Tomorrow is Today

Chinese Researchers Claim to Grow Mouse Sperm From Stem Cells, Fertilize Egg and Whelp Pup

In the past, researchers were able to coax mouse stem cells to produce primordial germ cells (PGC), a precursor to sperm and eggs. But, to get full-blown sperm, researchers had to transplant the cells into the testes where—hidden from scientists' prying eyes—the cells completed the somewhat mysterious, multi-step process of meiosis. 

In the new study, researchers say that they again made PGCs in lab but then sprinkled in testicular tissue from newborn mice and other molecules. After 14 days, the PGCs turned into spermatids—immature sperm that can’t swim but have sailed through the critical stages of meiosis. 

When the researchers fertilized eggs with the spermatids, they produced seemingly health pups. “It is, I think, truly the first time any lab has been able to go all the way up to a live pup in vitro,” Niels Geijsen, a stem cell biologist at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, told Science, “which is quite amazing, if this is indeed what happened.”

Researchers Revisiting Milgram Experiment: Time Flies When You’re Not Following Orders

[Researchers] were especially interested in how subjects felt when they were under orders and whether that feeling translated into recognizable patterns in an EEG reading. 

[T]hey gave a group of subjects £20 each. "Agents" were given a device with three keys on it. One would deliver a shock to a "victim," another would take a small amount of the £20 from a victim, and another would do nothing. 

A researcher would sometimes tell agents which keys to press and sometimes would let them choose. 

...When people intend to do something, they perceive the outcome as happening more quickly than when they do something unintentionally. In other words, if you kick a ball deliberately, it seems to fly through a window faster than if the kick was an accident. People acting under orders feel like they have less control over their actions, almost as if they are acting unintentionally—like that person who accidentally kicked the ball. 

The researchers surmised that people under orders might also experience time distortion. So each time an agent pressed a button, whether under orders or by free choice, the researchers asked the agent to tell them how long it was before the tone played. 

..The agents who were told to push the pain button thought the tone came later than the agents who chose to do it. 

The researchers write: Coercion increased the perceived interval between action and outcome, relative to a situation where participants freely chose to inflict the same harms. Interestingly, coercion also reduced the neural processing of the outcomes of one’s own action. Thus, people who obey orders may subjectively experience their actions as closer to passive movements than fully voluntary actions. ...The experience is so profoundly different that our brains actually process it differently.

DARPA to Deploy Anti-Submarine Drone Ships in Portland Starting This Spring

Darpa Deputy Director Steve Walker announced that the agency and its contractor Leidos would launch the first full prototype of an autonomous ship designed to hunt submarines and trail them for weeks at a time. 

Eventually, autonomous vessels could be deployed to track the latest generation of quiet diesel-electric submarines over distances of thousands of miles, providing targeting information to US Navy submarines, ships, and patrol planes—or simply harassing the subs with relentless active tracking to deter them from carrying out their mission. 

The technology could also be used for unmanned ships used to search for underwater mines and carry out resupply missions or act as a communications relay. And these ships all would operate at a fraction of the cost of conventional manned ships—costing $15,000 to $20,000 per day to operate instead of the $700,000 per day it costs to deploy a destroyer for the same job.

The prototype, named Sea Hunter, was built under DARPA's Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program, a project jointly funded by the Navy's Office of Naval Research and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. 

Measuring 132 feet long and displacing about 140 tons—roughly the size of a large fishing boat and a third the length of the Navy's LCS ships—the Sea Hunter will be christened in Portland, Oregon this April and begin testing in the Columbia River before undertaking long-range testing in the Pacific over the next 18 months.

(via DARPA robotic sub-hunting ship will set sail this spring | Ars Technica)

Researchers To Cure Blindness By Injecting Algal DNA-Doped Virus Into Patient’s Eyes 

The tests are being tried on patients with retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that kills specialized rod-and-cone photoreceptors cells in the eyes, causing permanent blindness. Rather than repairing those cells, the team will target ganglion cells located near the nerve fiber layer. 

The treatment should cause the cells to make a light sensitive protein and fire signals to the brain in response to light. The technique was proven to work on blind mice, which attempted to avoid bright lights like sighted mice following the treatment. 

