Jason Gerstner, assistant research professor in WSU’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, is lead author of a Science Advances paper describing a gene involved in the quality of sleep experienced by three different animals, including humans. Credit: Washington State University

Washington State University researchers have seen how a particular gene is involved in the quality of sleep experienced by 3 different animals, including humans. The gene and its function opens a new avenue for scientists exploring how sleep works and why animals need it so badly. As a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Gerstner looked at genes that change expression over the sleep-wake cycle and found expression of the gene FABP7 changed over the day throughout the brain of mice...

This is an artist’s impression of carbon nanotubes wrapped in polymers with thiol side chains (yellow spheres) and assembled on gold electrodes.
Credit: Arjen Kamp

Carbon nanotubes can be used to make very small electronic devices, but they are difficult to handle. University of Groningen scientists, together with colleagues from the University of Wuppertal and IBM Zurich, have developed a method to select semiconducting nanotubes from a solution and make them self-assemble on a circuit of gold electrodes. University of Groningen Professor Maria Antonietta Loi designed polymers which wrap themselves around specific carbon nanotubes in a solution of mixed tubes. Thiol side chains on the polymer bind the tubes to the gold electrodes, creating the resultant transistor.

‘In our previous work, ...

Previously accelerated by black holes, the particles are reaccelerated by shock waves resulting from the collision. The phenomenon helps scientists understand the structure of the universe on the largest scale (images: researcher’s archive)

A cosmic phenomenon on a colossal scale, resulting from the acceleration of a gas cloud by a black hole and its reacceleration by the shock waves from the merging of two galaxy clusters, has been observed. “The electrons that make up the cloud initially bounce off the supermassive black hole at the center of one of the galaxies and accelerate as a result. They are then reaccelerated by shock waves that propagate in the galaxy cluster when it collides with another cluster,” Andrade-Santos told.

Galaxy clusters grow through the gravitational accretion of...

Inflamed mouse colon mucosa, with an expanded population of intestinal stromal cells identified by expression of podoplanin (green). Epithelium is identified by expression of EpCAM (magenta); cyan, nuclei. Credit: Dr. Samuel Bullers

Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and Translational Gastroenterology Unit, University of Oxford have identified a potential therapeutic target for IBD. The findings are of particular importance to the 40% of patients who don’t respond to anti-TNF therapy, the current treatment option available. The new study published in Nature Medicine shows that IBD patients have higher concentrations of Oncostatin M (OSM), a protein linked to inflammation, in their intestine and suggest that blocking OSM could prove to be a successful treatment for IBD.

The research also sho...