In this study, the authors present magnetoelectric nanodiscs that enable minimally invasive, remote magnetic neuromodulation with subsecond precision to drive reward and motor behaviours in genetically intact mice.

Great article! I really resonate with how Raj Reddy describes his thinking about societal adaptation to technological change.

While some fret about technology’s social impacts, Raj Reddy still believes in the power of artificial intelligence to improve lives.

We present a DNA self-assembly based molecular data writing strategy to enable parallel movable-type printing for scalable DNA storage.

Such a cool idea: a 1 km diameter exoplanet telescope lens built from self-assembling subunits could image other worlds with incredible detail.

With the recent SpaceX Starship orbital flight tests, it is time to commit to building the largest physically possible space telescope. Such a telescope would peer deeper into the universe than any before it, answering fundamental questions: are we alone? What do Earth-like exoplanets around other stars look like? How did we get here? What weird stuff awaits discovery? Where is the limit on human ambition to know what is in our universe? The Monster Scope answers these questions. Monster, because of its enormous scale, grotesque in its ambition. Monster, from the Latin root meaning a revealed thing. And monster, because through it we may be able to study not just the rocks and land masses but possibly lifeforms, both monstrous and marvelous, on distant planets.

When we look up into the night sky, we see thousands of stars. Most of them, visible to our weak and poorly-evolved eyes, are either exceptionally close or exceptionally bright. Along with the starlight that passes each moment through our corneas onto our retinas, its brother and sister photons splash uselessly onto the skin of our face, the ground around our feet, and the rest of the entire planet.

A telescope gathers this wasted light and corrals it into exquisitely sensitive instruments, extracting more of the ambient information that otherwise flows unseen and unstudied around us. The larger the telescope, the smaller and fainter the things it can see. Our pupils are but a few millimeters across, while the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), one thousand times larger, can see objects millions of times fainter. For telescopes, a simple rule applies: the bigger, the better!

An exciting Focused Research Organization (FRO): is systematically developing tools for working with non-model microorganisms.

As we walked, Lee told me that’s efforts to make “extraordinary” organisms accessible almost always follow the same basic steps. First, the team orders a microbe from ATCC, a non-profit group that has been storing and mailing microbes to researchers since 1925. The ATCC catalog includes more than 14,000 bacterial strains, the vast majority of which gather dust and are rarely ordered by researchers.

After receiving a microbe in the mail, sequences it. Mutations can creep into strains over time, and even a seemingly minor alteration—a single base swapped here or there—can change how cells grow and respond to their environment.

Lee told me that he once sequenced Vibrio natriegens stored in the ATCC database. Ten years later, a professor at Harvard ordered the same microbe from ATCC and sequenced its genome again. But the professor noticed a small change: the Vibrio cells now carried a single mutation in a ribosomal gene that made the cells sickly and slow-growing. This mutation had not been present when Lee studied the same microbes just a decade prior: evidence that nothing in biology remains constant. By sequencing the genome, constructs a record from which to diagnose future problems.

Mammalian whole-brain connectomes at nanoscale synaptic resolution are a crucial ingredient for holistic understanding of brain function. Imaging these connectomes at sufficient resolution to densely reconstruct cellular morphology and synapses represents a longstanding goal in neuroscience. Although the technologies needed to reconstruct whole-brain connectomes have not yet reached full maturity, they are advancing rapidly enough that the mouse brain might be within reach in the near future. Detailed exploration of these technologies is warranted to help plan projects with varying goals and requirements. Whole-brain human connectomes remain a more distant goal yet are worthy of consideration to orient large-scale neuroscience program plans. Here, we quantitatively compare existing and emerging imaging technologies that have potential to enable whole-brain mammalian connectomics.

Neuron al behavior can be controlled by probing and modulating subcellular regions of the cells; however, developing an interface that can morph into the extreme curvatures of neurites is a major challenge. Here, the authors develop a wireless platform made of an azobenzene polymer that undergoes on-demand light-induced folding with an ultra-low curvature radius and wraps various morphologies of neuronal processes in vitro.

Adeno-associated virus (AAV) is a well-known gene delivery tool with a wide range of applications, including as a vector for gene therapies. However, the molecular mechanism of its cell entry remains unknown. Here, we performed coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations of the AAV serotype 2 (AAV2) capsid and the universal AAV receptor (AAVR) in a model plasma membrane environment. Our simulations show that binding of the AAV2 capsid to the membrane induces membrane curvature, along with the recruitment and clustering of GM3 lipids around the AAV2 capsid. We also found that the AAVR binds to the AAV2 capsid at the VR-I loops using its PKD2 and PKD3 domains, whose binding poses differs from previous structural studies. These first molecular-level insights into AAV2 membrane interactions suggest a complex process during the initial phase of AAV2 capsid internalization.

Humans have suffered from tuberculosis for thousands of years and, even today, the disease kills more than 1 million people each year. Yet diagnosing cases remains a challenge. Why?

Love this article from Our World in Data which describes how far we have come as a species and what challenges remain ahead. “Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.”

The data in this article uses a previous release of the World Bank’s poverty and inequality data in which incomes are expressed in 2011 international-$.

The World Bank has since updated its methods, and now measures incomes in 2017 international-$. As part of this change, the International Poverty Line used to measure extreme poverty has also been updated: from $1.90 (in 2011 prices) to $2.15 (in 2017 prices).

This has had little effect on our overall understanding of poverty and inequality around the world. But because of the change of units, many of the figures mentioned in this article will differ from the latest World Bank figures.