Mesquite Dunes | California (by Chris Lazzery)

There is a time when it is necessary to abandon the used clothes, which already have the shape of our body and to forget our paths, which takes us always to the same places. This is the time to cross the river: and if we don’t dare to do it, we will have stayed, forever beneath ourselves

Fernando Pessoa (via paizleyrayz)

Glowing crystals can detect, cleanse contaminated drinking water

Tiny, glowing crystals designed to detect and capture heavy-metal toxins such as lead and mercury could prove to be a powerful new tool in locating and cleaning up contaminated water sources.

Motivated by publicized cases in which high levels of heavy metals were found in drinking water in Flint, Mich., and Newark, N.J., a science team led by researchers at Rutgers University used intense X-rays at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to probe the structure of the crystals they developed and learn how they bind to heavy metals.

The crystals function like miniature, reusable sensors and traps, and are known as luminescent metal-organic frameworks, or LMOFs.

Top performer for detecting and trapping heavy metals

One type of LMOF that the team tested was found to selectively take up more than 99 percent of mercury from a test mixture of heavy and light metals within 30 minutes, according to recent results published in Applied Materials and Interfaces. No other MOFs have performed as well in this dual role of detecting and capturing, or “adsorbing,” toxic heavy metals, the team reported.

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Fangirl Challenge  - [3/10] relationships - House × Chase (House)

Which new battery will take electric vehicles across the finish line?

For the past seven years or so, electric vehicles have been on the rise. Tesla is practically a household name, and it’s not uncommon to see EVs from companies like Nissan, Chevy, and BMW on the road now. That wouldn’t have happened without the lithium ion battery. Right now, lithium ion is the most popular battery type for electric vehicles. It can last up to 200 miles on a single charge, and it’s not too expensive to make, which means EVs are also relatively affordable.

But experts say that lithium ion batteries can only take electric cars so far—both on the road and in the marketplace. Before they can beat more popular combustion engine cars, electric vehicles will need a battery makeover, which is why countless engineers and scientists are searching for the next EV battery.

So what’s it going to look like? There are dozens of battery chemistries to play with. But how many of them can even approach the success of lithium ion? Electric vehicle advocate and blogger Chelsea Sexton joins George Crabtree, the director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne National Laboratory, to discuss potential successors to the popular lithium ion battery.

(Image caption: Young neurons (pink), responsible for encoding new memories, must compete with mature neurons (green) to survive and integrate into the hippocampal circuit. Credit: Kathleen McAvoy, Sahay Lab)

Making memories stronger and more precise during aging

When it comes to the billions of neurons in your brain, what you see at birth is what get — except in the hippocampus. Buried deep underneath the folds of the cerebral cortex, neural stem cells in the hippocampus continue to generate new neurons, inciting a struggle between new and old as the new attempts to gain a foothold in the memory-forming center of the brain.

In a study published online in Neuron, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in collaboration with an international team of scientists found they could bias the competition in favor of the newly generated neurons.

“The hippocampus allows us to form new memories of ‘what, when and where’ that help us navigate our lives,” said HSCI Principal Faculty member and the study’s corresponding author, Amar Sahay, PhD, “and neurogenesis—the generation of new neurons from stem cells—is critical for keeping similar memories separate.”

As the human brain matures, the connections between older neurons become stronger, more numerous, and more intertwined, making integration for the newly formed neurons more difficult. Neural stem cells become less productive, leading to a decline in neurogenesis. With fewer new neurons to help sort memories, the aging brain can become less efficient at keeping separate and faithfully retrieving memories.

The research team selectively overexpressed a transcription factor, Klf9, only in older neurons in mice, which eliminated more than one-fifth of their dendritic spines, increased the number of new neurons that integrated into the hippocampus circuitry by two-fold, and activated neural stem cells.

When the researchers returned the expression of Klf9 back to normal, the old dendritic spines reformed, restoring competition. However, the previously integrated neurons remained.

“Because we can do this reversibly, at any point in the animals life we can rejuvenate the hippocampus with extra, new, encoding units,” said Sahay, who is also an investigator with the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine.

The authors employed a complementary strategy in which they deleted a protein important for dendritic spines, Rac1, only in the old neurons and achieved a similar outcome, increasing the survival of the new neurons.

In order to keep two similar memories separate, the hippocampus activates two different populations of neurons to encode each memory in a process called pattern separation. When there is overlap between these two populations, researchers believe it is more difficult for an individual to distinguish between two similar memories formed in two different contexts, to discriminate between a Sunday afternoon stroll through the woods from a patrol through enemy territory in a forest, for example. If the memories are encoded in overlapping populations of neurons, the hippocampus may inappropriately retrieve either. If the memories are encoded in non-overlapping populations of neurons, the hippocampus stores them separately and retrieves them only when appropriate.

Mice with increased neurogenesis had less overlap between the two populations of neurons and had more precise and stronger memories, which, according to Sahay, demonstrates improved pattern separation.

Mice with increased neurogenesis in middle age and aging cohorts exhibited better memory precision.

“We believe that by increasing the hippocampus’s ability to do what it supposed to do and not retrieve past experiences when it shouldn’t can help,” Sahay said. This may be particularly useful for individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, mild cognitive impairment, or age-related memory loss.

The fight is not over.

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