Curio Cabinet / Nerdy Curio

Hearing the terms “CRISPR” and “brown fat” together might make you think of barbeque, but these are no spare ribs. Just before the new year, scientists from the University of Michigan published an article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry recounteing a breakthrough in studying brown fat cells using a gene-editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9. Brown fat is one of two kinds of fat in the human body, the other being white fat. White fat is more commonly studied, not only because it is the type that accounts for most weight-related health problems, but because brown fat is buried deeper in the body and is thus harder to target. Add to this another challenge: how difficult it is to study any gene’s specific function. In a press release, study co-author Steven M. Romenelli explained, “The biggest challenge in terms of adipose research to date has been that if you want to study a gene’s function, you have to commit a considerable amount of time, resources and money into developing a transgenic mouse.” In other words, to study a gene’s function, researchers usually have to breed mice with or without certain genes, depending on what they're hoping to study. This process is slow and expensive.
 
It was this challenge that researchers have now found a way to push back against. Instead of breeding mice with specific mutations, they can now “knock out” certain existing genes in normal mice using CRISPR-Cas9. The technique consists of using RNA to guide an enzyme, called Cas9, to specific genes, which the enzyme can then break down. In this case, researchers used this technique to target brown fat in mice and knock out the UCP1 genes inside, which allow the brown fat to generate heat. Afterwards, the mice were still able to keep themselves warm in cold temperatures, which likely means that the body has other systems in place for maintaining a constant, safe body temperature. Using CRISPR-Cas9, researchers may now be able to unravel more of brown fat’s mysteries. Gene deletion never sounded so appealing.

[Image description: A digital illustration of a brown fat cell with mitochondria and lipid droplets inside.] Credit & copyright: [Scientificanimations.com, Wikimedia Commons]

The British monarchy aren’t the only royals with juicy secrets. Over the centuries, examining the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs has taught us a lot about how these ancient rulers lived. Yet one important mummy remained unwrapped: that of Pharaoh Amenhotep I, who ruled between around 1526 to 1506 BC. Amenhotep’s sarcophagus is elaborately decorated, featuring a painted face mask with obsidian eyes and a cobra headdress with inlaid stones, all wrapped in floral garlands. Opening the sarcophagus would undoubtedly do damage to these intricate decorations. So, modern Egyptian researchers found a workaround. Using CT (computed tomography) technology, they scanned the sarcophagus, digitally “unwrapping” the mummy inside.
 
According to a statement made in late December by Dr Sahar Saleem, professor of radiology at the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo University and the radiologist of the Egyptian Mummy Project, the scans have allowed researchers to see more of Amenhotep than the naked eye ever could. “By digitally unwrapping of the mummy and ‘peeling off’ its virtual layers—the facemask, the bandages, and the mummy itself—we could study this well-preserved pharaoh in unprecedented detail,” Saleem explained. So far, they’ve discovered that Amenhotep was around 35 years old when he died, around five feet, five inches tall, and circumcised. With his narrow chin, protruding upper teeth and curly hair, Amenhotep I probably looked like his father, Ahmose I, whose mummy was found to have similar features. Underneath Amenhotep’s wrappings, scans found that he wore 30 different amulets in various places, and a girdle made of gold. Lucky for this well-dressed mummy that he can rest easy with all his bling intact!

[Image description: A painted Egyptian sarcophagus.] Credit & copyright: albertr, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday AND New Year’s Eve! While looking into the future, enjoy these curios featuring images and stories from New Years past.
 
