Sleep: Nature’s Reset Button.

“More than 20 years ago…we began to suspect that the brain’s activity during slumber may somehow restore to a baseline state the billions of neural connections that get modified every day by the events of waking life. Sleep, in this telling, would preserve the ability of the brain’s circuitry to form new memories continually over the course of an individual’s lifetime without becoming oversaturated or obliterating older memories.”

More Science of Sleep: In Scientific American, two Italian academics put forward their “synaptic homeostasis hypothesis” (SHY) of slumber, whereby the brain weakens (not strengthens, as is usually assumed) synaptic links overnight. “In principle, SHY explains the essential, universal purpose of sleep…sleep restores the brain to a state where it can learn and adapt when we are awake…Most generally, sleep is the price we pay for the brain’s plasticity — its ability to modify its wiring in response to experience.”

Also part of SHY: the idea of “local sleep”: “Recently we have even found that prolonged or intense use of certain circuits can make local groups of neurons ‘fall asleep’ even though the rest of the brain (and the organism itself) remains awake…It seems that when we have been awake for too long or have overexerted certain circuits, small chunks of the brain may take quick naps without giving notice.” I believe in Internet parlance this is known as “haz-ing the dumb.”

Good News, Coffee Achievers.

“In one large-scale epidemiological study from last year, researchers primarily at the National Cancer Institute parsed health information from more than 400,000 volunteers, ages 50 to 71, who were free of major diseases at the study’s start in 1995…men who reported drinking two or three cups of coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t drink coffee, while women drinking the same amount had 13 percent less risk of dying during the study.”

Better living through chemistry: The NYT’s Gretchen Reynolds touts the potential medical benefits of caffeine addiction. “Participants with little or no caffeine circulating in their bloodstreams were far more likely to have progressed to full-blown Alzheimer’s than those whose blood indicated they’d had about three cups’ worth of caffeine.” Factor in all the taurine I consume to boot, and I’m disco.

World of Enzymecraft | Taming the Dragon.

“Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before.” Score one for spatial reasoning: Using the game Foldit, online gamers manage to decipher a enzyme structure that has eluded scientists for a decade — in three weeks. “Cracking the enzyme ‘provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs’, says the study, referring to the medication to keep people with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) alive.“

On the subject of HIV, it looks like the enemy of our enemy is our friend: In a stunning feat of gene therapy, scientists have used a disabled version of HIV to successfully defeat leukemia. “Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients…But scientists say [this] may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer…In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.”

The “Worms From Hell.”

“‘This is telling us something brand new,’ said Onstott, whose pioneering work in South Africa over the past decade has revolutionized the understanding of microbial life known generally as extremophiles, which live in places long believed to be uninhabitable. ‘For a relatively complex creature like a nematode to penetrate that deep is simply remarkable.‘”

From a few weeks ago and languishing in the bookmarks, scientists find nematodes a mile below the Earth’s surface, raising the possibility of similar life on other worlds. The spice must flow… “The two lead researchers…said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, was akin to finding ‘Moby Dick in Lake Ontario.‘”

And Thanks For All the Fish.

“At first, divers will play back one of eight “words” coined by the team to mean “seaweed” or “bow wave ride”, for example. The software will listen to see if the dolphins mimic them. Once the system can recognise these mimicked words, the idea is to use it to crack a much harder problem: listening to natural dolphin sounds and pulling out salient features that may be the ‘fundamental units’ of dolphin communication.“

As it happens, the iPad wasn’t the only modern technology predicted by Douglas Adams. Researchers at Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project develop a machine that will (hopefully) speak dolphin — or at least speak at dolphins. Says a skeptic: “‘Imagine if an alien species landed on Earth wearing elaborate spacesuits and walked through Manhattan speaking random lines from The Godfather to passers-by.’”

Fifty Years at Gombe.

“On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika…She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and — as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence Tanganyika — her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try.“

Fifty years after her studies began, pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall is honored (again) by National Geographic. “She created a research program, a set of protocols and ethics, an intellectual momentum — she created, in fact, a relationship between the scientific world and one community of chimpanzees — that has grown far beyond what one woman could do.”

Titan A.E.?

“We suggested hydrogen consumption because it’s the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth. If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth.“

In potentially very big doings, two astrobiology papers suggest that some form of life is currently consuming gas and fuel on Saturn’s moon of Titan (The gas being hydrogen and fuel being acetylane, which would make sense for a methane-based life form.) “We suggested hydrogen consumption because it’s the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth. If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth.’” Yes, that would be exciting.

Update: NASA’s Chris McKay advises scientific caution. “This is a still a long way from ‘evidence of life’. However, it is extremely interesting.”

Say Hello to Synthia.

“‘We think these are the first synthetic cells that are self-replicating and whose genetic heritage started in the computer. That changes conceptually how I think about life,’ said the leader of the project, J. Craig Venter, whose self-named research institute has laboratories and offices in Rockville and San Diego.“

O brave new world that has such bacteria in it: Scientists unveil their first synthetically-created, self-replicating cell. “Although the cell is primitive and lacks its own membrane, the techniques developed to create it promise groundbreaking advances in gene engineering and the rise of designer genomes. The achievement also raises ethical questions, not only about the creation of artificial life but the legitimacy of patenting it.”

Nano > Chemo?

“To create melanin particles tiny enough to squeeze through the liver, lungs, and spleen, Dr. Dadachova and her team layered several coats of synthesized melanin on silica particles. The particles, once injected into mice, clung onto bone marrow, as the researchers intended.“

It’s in the air, for you and me…By way of the always illuminating Dangerous Meta, scientists find a possible way to make people radiation resistant via melanin nanoparticles. “Clinical trials testing the melanized particles on cancer patients may begin two or three years. Dr. Dadachova also surmises that the technique has potential for protecting astronauts against radiation exposure.“

Broken-Hearted? Just Make a New One.

“To start with, only simple tissues, such as skin, muscle and short stretches of blood vessels, will be made…[H]owever, that the company expects that within five years, once clinical trials are complete, the printers will produce blood vessels for use as grafts in bypass surgery. With more research it should be possible to produce bigger, more complex body parts. Because the machines have the ability to make branched tubes, the technology could, for example, be used to create the networks of blood vessels needed to sustain larger printed organs, like kidneys, livers and hearts.”

Also in the Brave New World dept. and by way of a friend, The Economist takes a gander at new “bioprinter” technology. “As for bigger body parts, Dr Forgacs thinks they may take many different forms, at least initially. A man-made biological substitute for a kidney, for instance, need not look like a real one or contain all its features in order to clean waste products from the bloodstream.“