Science news of the day thread.

[Brian Peacock]

[macdoc]

Learned a bunch - always thought the 13,000 yr hypothesis was wrong.

[Brian Peacock]

While we've deprioritised the arts and culture in our curriculums to the point where it's virtually non-existent (unless you go to posh school) , research shows that familiarity, engagement with, and participation in the arts is far more beneficial to the individual and society than... say... algebra!

Arts and cultural engagement ‘linked to slower pace of biological ageing’

Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health.

The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger.

“These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level.

They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognised as a health-promoting behaviour in a similar way to exercise,” said Prof Daisy Fancourt, the lead author of the research and the head of the social biobehavioural research group at University College London.

However, slower ageing does not necessarily mean someone will live longer. The “epigenetic clocks” used in the study to assess biological ageing are predictive of future morbidity and mortality, and previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan, but much more research would be needed to establish potential causal effects on longevity.

Those who take part in artistic pursuits the most often slow the pace of their biological ageing the most. Under one of the study’s methods of assessment, those who did so at least weekly slowed their ageing process by 4%, while monthly engagement led to it slowing by 3%.

Similarly, another of the tests showed that those who undertook an arts activity at least once a week were on average a year younger biologically than those who rarely engaged in such pursuits. Those who exercised once a week were only six months younger by that measure....

[Tero]

HIV controlled for 92 months with engineered immune cells

That same approach may help control H.I.V., among the wiliest of viruses, scientists will report on Tuesday. After a single infusion of immune cells engineered to recognize the virus, two people in a new study have suppressed their H.I.V. to undetectable levels, one of them for nearly two years.

The data is scheduled to be presented at a gene therapy conference in Boston, but the researchers shared an early copy with The New York Times.

In the new study, scientists at Caring Cross, a nonprofit focused on developing affordable immunotherapies, engineered immune cells from each study participant to carry two molecules on the cell surface. Both molecules bind to H.I.V. and kill infected cells, but one also prevents the immune cells from becoming infected.

“It’s this dual nature of targeting — killing and protecting — that we think is the missing piece in terms of how this therapy works,” said Boro Dropulić, the executive director of Caring Cross, who developed the method.

The researchers extracted immune cells from each participant, modified the cells, then injected them back in. The participants stopped taking antiretroviral drugs the day of the infusion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/heal ... erapy.html

[Tero]

Man invents something called cell. Cell could eventually assemble to an organism to repalace all the AI life on our planet.
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events ... biological

Much work remains to turn the construction of individual SpudCells into a true engineering pipeline. The cell’s seven DNA plasmids need to be consolidated into a single, more stable genome, and further molecular machinery needs to be built. Adamala and her colleagues believe there is also an infrastructure challenge, since different labs do not have shared standards for a working cell.

[JimC]

Surely one of the team must be called Igor...

[Tero]

Bit of oddball link
https://www.earth.com/news/scientists-t ... sclerosis/

Gut bacteria causing MS

[rainbow]

Surely one of the team must be called Igor...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... oat-strike

[macdoc]

After 40 years of research, Brazilian scientist Dr. Mariangela Hungria wins the World Food Prize for pioneering a $2 nitrogen-fixing bacteria treatment that replaces costly fertilizers, saves farmers $25 billion annually, and cuts 230 million tons of CO₂ emissions

[Brian Peacock]

Wow.

[macdoc]

Virtual signaling well earned

[L'Emmerdeur]

This is damn cool, and fun for the 'Evolution Fairytale' crowd as well. The paper is open access.

How and where did the first forms of life arise? These are the main questions driving research at the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU). In a new publication in Science Advances, an international team led by Düsseldorf biologists uncovers pioneering insights into the network of chemical reactions that the very first cells used to make the building blocks of life and which sources of energy they used to drive those reactions. They retraced the origin of enzymes during life’s earliest divergence into bacteria and archaea, and found evidence for two independent origins of life for free-living cells.

If we could go back 4 billion years in time and watch as the first cells emerged on Earth, what would we see? “We would see two very different kinds of cells emerging, pioneer bacteria and pioneer archaea, making their first attempts at life outside the confines of a hydrothermal vent” says Natalia Mrnjavac, biologist at the University of Düsseldorf and lead author on the new publication in Science Advances.

There, Mrnjavac and an international team of scientists report investigations of genomes, protein structures and chemical reactions that probe the very earliest phases of microbial evolution before there were free living cells. “These comparisons are giving us unprecedented insights into the phase of evolution when metabolism catalysed by enzymes was arising from spontaneous reactions catalysed by metals in the Earth’s crust” says Düsseldorf biologist William Martin, senior author of the study.

The approach that the team took differs from all previous investigations of early evolution by looking at the entire set of chemical reactions that cells use to make the building blocks of life (amino acids, RNA bases and vitamins) from compounds present on the early Earth: hydrogen gas, ammonia and CO2. This set of 420 chemical reactions is called metabolism. The chemical reactions themselves are as universally conserved as the genetic code.

Martin: “The surprise is that the enzymes that catalyse those reactions are not conserved across the evolutionary divide that separates bacteria and archaea. We found that the last universal ancestor of all cells, LUCA, possessed enzymes for only about half of the reactions of metabolism. The other half was catalysed by metals in the environment where LUCA arose.”

[source]