All posts tagged: Intrigued

Scientists Intrigued by Nasal Spray That Reverse Brain Aging in Mice, Say It May Work on Humans as Well

Scientists Intrigued by Nasal Spray That Reverse Brain Aging in Mice, Say It May Work on Humans as Well

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A team of scientists at Texas A&M University say they’ve developed a nasal spray that improves the working memory of older lab mice. They believe the feat works by reducing markers of inflammation, a common feature of aging brains. And, with many caveats, say they suspect that it could one day be used on older humans, as a non-invasive method to tackle adult-onset brain fog and neurological diseases such as dementia. The spray is made up of special biological particles derived from stem cells, the scientists wrote in a new paper published in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles. An estimated 69.2 million people worldwide have dementia, and that figure is slated to increase to 82 million in 2030, making the development of this type of medicine urgent. “Our approach redefines what it means to grow old,” Ashok Shetty, neuroscience professor and the paper’s principal investigator, said in a university statement about the research. “We’re aiming for successful brain …

Scientists Intrigued by Microbe That That Makes Mice Swole

Scientists Intrigued by Microbe That That Makes Mice Swole

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A special gut microbe helped mice get jacked, researchers found. Because this microbe is found in humans, it raises the possibility that it could help us get stronger, too. For now, that remains unproven. But the work, a new study in the journal Gut, provides a compelling case for creating a probiotic that can help with maintaining strength and fitness as we age, the researchers argue, or combat muscle-wasting disorders. “Taken together, our findings provide solid evidence confirming the existence of an gut-muscle axis in which this identified bacterium positively modulates muscle metabolism and muscle strength,” said coauthor Jonatan Ruiz, a professor in the Department of Physical Education and Sport at the University of Granada, in a statement about the work. Until now, the connection between muscle strength and gut microbiota was unclear, even though it’s well established that these bacteria influence our bodies in other ways, such as metabolism and cardiovascular health. The researchers began by exploring …

Scientists Intrigued by “Negative Mass Anomaly” Under Surface of Mars

Scientists Intrigued by “Negative Mass Anomaly” Under Surface of Mars

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech NASA’s InSight Mars lander made an unusual discovery while probing the Red Planet’s surface for seismic activity. After poring over years of data from the spacecraft, and comparing it to measurements taken by NASA’s Viking landers from the 1970s, scientists found that Mars is spinning slightly faster with each passing year, shortening the length of a Martian day by fractions of a millisecond. Now, as detailed in a study published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, a team of scientists from Delft University in the Netherlands says they’ve come up with an explanation for the acceleration. They say an intriguing “negative mass anomaly” buried deep under the planet’s surface could be causing it to spin faster — a massive plume of “hot buoyant mantle material,” the movement of which could be driving the Red Planet’s rotation. “The Martian surface is so old and shows all these complex but largely not well understood process[es], which I …

Scientists Intrigued as Prominent Star Suddenly Winks Out of Existence

Scientists Intrigued as Prominent Star Suddenly Winks Out of Existence

Published by José Betancourt

Keith Miller/Caltech/IPAC – SELab The end of a star’s life can be an extremely violent event. Once it runs out of fuel, its core collapses, and if its original mass is large enough, it can erupt in a supernova, a runaway nuclear fusion event that can release as much energy as the Sun will produce over its entire lifespan of roughly ten billion years. The remains are either a neutron star, an immensely dense lump of matter, or a black hole. Now, scientists believe they may have observed a star dying in real time. They watched as the star, once one of the brightest in the Andromeda galaxy, quietly winked out of existence. Columbia University astronomer Kishalay De and his colleagues analyzed 15 years’ worth of data collected by NASA’s NEOWISE spacecraft as part of an effort to measure changes in the amount of infrared radiation millions of stars emit over the years. One star, dubbed M31-2014-DS1, stood out like a sore thumb — brightening in 2015, fading roughly a year later, and eventually disappearing …

Scientists Intrigued by Possible Hollow Structures Under Surface of Venus

Scientists Intrigued by Possible Hollow Structures Under Surface of Venus

Published by José Betancourt

Venus has long been known as Earth’s evil twin. While they both are roughly the same size and formed in the same inner region of the solar system, Venus is far less hospitable to life as we know it. Its surface temperatures can reach over 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Its clouds are made of sulfuric acid, and its surface atmospheric pressure is almost 100 times that of Earth, the equivalent of being 3,000 underwater. And beneath all those extreme conditions, the planet could harbor cavernous structures called lava tubes, as an international team of researchers suggests in a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Icarus. On Earth, lava tubes are the byproduct of volcanic activity that is left behind as liquid lava retreats, and are believed to exist on the Moon and Mars as well. While they may not serve as a great place to build a shelter for space travelers on Venus — the conditions are far too extreme for any human presence — the case that the planet may harbor them is …

Scientists Intrigued by Unfamiliar Life Form

Scientists Intrigued by Unfamiliar Life Form

Published by José Betancourt

Matt Humpage, Northern Rogue Studios via Loron / Cooper et al. It’s a plant! It’s a fungus! It’s… an entirely new type of lifeform hitherto unknown to science? That appears to be the case for a puzzling, spire-shaped organism that lived over 400 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. After analyzing its internal structures, the authors argue that the mystifying ancient beings known as prototaxites don’t belong to any of the existing biological kingdoms. “It feels like it doesn’t fit comfortably anywhere,” Matthew Nelsen, a senior research scientist at the Field Museum of Natural History who wasn’t involved in the work, told Scientific American. “People have tried to shoehorn it into these different groups, but there are always things that don’t make sense.” The name Prototaxites means “early yew” or “first yew,” a misnomer that captures the debate that has surrounded its nature for over a century. With its resemblance to a tree trunk, scientists initially suspected it was some kind of extinct tree when its fossils …

Astronomers Intrigued By Impossible Structure Around Dead Star

Astronomers Intrigued By Impossible Structure Around Dead Star

Published by José Betancourt

ESO/K. Iłkiewicz and S. Scaringi et al. Background: PanSTARRS A dead star 730 light years away appears to be forming a powerful structure around itself — and despite their best efforts, astronomers aren’t sure how. The cosmic corpse, designated RXJ0528+2838, is an incredibly dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf, with a Sun-like star orbiting around it. This binary arrangement isn’t uncommon throughout the universe, but what is strange is the structure surrounding the former body: a highly energetic and luminescent cloud known as a nebula, even though there doesn’t appear to be anything that could be forming it. “Our observations reveal a powerful outflow that, according to our current understanding, shouldn’t be there,” said Krystian Iłkiewicz, a researcher at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw, Poland, and co-lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, in a statement. White dwarfs are what’s left over when stars of moderate mass like our Sun exhaust all their fuel, shed their outer layers, and expose a dense core. In many cases …