Synthetic Biology used to Target Cancer Cells while Sparing Healthy Tissue

(Top) some types of cancers are caused by mutated or overexpressed cell surface proteins that signal to the nucleus (green pathway) to drive uncontrolled growth and survival. (Bottom) Using an approach called RASER, the cancer-causing signals are redirected away from cell growth and survival and toward programmed cell death (orange pathway).
Michael Lin and Stuart Jantzen

Synthetic proteins engineered to recognize overly active biological pathways can kill cancer cells while sparing their healthy peers, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine...

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Walnuts may help Lower Blood Pressure for those at risk of Heart Disease

open walnut with heart
Penny Kris-Etherton, distinguished professor of nutrition at Penn State, said the study suggests that because walnuts lowered central pressure, the participants’ risk of CVD may also have decreased.IMAGE: © GETTY IMAGES / CALYPSOART

When combined with a diet low in saturated fats, eating walnuts may help lower blood pressure in people at risk for cardiovascular disease, according to a new Penn State study.

In a randomized, controlled trial, researchers examined the effects of replacing some of the saturated fats in participants’ diets with walnuts. They found that when participants ate whole walnuts daily in combination with lower overall amounts of saturated fat, they had lower central blood pressure.

According to the researchers, central pressure is the pressure that is exer...

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Storing Info in Molecules, for Millions of Years

Pairing molecule mass and binary code, the Whitesides team can "write" massive amounts of data
Pairing molecule mass and binary code, the Whitesides team can “write” massive amounts of data
Credit: Michael J. Fink

As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information.

“Think storing the contents of the New York Public Library with a teaspoon of protein,” says Brian Cafferty, first author on the paper that describes the new technique and a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of George Whitesides, the Woodford L...

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Magma is the key to the Moon’s Makeup

Snapshots of numerical modeling of the moon’s formation by a giant impact. The central part of the image is a proto-Earth; red points indicate materials from the ocean of magma in a proto-Earth; blue points indicate the impactor materials.
Credit: Hosono, Karato, Makino, and Saitoh

For more than a century, scientists have squabbled over how Earth’s moon formed. But researchers at Yale and in Japan say they may have the answer.

Many theorists believe a Mars-sized object slammed into the early Earth, and material dislodged from that collision formed the basis of the moon. When this idea was tested in computer simulations, it turned out that the moon would be made primarily from the impacting object...

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