SpaceX biggest ever launch fails, Scientists create light powered yeast and other Science News of the Week

Hey there, welcome to my blog. In this weekly writeup, wherein I cover the current science, we will delve into the new scientific research that happened in the past week or so and explore the latest technologies and breakthroughs that were achieved in this domain.

Whether you are a student, a professional, or simply a science enthusiast, this article will provide you an engaging and informative insights and updates. Plus, as a compliment, you will get a peep into pretty quirky AI generated images by me related to those particular topics.

In today's blog, you will read about the following science events of the week:

• SpaceX’s launch of biggest ever rocket unfortunately ends with explosion

• Why does the hair turn grey? The researchers might have found the answer

• New form of Microscopy gives high resolution images that too at cheap costs

• Scientists create the first ever light powered Yeast

• An ancient gene stolen from bacteria would have set the stage for human sight

• A mosquito factory in Brazil aims to end dengue

SpaceX biggest ever launch fails, Scientists create light powered yeast and other Science events of the Week; Mufawad

SpaceX’s launch of biggest ever rocket unfortunately ends with explosion

An uncrewed enormous rocket of SpaceX called “Starship” roared off a launch pad in southern Texas, fled for 4.09 minutes and then exploded 39 kilometres away from the surface of the earth. Thus, ending the first major test flight of the largest rocket ever built.

The rocket was powered by up to 33 engines firing in synchrony, marking what “The Nature” write a substantial step beyond what SpaceX has been able to do so far with its most ambitious rocket.

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These enormous rockets of SpaceX called “Starships” ‘which SpaceX has dozens of them already built’ are supposed to kick off a new era of space exploration, including sending humans to the Moon and Mars, and enable new types of astrophysics and planetary science. SpaceX wants to use these “Starships” to colonize Mars whereas NASA aims to use this vehicle to help put astronauts on the surface of the Moon in the coming years besides that carry big telescopes or planetary missions into deep space.

SpaceX's Starship, a giant metal cylinder, sits 120 metres tall when stacked atop its Super Heavy rocket booster. It can carry up to 150 tonnes of equipment into space and is designed as a fully reusable transportation system and is designed to fly frequently into the space.

NASA’s fleet of space shuttles, which flew 135 times to low Earth orbit and back between 1981 and 2011, was also supposed to provide frequent access to space. But NASA eventually retired the shuttle in favour of developing the more powerful SLS to travel farther away from Earth.

SpaceX has already developed smaller and partially reusable rockets, such as its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy series, that routinely launch satellites for governments, companies and other customers. It has now envisioned to use Starship to deploy even larger objects, such as the next generation of its Starlink communications satellites, which some astronomers have criticized for interfering with observations of the night sky.

It's too soon to tell whether SpaceX can fulfil its promises of flying Starship again, regularly and cheaply, but the fact that NASA is supporting Starship as a key part of its Moon exploration programme is in the Starship's favour. 

Why does the hair turn grey? The researchers might have found the answer

A new study on mice, published in the journal Nature, provides a clearer picture of the cellular glitches that make our hairs turn grey. The melanocyte stem cells in our hair follicles which produces Melanin are responsible for producing and maintaining the pigment in our hair.

To learn more about stem cell behaviour throughout different phases of hair growth, the researchers at New York University spent two years tracking and imaging individual cells in mouse fur. To their surprise, the stem cells travelled back and forth within the hair follicle, transitioning into their mature, pigment-producing state and then out of it again.

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This is a big step towards understanding why we grey. The study found that plucking hairs from mice caused a build up of melanocyte stem cells stuck in their storage place, no longer producing melanin. This led to a build up of melanocyte stem cells stuck in their storage place, no longer producing melanin, and the mice’s fur went from dark brown to salt-and-pepper.

As I read in Science.org Melissa Harris, a biologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said the findings help “clinch” previous evidence suggesting that not all melanocyte stem cells are created equal, and that even if you have some left over, they may not be useful.

She found the study valuable, not just because a cure for graying hair might be a hit with the public, but because it makes it easier for researchers to understand things like cancer and cell regeneration.

 

New form of Microscopy gives high resolution images that too at cheap costs

Ali Shaib, a nanoscale specialist at the University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany, and his colleagues have developed a technique, dubbed as ONE microscopy, offers a level of detail that eclipses even that of multi-million-dollar'super-resolution' microscopes.

The power of conventional light microscopes is limited by the laws of optics, which mean that objects smaller than about 200 nanometres are a blur.

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Earlier two different types of Microscopy have been developed which can focus down to 20 nm. These researchers have developed physics-beating super-resolution methods that can bring this limit down to around 20 nm by using Optical trick microscopy.

Besides that in 2015, Edward Boyden, a neuroengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, showed that inflating tissue using an absorbent compound found in nappies moves cellular objects away from each other. This is called as “Expansion microscopy”

Shaib et. al’s technique melds the two approaches to achieve resolutions below 1 nm, which is sharp enough to reveal the shape of individual proteins. These researchers have used ONE microscopy to record pictures of a neural molecule, the GABAA receptor, that closely resemble much-higher-resolution cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography maps of the protein.

They also captured the outlines of a bulky protein called otoferlin, for which the structure hasn't been determined and that helps to convey audio signals in the brain.

Scientists create the first ever light powered Yeast

Researchers have made a certain type of yeast a little less dependent on carbs by enabling it to use light as energy. This work, reported last week on the preprint server bioRxiv, is the first step in more complex modes of engineering artificial photosynthesis.

