I’ve trained so many young scientists - and this award is for them.” Mizrahi plans to use most of the prize money on hiring senior researchers who are able to bring new skills to the…
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Dengue was created for Irene Bosch, Ph.D. at University of Massachusetts and Yorgo Modis, Ph.D. from Yale University. This animation was an educational proje…
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This week is ‘World Immunisation Week’, which aims to promote vaccinations, particularly amongst the 22 million infants which are not protected with routine immunisations.
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Think about the type of animal that would make an ideal host for a virus. It would gather …
Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences via “socialstructed learning,” an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards, suggests Marina Gorbis, Executive Director at the Institute for the Future.
“Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us,” she says.
What if we could access historical, artistic, demographic, environmental, architectural, and other kinds of information embedded in the real world via augmented reality devices?
“This is exactly what a project from USC and UCLA called HyperCities is doing: layering historical information on the actual city terrain. As you walk around with your cell phone, you can point to a site and see what it looked like a century ago, who lived there, what the environment was like.
“The Smithsonian’s free iPhone and iPad app, Leafsnap, responds when you take a photo of a tree leaf by instantly searching a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution.
“We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) . … Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.”
Neuroscientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute have mapped the activity of nearly all the neurons in a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution, with signficant implications for neuroscience research and projects like the proposed Brain Activity Map (BAM).
Fast volumetric imaging of the larval zebrafish brain with light-sheet microscopy (credit: Misha B Ahrens, Philipp J Keller/Nature Methods)
The researchers used high-speed light sheet microscopy to image the activity of 80% of the neurons in the brain (which is composed of ~100,000 neurons) of a fish larva at 0.8 Hz (an image every 1.3 seconds), with single-cell resolution.
This represents the first technology that achieves whole brain imaging of a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution with speeds that approximate neural activity patterns and behavior, as Nature Methodsmethagora blog noted.
The authors saw correlated activity patterns at the cellular level that spanned large areas of the brain — pointing to the existence of broadly distributed functional circuits.
The next steps will be to determine the causal role that these circuits play in behavior — something that will require improvements in the methods for 3D optogenetics, the blog said. Obtaining the detailed anatomical map of these circuits will also be key to understand the brain’s organization at its deepest level.
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A Maryland man who died of the first fatal case of human rabies in the state in nearly 40 years got the virus through an organ transplant, health officials say.
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PLoS Blogs (blog)
Do Cats With FIV Foretell HIV’s Future?
