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Category: biological

In biology textbooks, the endoplasmic reticulum is often portrayed as a distinct, compact organelle near the nucleus, and is commonly known to be responsible for protein trafficking and secretion. In reality, the ER is vast and dynamic, spread throughout the cell and able to establish contact and communication with and between other organelles. These membrane contacts regulate processes as diverse as fat metabolism, sugar metabolism, and immune responses.

Exploring how pathogens manipulate and hijack essential processes to promote their own life cycles can reveal much about fundamental cellular functions and provide insight into viable treatment options for understudied pathogens.

New research from the Lamason Lab in the Department of Biology at MIT recently published in the Journal of Cell Biology has shown that Rickettsia parkeri, a bacterial pathogen that lives freely in the cytosol, can interact in an extensive and stable way with the rough , forming previously unseen contacts with the organelle.

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday (Jan. 23) that accelerated advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in biology, can lead to a doubling of human lifespans in as little as five to 10 years “if we really get this AI stuff right.”

During a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amodei called this the “grand vision.” He explained that if AI today can shrink a century’s worth of work in biology to five to 10 years, and if one believes it would take 100 years to double the average length of human life, then “a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy, and if AI is able to accelerate that we may be able to get that in five to 10 years.”

Amodei also said that Anthropic is working on a “virtual collaborator,” an AI agent capable of doing higher-level tasks in the workplace such as opening Google Docs, using the Slack messaging channel, and interacting with workers. A manager will only need to check in with this AI agent “once in a while,” similar to what management does with human employees.

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In the quest to take the “forever” out of “forever chemicals,” bacteria might be our ally. Most remediation of per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) involves adsorbing and trapping them, but certain microbes can actually break apart the strong chemical bonds that allow these chemicals to persist for so long in the environment.

Now, a University at Buffalo-led team has identified a strain of bacteria that can break down and transform at least three types of PFAS, and perhaps even more crucially, some of the toxic byproducts of the bond-breaking process.

Published in this month’s issue of Science of the Total Environment, the team’s study found that Labrys portucalensis F11 (F11) metabolized over 90% of perfluorooctane (PFOS) following an exposure period of 100 days. PFOS is one of the most frequently detected and persistent types of PFAS and was designated hazardous by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year.

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Artificial neural networks, central to deep learning, are powerful but energy-consuming and prone to overfitting. The authors propose a network design inspired by biological dendrites, which offers better robustness and efficiency, using fewer trainable parameters, thus enhancing precision and resilience in artificial neural networks.

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about an intriguing experiment that created endosymbiosis.
Links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08010-x.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9040847/
Previous videos: https://youtu.be/GkuAzdS-VwA


#symbiosis #biology #life.

0:00 Endosymbiosis in a nutshell.
1:50 Examples.
3:00 Fungal endosymbiosis.
5:35 Questions that need answering.
6:10 Incredible new experiment.
6:48 What fungus was used.
8:00 What the experiment was trying to do.
9:30 Successful union and reproduction.
11:15 Major discoveries 13:00 Conclusions.

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Swiss researchers claim to have devised a functional living battery powered by the combined efforts of two types of fungi – all in a biodegradable, non-toxic 3D-printed package. I’ll give you a second to wrap your head around that outrageous statement before diving into the details.

That’s from a team at Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA), a Dübendorf-based research institute whose innovations have found their way into Omega watches, quick-drying sports bras, and top British soccer team Arsenal’s artificial turf.

While we’ve seen work on bacteria-powered batteries before, the researchers note this is the first time two types of fungi have been brought together to create a working fuel cell. And to be clear, this is indeed more of a fuel cell than a battery, as it’s utilizing the fungal metabolism to convert nutrients from microbes into energy.

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Researchers at the John Innes Centre have identified a biological mechanism that helps plant roots create a more hospitable environment for beneficial soil microbes. This breakthrough has the potential to promote more sustainable farming practices by reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers.

Most major crops currently rely on nitrate and phosphate fertilizers, but excessive fertilizer use can have harmful environmental consequences. By leveraging the natural, mutually beneficial relationships between plant roots and soil microbes to improve nutrient uptake, it may be possible to significantly cut down on the use of inorganic fertilizers.

Researchers in the group of Dr Myriam Charpentier discovered a mutation in a gene in the legume Medicago truncatula that reprogrammes the signaling capacity of the plant so that it enhances partnerships with nitrogen fixing bacteria called rhizobia and arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi (AMF) which supply roots with phosphorus.

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Gould’s thesis has sparked widespread debate ever since, with some advocating for determinism and others supporting contingency. In his 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, science fiction author Ray Bradbury recounted how a time traveler’s simple act of stepping on a butterfly in the age of the dinosaurs changed the course of the future. Gould made a similar point: “Alter any early event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.”

Scientists have been exploring this problem through experiments designed to recreate evolution in the lab or in nature, or by comparing species that have emerged under similar conditions. Today, a new avenue has opened up: AI. In New York, a group of former researchers from Meta — the parent company of social networks Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — founded EvolutionaryScale, an AI startup focused on biology. The EvolutionaryScale Model 3 (ESM3) system created by the company is a generative language model — the same kind of platform that powers ChatGPT. However, while ChatGPT generates text, ESM3 generates proteins, the fundamental building blocks of life.

ESM3 feeds on sequence, structure, and function data from existing proteins to learn the biological language of these molecules and create new ones. Its creators have trained it with 771 billion data packets derived from 3.15 billion sequences, 236 million structures, and 539 million functional traits. This adds up to more than one trillion teraflops (a measure of computational performance) — the most computing power ever used in biology, according to the company.

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Vector Institute’s Remarkable 2024 | Geoffrey Hinton — Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?

In this profound keynote, Vector co-founder Geoffrey Hinton explores the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence and its potential to surpass human intelligence. Drawing from decades of expertise, Hinton shares his growing concerns about AI’s existential risks while examining fundamental questions about consciousness, understanding, and the nature of intelligence itself.

Geoffrey Hinton is one of the founding fathers of deep learning and artificial neural networks. He was a Vice President and Engineering Fellow at Google until 2023 and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. In 2024 Hinton was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Key Topics Covered:

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If Earth’s life survives the Anthropocene, it will eventually face another existential threat from space.

As the Sun brightens with age, it will inevitably interfere with our planet’s finicky carbon cycle, triggering a depletion of atmospheric carbon dioxide to the point where plants will starve.

Luckily, this won’t happen until at least 1.6 billion years from now, suggests new research from University of Chicago geophysicist RJ Graham and colleagues. That potentially doubles the projected lifespan of Earth’s plants and animals.

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