It also recapitulates a key evolutionary transition—the harnessing of light. To convert carbon dioxide into sugars that fuel life on Earth, plants rely on a protein complex that includes chlorophyll to shuttle both electrons and protons, which perform chemical reactions and transfer energy.

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Researchers have been working for years to recreate photosynthesis to explore how to use light more efficiently as an energy source for solar panels and other applications. However, the chlorophyll complex requires many other molecules to do its job.

Anthony Burnetti, a geneticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and William Ratcliff, an evolutionary biologist at Georgia Tech, sought a simpler solution to the problem of converting light into usable energy. They began by inserting a rhodopsin gene from a marine bacterium into brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in a petri dish.

Burnetti hoped the rhodopsin would find its way into the yeast’s vacuole, an enzyme-laden sac that degrades unneeded proteins. However, the rhodopsin protein made by the gene went to a different compartment known not for protein degradation, but for protein synthesis.

So Burnetti looked instead for rhodopsin already known to exist in vacuoles. He settled on using one from corn smut, a fungal pathogen. By attaching a green fluorescent tag to the protein, he and his colleagues verified that it had localized to the yeast’s vacuole, as they hoped.

Autumn Peterson, a member of Burnetti’s team, went a step further to prove this engineered yeast was indeed using light. She grew the new strain in the same dish as the original, unaltered yeast and exposed it to green light, the wavelength rhodopsin is most sensitive to. The cells in the light-sensing strain had shorter lives but reproduced fast enough to outgrow the nonlight sensing yeast by 0.8%.

Burnetti and his colleagues think light induces the rhodopsin to pump more protons into the vacuole, relieving the cells’ need to expend ATP for this task and instead freeing up that energy to help the cell grow in other ways.

Alaattin Kaya, a biologist who studies aging at Virginia Commonwealth University, believes these yeast cells can help clarify why vacuole acidification over the life of a cell sometimes seems to cause mitochondria to malfunction and in turn accelerate aging.

Burnetti plans to eventually put rhodopsin into the mitochondrion to provide a lot of energy directly from the Sun, just like photosynthesis does. In that regard, yeast would then be a little more like plants.

An ancient gene stolen from bacteria would have set the stage for human sight

The evolution of the vertebrate eye got an unexpected boost from bacteria, which contributed a key gene involved in the retina’s response to light. This work, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drives home the evolutionary importance of genes borrowed from other species.

Bacteria are known to readily swap genes, packaged in viruses or mobile pieces of DNA called transposons, or even as free-floating DNA. Vertebrates, too, can incorporate microbial genes. When the human genome was first sequenced in 2001, scientists thought it contained about 200 bacteria-derived genes, but the microbial origins of many did not hold up.

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Matthew Daugherty, a biochemist at the University of California and his colleagues used sophisticated computer software to trace the evolution of hundreds of human genes by searching for similar sequences in hundreds of other species.

Genes that seemed to have appeared first in vertebrates and had no predecessors in earlier animals were good candidates for having jumped from across the bacteria. One of these genes, called IRBP (Interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein), was already known to be important for seeing. It encodes a protein that resides in the space between the retina and the retinal pigment epithelium, a thin layer of cells overlying the retina.

When light hits a light-sensitive photoreceptor in the retina, vitamin A complexes become unkinked, setting off an electrical pulse that activates the optic nerve. IRBP then shifts these molecules to the epithelium to be rekinked and shuttles the restored molecules back to the photoreceptor.

Daugherty and his colleagues propose that more than 500 million years ago microbes transferred a peptidase gene into an ancestor of all living vertebrates. The reason being IRBP is found in all vertebrates but generally not in their closest invertebrate relatives.

Once the gene was in place, the protein’s recycling function is supposed to be lost and the gene duplicated itself twice, explaining why IRBP has four copies of the original peptidase DNA.

Not everyone agrees that the evolution of IRBP was crucial for vertebrate vision, as invertebrate eyes do without IRBP. However, the work supports the idea that horizontal gene transfer can help to endow organisms with new functions, as once these genes take root in a new species, evolution can tinker with them to produce totally new abilities or enhance existing ones.

A mosquito factory in Brazil aims to end dengue

The World Mosquito Program (WMP) has announced that it will release modified mosquitoes in many of Brazil’s urban areas over the next 10 years, with the aim of protecting up to 70 million people from diseases such as dengue.

Researchers have tested the release of this type of mosquito which carries a Wolbachia bacterium that stops the insect from transmitting viruses in select cities in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

A mosquito factory will be built in a location yet to be determined in Brazil to supply the WMP’s ambitious initiative. The facility should begin operating in 2024 and will produce up to five billion mosquitoes per year.

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Despite the positive results from past mosquito releases, researchers expect that it will be challenging to operate the technology at such a massive scale.

The bacterium Wolbachia pipientis naturally infects about half of all insect species including that of  Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit dengue, Zika, chikungunya and other viruses. The World Mosquito Project (WMP) is also testing mosquito-dispersal methods using drones, motorbikes and cars. A large randomized, controlled study is underway in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to compare the incidence of dengue in areas that receive Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes with that in other areas.

However, the technology has not yet been officially endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which could be an obstacle to its use in other countries. Although the modified mosquitoes have been under evaluation by the WHO's Vector Control Advisory Group, and a discussion of the technique is scheduled for the group's upcoming meeting later this month.