Since we missed last week’s roundup, we have a double week update today so it’s slightly longer than normal.
Researchers from Egypt and Saudi Arabia are collaborating to study bacteria that live in brine pools in the Red Sea. High temperatures, salinity and concentration of heavy metals, coupled with a lack of oxygen, make the brine pools among the most hostile environments in the world.
While very few organisms can live in these conditions, some bacteria thrive there, and are thus producing hardy and unique enzymes. Researchers are isolating these enzymes to use to remove pollutants and toxic chemicals which can have wide industrial uses. They have already found two unique enzymes and the search is on for more.
Back on land, electricians may be taking a closer look soon at spider silk, which is one of the strongest and toughest substances in the world. Researchers have managed to come up with a technique to coat spider silk with conductive carbon nanotubes. This could pave the way to using spider silk to create electric wiring in electronics.
And speaking of electronics, researchers are closer to realizing lithium-oxygen (Li-O2) batteries, which can store more energy than any other battery so far, by coming up with a new cathode architecture for the cells. This helps solve the main problem of Li-O2, which is having a higher voltage during charging, which can damage the battery.
Researchers are also taking a closer look at magmatic systems to understand how crystals precipitate in them. They found that, like aqueous solutions, nanoparticles start forming long before the actual crystals precipitate. This makes it easier for the formation of crystals afterwards as they grow from these nanoparticles.
Finally, we go back to the discovery of a Higgs boson like particle at the Large Hadron Collider last year. Physicists were excited by the discovery, but are finding trouble adapting its properties to the standard model of particle physics. Thus theoretical physicists from Zewail City of Science and Technology are suggesting a modified version of the standard model that contains an new particle called an “octet scalar” which can explain the faster than expected decay of the Higgs particle into two photons.
Beyond the hood
Stem cells have held so much promotion for medicine for many years now, but have come with a fair share of ethical issues. By removing a single protein, researchers for the first time are able to convert cultured skin cells into stem cells with very high efficiency.
In the past, researchers have been able to reprogram cells to become pluripotent stem cells by the addition of four genes. This only converted less than 1% of the cultured cells, however. Working with a line of specially engineered mouse cells that normally had a conversion rate of 10%, the researchers, who published their findings in Nature, were able to bring it up to nearly 100%.
On other medical news, do you hate those annual flu jabs before winter? Well, you may be in luck. Researchers are looking into a vaccine that may require a single jab to give protection from all different strains of flu.
Flu vaccines basically trigger the formation of antibodies that bind to a protein in the surface of the virus that helps it infect other cells to stop the spread. However, this protein mutates rather fast, which is why vaccinemakers need to create a new vaccine every year that targets the protein on current strains. And new viruses that mutate to make the jump to humans from birds or animals add another level of complication and trigger fears of pandemics (which we have had a few of in recent years).
Researchers hope to overcome this problem by using “broadly neutralizing antibodies”, which can bind to almost all the different variants of the protein, as discussed in Science. There are challenges, but scientists are working to tackle those, hopeful to produce what would be the solution to all influenza.