advances Archives - Times Wonderful News

[ad_1]

Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.

An image of the front of the Large Aperture Telescope Receiver (LATR) just before the final closing. — The front of the Simons Observatory’s Large Aperture Telescope Receiver, the largest receiver for observing the cosmic microwave background built so far.Credit: Mark Devlin/University of Pennsylvania

In a few weeks, a new observatory high in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert will be ready to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with unprecedented sensitivity. One of the goals of the Simons Observatory is to find fingerprints left in the CMB by gravitational waves that originated from the Big Bang itself. These would provide incontrovertible evidence for cosmic inflation, a brief moment when the expansion of the early universe is thought to have accelerated hugely. There is no guarantee that the inflation signature, if it exists, is strong enough for the Simons Observatory to detect, says cosmologist Suzanne Staggs, who is the observatory’s co-director. “But oh my gosh — if they were right there, it would be amazing.”

Nature | 7 min read

A 62-year-old man with end-stage renal failure has become the first living person to receive a pig kidney transplant. The kidney was taken from a miniature pig carrying a record 69 genomic edits, which were aimed at preventing rejection of the donated organ and reducing the risk that a virus lurking in the organ could infect the recipient. So far, the patient is recovering well and the pig kidney is producing urine and showing other signs of a working organ. This early success has raised researchers’ hopes for larger clinical trials involving pig organs. It follows from news last week that surgeons say they have transplanted a genetically modified pig liver into a person for the first time.

Nature | 6 min read

Studies in mice and humans suggest that being pregnant can increase a person ’s ‘biological age’ by a couple of years — but giving birth reverses these changes. Biological age can be estimated from patterns of DNA methylation, which occurs when chemical methyl groups are added to DNA. The patterns reflect the stresses that a body accrues over time. The work supports the idea that “biological age is quite flexible; it’s a fluid parameter. It can go up and down”, says biomedical scientist Vadim Gladyshev.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Cell Metabolism paper

China has launched a spacecraft to the Moon that will act as a communications link between Earth and the lunar far side.Queqiao-2, named after a folktale in which magpies form a bridge across the sky, will support China’s Chang’e-6 mission, set to launch in May. Chang’e-6 aims to become the first mission to collect samples from the far side of the Moon, which is permanently hidden from Earth. Queqiao-2 will also support future Chinese missions to the lunar south pole and will take over from its predecessor, Queqiao-1.

SpaceNews | 3 min read

Read more on Queqiao-1: Chinese satellite launch kicks off ambitious mission to Moon’s far side (Nature | 4 min read, Nature paywall)

Features & opinion

There is a type of test for infections such as COVID-19 that is almost as accurate as a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test — which has to be done by a laboratory — and as easy and quick as the rapid antigen tests many of us have used at home. They are ‘isothermal tests’ — so-called because they operate at a consistent temperature, eliminating the need for the repetitive heating and cooling cycles of PCR. They’re comparatively expensive and have stumbled over bureaucratic hurdles. Still, developers are pushing forward, targeting applications such as at-home testing for sexually transmitted infections.

Nature | 10 min read

This article is part of the editorially independent supplement Nature Outlook: Medical diagnostics, produced with financial support from Seegene.

A study that looked at home-grown food and community gardens in the United States and Europe unveiled a surprising conclusion: the carbon footprint of food from urban agriculture is six times greater than the conventional, commercial version. Allotmenteers recoiled from the result, but the authors — keen home-growers themselves — emphasize that their findings can help make urban efforts (which have worthwhile social benefits) more carbon-efficient. Upcycling refuse as infrastructure such as raised beds, using equipment for a long time, collecting rainwater for irrigation and practising optimal composting can all help. And for some carbon-intensive commercial products, such as tomatoes, growing locally is already on par with big farms.

BBC Future | 7 min read

Reference: Nature Cities paper

Peggy Oti-Boateng, a Ghanaian biochemist, and Lise Korsten, a South African food-security researcher, are at the helm of the African Academy of Sciences at a critical time. They have a new strategic plan, with five areas of focus, and a desire to recruit scientists in the African diaspora as members. “We have lost a group of young academics who should have now been leaders on the continent, the professors of the future — and maybe we can partially bring them back,” says Korsten, the academy’s first female president.

Nature | 5 min read

Where I work

Antonia Bornas stands wth sea and a volcano in the background — Mariton Antonia Bornas is chief of the Volcano Monitoring and Eruption Prediction Division of PHIVOLCS in Quezon City.Credit: Dave Tacon for *Nature*

“We have a lot of natural disasters in the Philippines,” says Mariton Antonia Bornas, pictured here standing next to a monitoring station overlooking Taal volcano, which erupted in January 2020. As chief of the Volcano Monitoring and Eruption Prediction Division, her job is to provide early warning of potential eruptions and to monitor levels of harmful emissions. The hardest part of the job is “dealing with the non-science,” she says. “Responding to people online — even to psychics predicting an eruption — is part of my job and it doubles my work. I have to be a communicator, not just a scientist.” (Nature | 2 min read)

Quote of the day

Engineer Caleb Chung, who invented Furby — a big-eyed toy that gave the impression of being a sort of proto-chatbot — chimes in on people’s tendency to ascribe personalities to AI systems such as ChatGPT. (The New Yorker | 14 min read)

Last week in our penguin-search puzzle, Leif Penguinson was enjoying the river landscape of Oulanka National Park in Finland. Did you find the penguin? When you are ready, here’s the answer.