Scientists hope to generate at least 100,000 light sensitive cells, which should allow for a decent level of vision. In reality, however, they have no idea how well patients will see until they try it. 

...The algae cells are only sensitive to the color blue, so it's expected that patients will only see in black and white. In addition, algae cells have limited light sensitivity compared to healthy retina, so researchers think patients will only see well in bright sunlight. If the technique works, the researchers could overcome the brightness problem by fitting patients with light-magnifying goggles.

Robot Hand As Good As the Real Thing: Next Step Human Skin and Tendons

Researchers [have] created a robot hand that is so accurate [that] it has almost the same dexterity as a human hand. 

That alone is enough to improve the motion capabilities in prosthetics in a way that has never been seen before. But the researchers plan on taking the project even farther by growing human tendon and tissue on the robot hand. 

... "We are very optimistic about this concept and we are looking forward to making this happen as soon as possible," Zhe Xu, a postdoctoral associate at Yale who co-led the creation of the robot hand, told Tech Insider.

Xu said the hand is still a "proof of concept" and that he hasn't met with biologists yet about turning the robotic hand into a regenerative limb. But he said the project has already attracted a lot of attention and he is optimistic about it moving forward.

More  Evidence of Theory of Mind Among Corvids

To establish a baseline for observed and unobserved caching behaviour, the researchers examined how the ravens cached food with the window shutters both open and closed. The peepholes remained closed. 

Next, the ravens were individually trained how to use the peepholes to observe and recover caches installed by the humans. 

Finally, the ravens were given food to hide with the window shutter closed, but the peephole open and closed, with the observing room empty but audio playing of raven sounds. The raven hiding the food behaved much more carefully with the peephole open. 

"This strongly suggests that ravens make generalisations based on their experience, and do not merely interpret and respond to behavioural cues from other birds," explained Bugnyar. "The results indicate that ravens mentally integrate information about the others' audible presence and their own visual experience of seeing through the peephole, which fits one of the recent hypotheses of how a Theory of Mind could work."

Australian Researchers Studying Wasp Vision to Improve UAV Navigation

The ANU team used high-speed cameras to track the wasps eye movements and, from that data, figure out where the insects were looking. 

"The learning and homing abilities of wasps make them smarter than anything humans know how to build," ANU Professor Jochen Zeil said in a statement. "Roboticists look to replace expensive high resolution cameras and reduce power consumption without losing information that is crucial for visual navigation and our research could help with this." 

The research should also help biologists better understand the mental mechanisms involved in the insects' navigational skills.

Scientists grow functional kidney organoid from stem cells

Previously, scientists have used stem cells to grow the tubes that filter the blood (nephrons) and the tubes that send fluids to the bladder (collecting ducts). ...both these structures arise from the same embryonic tissue, yet they originate at distinct times and positions in a growing embryo. 

...the team first performed an analysis of the mechanisms that enable a stem cell to preferentially transform into either a collecting duct or a nephron [and] found that the amount of time cells are exposed to specific signaling molecules  ...influences the fate of the stem cells. 

 Using this information, the scientists were able to control the relative ability of the cells to transform into either the nephron or the collecting duct. They started with either human embryonic stem cells or human induced pluripotent stem cells and exposed them to a series of signaling molecules over the course of a week, then cultured the cells for up to 20 days. Over this time period, the cultures spontaneously formed complex kidney-like tissues called organoids.

Further examination of the kidney organoid revealed that they contain individual nephrons with distinct distal and proximal tubules, early loops of Henle, and other key structures. When the genes that are active in these kidney organoids were compared to those active in human fetal tissue, they showed the highest resemblance with a first trimester human kidney. 

While these kidney organoids are not yet ready to transplant into adolescents or adults, they can serve as a powerful tool to screen drugs for kidney toxicity or model diseases. This in turn could help develop more effective therapeutics that could lower the risk of a patient landing on the kidney transplant list in the first place.

