A genetic pathway involving proteins in the endosomes of cells appears to be misregulated in the brains of children with autism, according to a newly published statistical analysis in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Previously the genes were shown to cause rare forms of the disease but the new study suggests they have a wider role.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study finds that two genes individually associated with rare autism-related disorders are also jointly linked to more general forms of autism. The finding suggests a new genetic pathway to investigate in general autism research. (more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists discover how a photon beam can flip the spin polarization of electrons emitted from an exciting new material
Plain-looking but inherently strange crystalline materials called 3D topological insulators (TIs) are all the rage in materials science. Even at room temperature, a single chunk of TI is a good insulator in the bulk, yet behaves like a metal on its surface.
Researchers find TIs exciting partly because the electrons that flow swiftly across their surfaces are “spin polarized”: the electron’s spin is locked to its momentum, perpendicular to the direction of travel. These interesting electronic states promise many uses – some exotic, like observing never-before-seen fundamental particles, but many practical, including building more versatile and efficient high-tech gadgets, or, further into the future, platforms for quantum computing. (more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists discover the balance that allows electricity to flow between cells and electronics
Just like electronics, living cells use electrons for energy and information transfer. Despite electrons being a common “language” of the living and electronic worlds, living cells cannot speak to our largely technological realm. Cell membranes are largely to blame for this inability to plug cells into our computers: they form a greasy barrier that tightly controls charge balance in a cell. Thus, giving a cell the ability to communicate directly with an electrode would lead to enormous opportunities in the development of new energy conversion techniques, fuel production, biological reporters, or new forms of bioelectronic systems. (more…)
Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Dynamics Beamline points to why isotope ratios in interplanetary dust and meteorites differ from Earth’s
By studying the origins of different isotope ratios among the elements that make up today’s smorgasbord of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and interplanetary ice and dust, Mark Thiemens and his colleagues hope to learn how our solar system evolved. Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, has worked on this problem for over three decades.
In recent years his team has found the Chemical Dynamics Beamline of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to be an invaluable tool for examining how photochemistry determines the basic ingredients in the solar system recipe. (more…)
One of the world’s first working circular particle accelerators returns to Berkeley Lab—75 years later.
Seventy-five years after one of the world’s first working cyclotrons was handed to the London Science Museum, it has returned to its birthplace in the Berkeley hills, where the man who invented it, Ernest O. Lawrence, helped launch the field of modern particle physics as well as the national laboratory that would bear his name, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
On Jan. 9, 1932 the brass cyclotron—which measures 26 inches from end to end and whose accelerating chamber measures just 11 inches in diameter—was successfully used to boost protons to energies of 1.22 million electron volts. Its return to Berkeley Lab caps a decades-long saga in which various parties endeavored to secure the cyclotron’s return from London, but the persistence of Pamela Patterson, who chronicles Berkeley Lab’s history as managing editor of its website, finally paid off. (more…)
Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have provided important new details into the activation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a cell surface protein that has been strongly linked to a large number of cancers and is a major target of cancer therapies.
“The more we understand about EGFR and the complex molecular machinery involved in the growth and proliferation of cells, the closer we will be to developing new and more effective ways to cure and treat the many different forms of cancer,” says chemist Jay Groves, one of the leaders of this research. “Through a tour-de-force of quantitative biology techniques that included cutting edge time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy in living cells, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and computational modeling, we’ve determined definitively how EGFR becomes activated through to its epidermal growth factor (EGF) ligand.” (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. – A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea. The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs. (more…)
History has long denied the political genius of the Black Panther Party. At worst, its members have been cast as unconscionable criminals. At best, such seminal figures as party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and early supporter Stokely Carmichael have been portrayed as outlaw folk heroes who, propelled by the progressive winds of the late 1960s, dared to take on the establishment.
But a UCLA graduate student in sociology who worked alongside former Panthers a decade ago as a community organizer in Oakland, Calif., didn’t buy the conventional wisdom. (more…)
