Researchers have demonstrated the ability to deliver a fully functional copy of the CLN3 gene to stem cells of patients with juvenile NCL, an inherited neurodegenerative disease in which a mutation in the CLN3 gene causes early-onset severe central vision loss. The gene therapy restored production of CLN3 protein in the stem cell-derived retinal neurons, as described in an article in Human Gene Therapy.

Invasive plants are a problem around the world, but are they just a nuisance or are they killers? So far there are no documented cases of native plants becoming extinct purely because of an alien plant invasion. However, researchers Paul Downey and David Richardson argue in a paper published this month in AoB PLANTS, 'Alien plant invasions and native plant extinctions: a six-threshold framework', that traditional methods of modelling extinction do not work well for plants. Focusing purely on extinction can distract plant conservationists from growing problems. Instead they propose six thresholds that species cross before they become extinct.

Chocolate or apple? Most people are in two minds when buying food: one motivation is to purchase whatever tastes best – so something that is generally sweet or fatty. At the same time, we know attention should be paid on health factors and, for instance, making sure we don’t consume too many calories. A new survey finds that if the packaging information also features food traffic light colors, fewer products are chosen purely based on taste and more based on health aspects compared with nutritional information purely in percentages and grams.

Not that many years ago, many reusable food and beverage containers on the market worldwide were made from polycarbonate plastic.  Polycarbonate, which is made from bisphenol A (BPA), is an almost ideal material for these products since its clarity is comparable to glass, making it easy to see what’s inside, and it’s virtually shatter-proof – an important attribute for consumer products that could be dropped. 

A new mathematical model developed at the University of British Columbia integrates environmental and molecular sequence information to better explain how microbial networks drive nutrient and energy cycling in marine ecosystems.

The work could dramatically improve researchers’ and policy makers’ ability to predict how the world’s marine microbial communities (microbiome) respond to climate change, and resulting impacts on fisheries, biodiversity, climate and more.

The model and associated simulations were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team of physicians and laboratory scientists has taken a key step toward a cure for sickle cell disease, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to fix the mutated gene responsible for the disease in stem cells from the blood of affected patients. For the first time, they have corrected the mutation in a proportion of stem cells that is high enough to produce a substantial benefit in sickle cell patients.

The first animals evolved from their single-celled ancestors around 800 million years ago, but a new paper suggests that this leap was a lot less dramatic than scientists have assumed, because the single-celled ancestor of animals likely already had some of the mechanisms that animal cells use today to develop into different tissue types.

The researchers studied a single-celled amoeba called Capsaspora owczarzaki, which is a close relative of today's multi-celled animals. Capsaspora was originally discovered living inside a freshwater snail and the team sequenced the Capsaspora genome in an earlier project and discovered that the amoeba contained many genes that, in animals, are related to multicellular functions.

Last December, when the ATLAS and CMS experiments gave two bacl-to-back talks at the end-of-the-year LHC "physics jamboree" in the CERN main auditorium, the whole world of particle physics was confronted with a new question nobody had seen coming: could a 750 GeV particle be there, decaying a sizable fraction of the time into pairs of energetic photons? What new physics could account for it? And how to search for an experimental confirmation in other channels or phenomena?

Thanks to Padre for pointing out that there can only be a Dark Triad of sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism because a tetrad implies four.

How stupid was he?

He shut down the Center for Groundwater Research. I quote him: “You don’t need to grind water. It’s a liquid.”


He closed our renowned Digital Signal Processing program. He was then unable to process, when faculty flashed him a certain digital signal.


Next to go was the knockout mouse lab. He said, “They have some attractive mice, but none that I’d call a real knockout.”