“Prior research has shown that no matter how quickly brain matter is frozen, the freezing and thawing process always causes tissue damage. This has made it more difficult for researchers to study brain matter because research must be conducted immediately after obtaining a tissue sample. In this new effort, the team in China found a way around this problem by soaking the tissue in a special solution before freezing.

The work involved dipping or soaking brain organoids (brain tissue grown from stem cells) in candidate compounds and then freezing and thawing them to see how they fared. After many attempts, they found one combination of solutions that worked best—a mix of ethylene glycol, methylcellulose DMSO and Y27632. They named the solution mix MEDY.”

From Medical Xpress.

“How did Beethoven end up with so much lead, as well as arsenic and mercury, in his body? The substances likely accumulated over decades of the composer’s life through food and drink, Rifai said.

Beethoven was known to favor wine, sometimes drinking a bottle a day, and he drank plumbed wine. A common practice dating back at least 2,000 years, the creation of plumbed wine involves adding lead acetate as a sweetener and preservative, Rifai said. At the time, lead was also used in glassmaking to give glassware a more clear and appealing appearance.

Beethoven also loved to eat fish, and at the time, the Danube River was a great source of industry, meaning waste ended up in the same river that was a source of fish caught for consumption — and that fish likely contained arsenic and mercury, Rifai said.”

From CNN.

“In a paper published in Nature, we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.

We hope AlphaFold 3 will help transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Scientists can access the majority of its capabilities, for free, through our newly launched AlphaFold Server, an easy-to-use research tool. To build on AlphaFold 3’s potential for drug design, Isomorphic Labs is already collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to apply it to real-world drug design challenges and, ultimately, develop new life-changing treatments for patients.”

From the Keyword.

“In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has demonstrated that heat isn’t alone in causing water to evaporate. Light, striking the water’s surface where air and water meet, can break water molecules away and float them into the air, causing evaporation in the absence of any source of heat.

The astonishing new discovery could have a wide range of significant implications. It could help explain mysterious measurements over the years of how sunlight affects clouds, and therefore affect calculations of the effects of climate change on cloud cover and precipitation. It could also lead to new ways of designing industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination or drying of materials.”

From MIT News.