Discovery Enables Adult Skin to Regenerate like a Newborn’s

An image of a regenerating skin wound with hair follicles that can make goose bumps. The green lines are the muscles attached to individual regenerating hairs so that they can stand up.

A newly identified genetic factor allows adult skin to repair itself like the skin of a newborn babe. The discovery by Washington State University researchers has implications for better skin wound treatment as well as preventing some of the aging process in skin.

In a study, published in the journal eLife on Sept. 29, the researchers identified a factor that acts like a molecular switch in the skin of baby mice that controls the formation of hair follicles as they develop during the first week of life. The switch is mostly turned off after skin forms and remains off in adult tissue...

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Researchers solve decades-old problem of how to Uniformly Switch Memristors

electronics
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Lack of uniformity is possibly the biggest challenge in today’s technology of memristor devices as it gives rise to problems like inconsistency, stochastic variability, and instability of the memory state. A uniform switching mechanism in memristors is something researchers have been looking at in the last several decades.

Now, an international team, led by the scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS), has developed a solution to address this long-standing problem in the field of organic and molecular electronics.

Professor T. Venkatesan, who led this project, said, “We are working on an organic material system that is possibly one of the most efficient platforms for realizing artificial intelligence and brain-inspired computing...

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Titan’s Lakes can Stratify like those on Earth

Saturn’s moon Titan hosts numerous small lakes, dried lakebeds, and disappearing lakes.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/USGS (Modified from original)

Lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan, composed of methane, ethane, and nitrogen rather than water, experience density driven stratification, forming layers similar to lakes on Earth. However, whereas lakes on Earth stratify in response to temperature, Titan’s lakes stratify solely due to the strange chemical interactions between its surface liquids and atmosphere, says a paper by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Jordan Steckloff.

Stratification occurs when different parts of a lake have different densities, with the less dense layer floating atop the denser layer...

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Strong Activation of Anti-bacterial T cells linked to Severe COVID-19

Illustration of T cells fighting virus
Illustration: Getty Im“MAIT cell activation and dynamics associated with COVID-19 disease severity,” Parrot, T., Gorin, J. B., Ponzetta, A., Maleki, K. T., Kammann, T., Emgård, J., Perez-Potti, A., Sekine, T., Rivera-Ballesteros, O., the Karolinska COVID-19 Study Group, Gredmark-Russ, S., Rooyackers, O., Folkesson, E., Eriksson, L. I., Norrby-Teglund, A., Ljunggren, H. G., Björkström, N. K., Aleman, S., Buggert, M., Klingström, J., Strålin, K., and Sandberg, J. K., Science Immunology, online 28 september, 2020, doi: 10.1126/sciimmunol.abe1670ages

A type of anti-bacterial T cells, so-called MAIT cells, are strongly activated in people with moderate to severe COVID-19 disease, according to a study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden that is published in the journal...

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