Astronomers detect possible dyson sphere orbiting star near the Milky Way

Boyajian, who oversees the Planet Hunters project, recently published a paper looking at all the possible natural explanations for the objects and found all of them wanting except one – that another star had pulled a string of comets close to KIC 8462852. But even this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence. 

...Now the possibility that the objects were created by intelligent creatures is being taken very seriously by the team. 

As civilisations become more technologically advanced, they create new and better ways of collecting energy — with the end result being the harnessing of energy directly from their star. If the speculation about a megastructure being placed around the star system is correct, it could for instance be a huge set of solar panels placed around the star, scientists say.

...Astronomers want to point a radio dish at the star to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilisations. And the first observations could be ready to take place as early as January, with follow-up observations potentially coming even quicker. 

 “If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner,” Wright told The Atlantic. “If we saw something exciting… we’d be asking to go on right away.”

It’s one thing to make pig organs safe, it’s quite another to make them compatible. Though it’s the inactivation of 62 PERV genes that has set an editing record, these are still pig organs at the end of the day, and they will need to be modified on the protein level if they’re to work properly in the human body.

As we just discussed, getting to that point should be easier in pigs than just about any other candidate species. In that spirit, the team has actually engineered two separate lines of pig embryos. The second has modifications made to more than 20 separate (and currently unpublished) genes, ones that affect cell behavior through things like cell surface proteins. These are the changes that could potentially be tailored to a particular patient’s genome, allowing us to grow highly compatible organs by mixing a small number of the patient’s own genes into defanged porcine genome. 

The edited pig embryos should be perfectly viable as pigs in their own right, but we won’t know for sure until they’re actually implanted in pig mothers. Harvard has a facility all setup for their growth in isolation — they’ll breed each line separately to be able to study problems with as few confounding issues as possible. 

87 percent of Americans said that they think candidates running for Congress or president should have a basic understanding of the science that informs public policy decisions. 

That opinion holds true across the political spectrum, with 92 percent of Democrats, 90 percent of Republicans, and 79 percent of Independents saying that it’s important to them that candidates have a baseline understanding of science. 

As someone who recently moved to New Jersey, I can feel the autonomous cars’ pain: In a scenario where everyone routinely ignores traffic rules and drives aggressively, obeying the law and driving conservatively actually makes driving MORE DANGEROUS

The DMV has just published all the official accident reports involving autonomous vehicles tested on California’s roads, covering the period from last September to date, on its website... The reports appear to support Google’s claims that human error by the drivers of the non-autonomous cars is, on the surface, causing accidents. However the difficulties caused by the co-mingling of human and robot driving styles is also in ample evidence. 

In one report... [an autonomous car] applied the brakes to avoid an oncoming car, after initially creeping forward. The human-driven car behind it, also trying to turn right and presumably encouraged by the Lexus creeping forward, then “failed to brake sufficiently” and so collided with the rear of the Google Lexus.

In another report... [an autonomous car] was obeying a red stop sign that was still showing for the lane it was occupying. The human driver behind was apparently spurred on to drive into the back of the stationary Lexus because of a green light appearing — albeit for a left-turn lane (whereas the two cars were actually occupying the straight ahead lane). 

A third report... [describes how an autonomous car was struck from behind] after decelerating to a stop in traffic because of stopped traffic ahead of a green lit traffic intersection. Presumably the human driver was paying more attention to the green traffic signal than to the changing road conditions.

In the near future, driving “by hand” will become like driving a manual transmission: not everyone will know how to do it.

“Complex Social Behavior,” Reciprocal Cooperation, Observed Among Rabbitfish

Rabbitfish help one another in a way that had been observed only in mammals and highly social birds, according to a new study.

Pairs of these tropical fish will cooperate: While one has its head down feeding in the crevices of coral reefs, the other holds its head at an upward angle, apparently watching for predators...

Dr. Brandl and his colleagues observed this form of cooperation in male-female pairs and in same-sex pairs — a sign that this is a complex social behavior.

“If it occurred in only male-female pairs, it makes sense for the male to help out the female to improve fertility,” Dr. Brandl said.

But this behavior... is an example of reciprocal cooperation, more often seen in mammals like chimpanzees and humans.

(via Self-assembling material could produce artificial veins)