Studies with financial conflicts of interest are 5x more likely to find no link between sugary drinks and weight gain. : science Foldit Gamers Solve Riddle of HIV Enzyme within 3 Weeks When video gamers armed with the world's most powerful supercomputers take on science and its most vexing riddles, who wins? Sometimes, it's the gamers. Humans retain an edge over computers when complex problems require intuition and leaps of insight rather than brute calculation. Savvy programmers and researchers at the University of Washington have tapped into this human "supercomputer" with Foldit, an online game that poses complex puzzles about how proteins fold, one of the hardest and most expensive problems in biology today. "Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins," the company explains on its website. They've been on a tear ever since. Their latest solution has resolved a problem stumping scientists for a decade. Want to discover the next cure? Game on.
Vitamin D supplements could fight Crohn's disease A new study has found that Vitamin D, readily available in supplements or cod liver oil, can counter the effects of Crohn's disease. John White, an endocrinologist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, led a team of scientists from McGill University and the Université de Montréal who present their findings about the inflammatory bowel disease in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. "Our data suggests, for the first time, that Vitamin D deficiency can contribute to Crohn's disease," says Dr. Vitamin D, in its active form (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D), is a hormone that binds to receptors in the body's cells. What Vitamin D does Dr. What's most promising about this genetic discovery, says Dr. "This discovery is exciting, since it shows how an over-the-counter supplement such as Vitamin D could help people defend themselves against Crohn's disease," says Marc J. This study was funded by a grant from McGill University.
BOINC Through a glass, clearly One of the most instantly recognizable features of glass is the way it reflects light. But a new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls. The new “multifunctional” glass, based on surface nanotextures that produce an array of conical features, is self-cleaning and resists fogging and glare, the researchers say. Ultimately, they hope it can be made using an inexpensive manufacturing process that could be applied to optical devices, the screens of smartphones and televisions, solar panels, car windshields and even windows in buildings. Photovoltaic panels, Park explains, can lose as much as 40 percent of their efficiency within six months as dust and dirt accumulate on their surfaces.
Online Gamers Achieve First Crowd-Sourced Redesign of Protein Obsessive gamers' hours at the computer have now topped scientists' efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein. The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations. The researchers have previously reported successes by Foldit players in folding proteins, but the latest work moves into the realm of protein design, a more open-ended problem. By posing a series of puzzles to Foldit players and then testing variations on the players' best designs in the lab, researchers have created an enzyme with more than 18-fold higher activity than the original. The work was published January 22 in Nature Biotechnology. Science by intuition "You can explore things that look crazy.
New Probiotic Combats Inflammatory Bowel Disease You know the probiotics in your peach yogurt are healthful, but now it appears they may also be a powerful treatment for disease. A genetically tweaked version of a common probiotic found in yogurt and cheese appears to be an effective therapy for inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. It may also prove to be useful in colon cancer, another disease triggered by inflammation. Northwestern Medicine researchers deleted a gene in the probiotic Lactobacillus acidophilus and fed the new form to mice with two different models of colitis. "This opens brand new avenues to treat various autoimmune diseases of the gut, including inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer, all which can be triggered by imbalanced inflammatory immune responses," said Mansour Mohamadzadeh, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead investigator of the study.
ENCODE 12 Sept 2013 - New UDR ENCODE Download Method Available The UCSC Genome Browser is pleased to offer a new download protocol to use when downloading large sets of files from our download servers: UDR (UDT Enabled Rsync). UDR utilizes rsync as the transport mechanism, but sends the data over the UDT protocol, which enables huge amounts of data to be downloaded more efficiently over long distances. Read more. 25 July 2013 - BLUEPRINT Epigenome Data Hub and Quick Reference PDF Now Available We are pleased to announce the addition of the BLUEPRINT Epigenomics Data Hub on the UCSC Genome Browser through our Public Hubs function. Also the ENCODE Quick Reference Card is now available in PDF courtesy of OpenHelix on the ENCODE Education and Outreach page. 28 May 2013 - ENCODE portal changes: New Link to NHGRI Tutorials, New External Software Tools Page, Updates to Publications including New 2013 Consortium Papers Section The ENCODE portal was updated to include informative new and expanded pages.
5 Animals That Are Terrifyingly Hard to Kill The lungfish is one of the oldest species living today. Its lineage traces directly to a species alive right after the breakup of Pangaea--which Wikipedia tells us was the original super-continent and not, as we have for years assumed, some sort of tragically disbanded Dinosaur Speedmetal group. Nor is there a hipster version. Great! So How Do I Kill It? The lungfish--as you may have cleverly guessed by the inclusion of the "fish" descriptor--is an aquatic creature. Just like the Cracked staff. A science lab in East Africa witnessed this phenomena firsthand when a lungfish, while being transported in an air-tight metal cylinder full of mud (a method of travel a lungfish could easily survive for a brief time), became lost during the trip. "Shit, we didn't really think this through." Which was totally cool with the lungfish; after the team added a little water, it popped right back to life -- perfectly fine in every respect. Was it? Sorry. "Get out of my way, you young punks!"