Happy New Year! Depending on how many glasses you drink tonight, you may wonder how many bubbles are in a bottle of champagne. The answer is none, until the cork is popped. Champagne is loaded with bubbly carbon dioxide. But you can't see many bubbles in a corked bottle because the liquid has reached equilibrium with the gas mixture in the neck of the bottle. This is thanks to Henry's Law, which states that the pressure of a gas above a solution is proportional to the amount of gas in the solution. So there are no bubbles because all the CO2 that can escape the champagne already has, and is in the neck of the bottle; which in turn is pushing back down on the CO2 remaining in the champagne at the perfect pressure. Opening the bottle causes the CO2 in the neck to rapidly escape, not only sending the cork flying but also disrupting the equilibrium. So bubbles of CO2 from the champagne escape into the air in an attempt to reach a new equilibrium. Which it never reaches until it goes flat, since the concentration of CO2 in our air is so low compared to that of the original champagne. Bringing us back to the question of how many bubbles are in a bottle of champagne. Mathematicians have long calculated that a single glass of bubbly "contains" 15 million bubbles. Scientist Gerard Liger-Belair suspected the accepted calculations were flawed, so he devised a more sophisticated method to calculate the number of bubbles "released." His approximation, which considered crucial factors like temperature, bubble dynamics, and the tilt of a flute, is only 1 million! He also deduced a few tips for people who like fizzier champagne. Serve it a little warmer, and don’t forget to tilt the flute as your pour. Now there is some news you can use, in only 364 more days!

Turns out, the fountain of youth is full of eyedrops. In October, the FDA approved Vuity, an eyedrop from American pharmaceutical company Allergan that helps correct presbyopia, blurry vision and nearsightedness caused by aging. In December, Vuity went on sale for the first time. The drops’ active ingredient is pilocarpine, a medication which has been used for years to manage certain kinds of glaucoma. In Vuity, the pilocarpine works by causing a patient’s pupils to constrict. This counteracts the decreased eye flexibility that often accompanies aging, and increases the eyes’ ability to focus. The only catch? The drops can only be used safely once a day, and wear off after five or six hours. This means that, while the drops are active in a patient’s eyes, they may be able to put down their reading glasses. But they’ll have to pick them up again once the drops wear off. Vuity drops also work best in patients younger than 65, with milder cases of presbyopia, and it doesn’t treat farsightedness, another common, age-related vision ailment.
 
Still, the eyedrops represent a major breakthrough in vision-related, anti-aging healthcare, and their road to achieving FDA approval was long. It necessitated two, 30-day, phase 3 clinical studies of 750 patients between the ages of 40 and 55 with presbyopia, all of whom had their vision tested regularly. At the end of the trials, a significant number of participants could read three or more additional lines on a reading chart than they could before using Vuity. The drops may not be perfect, but their success rate is still nothing to sneeze—or blink—at.
 

[Image description: A white-haired woman administers eyedrops to a seated, white-haired man.] Credit & copyright: Yaroslav Shuraev, Pexels
 

Here’s hoping this spacecraft doesn’t end up like Icarus. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just entered the solar atmosphere, making it closer to the surface of The Sun than any other craft in history. The probe’s mission is to gather up-close data about The Sun to help us better understand phenomena like solar winds, and it is already accomplishing that goal. In April, the 1510-pound probe passed into The Sun’s Alfvén critical boundary, which marks the edge of it’s corona, the outermost region of the solar atmosphere. This not only taught scientists exactly where the Alfvén critical boundary is, but also gave them their first true glimpse of the corona’s makeup.
 
As it moved on a steady path around The Sun, data transmitted from the Parker Solar Probe indicated that it was passing in and out of the corona. This confirmed that the corona is actually “wrinkled” by solar pressure and heat. The probe also discovered a possible origin for solar winds, solar materials that are pushed away from The Sun’s surface by heat and pressure in long zigzag patterns, called switchbacks. The switchbacks seem to be caused by supergranules, magnetic funnels from The Sun’s photosphere, or deepest observable layer, which align with the patterns of solar winds above them. As the Parker Solar Probe continues to dart in and out of The Sun’s atmosphere for the next several years, who knows what new information we may be able to gather about our solar system’s most important star. Assuming, of course, that the little craft can take the heat.

[Image description: A digital illustration of the sun.] Credit & copyright: beetpro, Pixabay
 

It's Flashback Friday, and the first official day of winter is quickly approaching! Enjoy these cold-weather curios.
 