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Katrina Krämer, Smriti Mallapaty and Sarah Tomlin

Want more? Sign up to our other free Nature Briefing newsletters:

• Nature Briefing: Anthropocene — climate change, biodiversity, sustainability and geoengineering

• Nature Briefing: AI & Robotics — 100% written by humans, of course

• Nature Briefing: Cancer — a weekly newsletter written with cancer researchers in mind

• Nature Briefing: Translational Research covers biotechnology, drug discovery and pharma

[ad_2]

Source Article Link

[ad_1]

A young woman holds her newborn baby in a hospital bed at at the University of Chicago Medical Center. — Giving birth shifts a person’s DNA markings back toward a more youthful state, but this trend is less noticeable in new birth parents with obesity.Credit: Chicago Tribune/Getty

Aches and pains aren’t all that pregnancy shares with ageing. Brewing a baby leads to changes in the distribution of certain chemical markers on a pregnant person’s DNA — changes similar to those that are a hallmark of getting older. But new research shows that, several months after a person gives birth, the chemical patterns revert to an earlier state¹. The results strengthen previous work in mice and preliminary results in humans².

It’s not surprising that pregnancy takes a toll, but the reversal was “somewhat unexpected”, says perinatal-health specialist Kieran O’Donnell at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, a co-author of the study. It was published 22 March in Cell Metabolism.

Aged DNA

The chemical tags analysed in the study are called methyl groups, and they are added to DNA in a process called methylation. They are one example of the ‘epigenome’, features of DNA that change gene activity without altering the genetic code.

Extreme morning sickness? Scientists finally pinpoint a possible cause

DNA-methylation patterns can be used to estimate a person’s ‘biological age’, which reflects the physiological stresses that a person’s body has accrued over time. Some research has found that biological age is a better predictor of health problems such as cardiovascular disease³ and dementia⁴ than a person’s chronological age.

But unlike chronological age, “biological age is quite flexible; it’s a fluid parameter. It can go up and down”, says biomedical scientist Vadim Gladyshev at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Last year, his team published a study in Cell Metabolism² that noted a decrease in biological age after pregnancy in mice and suggested that there could be a similar effect in humans. Cessation of several other stressful conditions also reversed biological age.

Obesity’s effect

The new study confirmed Gladyshev and colleagues’ results in humans and also showed that not everyone bounces back from pregnancy to the same degree. People who were at the cusp of obesity before pregnancy shed fewer years of biological age in the three months after birth than did people who had a body weight classified as “normal,” O’Donnell and his colleagues found. Meanwhile, people who breastfed exclusively experienced a greater reduction in biological age than did those who used formula or a mix of formula and breast milk.

Some participants’ biological ages were a few years younger postpartum than in early pregnancy. That’s “one thing that caught my eye”, says ageing-biologist Yousin Suh at Columbia University in New York City, who was not involved in the work.

The researchers didn’t measure the biological age of participants before pregnancy, so “we can’t claim that this is a rejuvenation effect”, O’Donnell says. But the data are suggestive, and he’d like to follow up with the participants in the future.

Not to worry

Interpreting Gladyshev and O’Donnell’s findings is tricky, some researchers say. Methylation clearly changes during pregnancy, but “we would be wrong to assume pregnancy is a state of accelerated ageing”, says Dena Dubal, a physician-scientist and specialist in ageing at the University of California, San Francisco. Dubal thinks that methylation might not be a hallmark of ageing but could instead underlie some of the sweeping changes that the body must undergo to support a growing fetus, such as altered gene expression.

Suh isn’t so sure. “Methylation is, thus far, one of the most robust markers of biological age,” she says.

‘Inflammation clock’ can reveal body’s biological age

Whether a reversible state can truly be called “age” is “a really important point”, O’Donnell says. “Perhaps as we begin to focus on pregnancy as a new area for ageing research, maybe there’s new terms and terminology that will need to be developed.”

In the end, people shouldn’t worry about any pregnancy-related increase in their biological age, scientists say. “We are talking about, you know, changes of about two, three years,” Gladyshev says.

And Dubal points out that pregnancy should not be conceptualized as a biological problem, even for people who don’t maximize recovery by breastfeeding. “While the benefits of breast feeding are many, its absence is not a dangerous predicament,” she says.

[ad_2]

Source Article Link