Category Health/Medical

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have captured one of the clearest views yet of how an early supermassive black hole may grow within a network of young galaxies. The compact active galaxy, seen just a billion years after the Big Bang, lies beside a 12,000-parsec-long filament containing multiple galaxies that are expected to merge within a few hundred million years.

The findings, posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 6, suggest astronomers may be witnessing a short-lived phase in the evolution of rapidly growing black holes while also shedding light on how the first massive galaxies assembled in the early universe.

Too big for its galaxy
Since JWST began operating, astronomers have found a population of compact, actively feeding black holes in galaxies from ...

Chronic, low-grade inflammation in the body—a phenomenon known as “inflammaging” because it increases with age—has been linked to many of today’s leading causes of illness and death, including cancer, heart disease, metabolic conditions and neurodegenerative diseases. But scientists have struggled to understand what causes inflammaging or how to reverse its effects.

Researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have identified the thymus, a small organ behind the breastbone that plays a central role in immune system development, as a key player in inflammaging. They discovered that thymulin, a hormone produced by the organ, keeps inflammation under control.

As we age, thymulin decreases and inflammation increases, allowing diseases like cancer to progress...

The immune system, the body’s defense network against infections and injuries, can sometimes become too active. In these cases, it can produce too many immune mediators, fragments of genetic material or proteins that regulate immune responses.

An excess of these molecules in the bloodstream can cause severe inflammation, sometimes leading to life-threatening medical conditions such as sepsis and acute lung injury. Sepsis is an extreme and life-threatening response to a bacterial, viral or fungal infection...

Scientists have made many advances using traditional CRISPR technology, especially in medicine, but they are now seeking ways to create genuinely new gene-editing enzymes with properties that have not already evolved naturally. A new study, published in Science, describes a new AI-designed synthetic TnpB enzyme, called SynTnpBs, that has outperformed the natural reference enzyme.

Creating new gene editors
CRISPR tools use a programmable guide RNA to direct an enzyme to a specific target in the genome to edit (cut, insert or correct) DNA. The TnpB enzyme is a compact ancestor of certain CRISPR enzymes, called CRISPR-Cas12 enzymes...