These cold-weather birds seem to have taken a wrong turn. A handful of king penguins have been spotted on the Martillo island at the southernmost tip of Argentina. Researchers are unsure how, and why, the king penguins ended up there. Typically, the penguins live in massive colonies with up to 100,000 breeding pairs. Most likely, their arrival on Martillo was accidental, and the penguins, "were wandering around the ocean looking for food," according to researcher Andrea Raya Rey of the CADIC (Centro Austral de Investigaciones Científicas or Southern Center for Scientific Research). Martillo island, in the Beagle Channel, is already home to gento and magellanic penguins. The former took residence in the 1970s, and the latter in the 1990s. Researchers suspect the king penguins decided to join their feathered friends during moulting season (between February and April, depending on the penguin's age). King penguins are slightly smaller than emperor penguins, although they share the same striking orange coloring. The species have a circumpolar distribution, that is they are found around the Earth's poles. They are also serially monogamous. Between 5 and 6 years old, on average, king penguins begin mating. They remain faithful to their partners during the breeding cycle. During winter, both partners go to sea in search of food. King penguins are long-distance foragers, with a diet consisting primarily of fish, such as lanternfish, and squid. The king penguins on Martillo island could have swam from Antarctica, a journey of less than 700 miles, the Falkland Islands, an archipelago off the Patagonian coast, South Georgia Island, even farther east in the Atlantic, or nearby in Inútil Bay, Chile or Staten Island, Argentina. One thing's for sure, the king penguins are tired of being alone. Last year, they tried to start a colony by hatching a chick, which sadly succumbed to unusual heat. Here's to hoping they aren't alone long!

 
Image credit & copyright: Sonyuser, Pixabay

If only radiation didn’t overstay its welcome so long. Ever since the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, the site has suffered from dangerously high levels of ground radiation. Around 1,000 square miles surrounding the defunct nuclear plant are now part of an exclusion zone, into which most people are forbidden to go. However, a Geneva-based company called Exlterra is attempting to change that. In 2019, the company announced that they had produced technology capable of lowering Chernobyl’s ground radiation to safe levels. This September, they gave an update on their progress and the results are impressive by any measure.
 
After just one year, Exlterra has managed to decontaminate a 2.5 acre portion of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Specifically, radiation in the soil was cut by 47 percent, while radiation in the air was cut by around 37 percent. This was accomplished with Exlterra’s NSPS (Nucleus Separation Passive System) technology. Using a system of underground tubing, which protects overhead air from radiation, NSPS directs naturally-occuring particles, called positrons, toward radioactive isotopes in the soil. The positrons break apart the bonds that hold the isotopes together, then rejoin with electrons to bring radioactive material back to its original state. Positions already break radiation down in the natural world, but the process takes years. Exlterra CTO Andrew Niemczyk explained in a statement, “This invention is unique because it is the first of its kind to provide a pathway for positrons to naturally accelerate in a passive system to remove contaminated areas. It harnesses renewable energy sources present in nature to considerably accelerate the natural decomposition process of contaminants in the soil.” Exlterra is hopeful that a complete decontamination of Chernobyl could be possible within four years. What a speedy recovery that would be!

[Image description: A sun-bleached warning sign at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the Ukraine.] Credit & copyright: ArticCynda, Wikimedia Commons, image cropped for size
 

Lights out? Not anymore. Researchers at the University of South Australia (UniSA) and a company called Impact Absorbing Systems (IAS) are currently working together to develop a traffic light that can withstand car crashes. Lead researcher Dr. Mohammad Uddin explained, in a statement, “Existing traffic lights are rigid steel, hollow structures which cause severe and fatal injuries to pedestrians and motorists when a vehicle smashes into them...The cost to human life is bad enough, but they also leave councils with a significant bill to repair and replace them.”
 
In Australia, at least, that bill can be as high as $16 million every year. The researchers’ new traffic light design should save money and lives by building upon IAS’s existing bollard design, which features a polyurethane cartridge that sits inside a cone-shaped cavity in the foundation of a bollard, a short, vertical post. When struck, the polyurethane deforms to absorb the impact, allowing the bollard to tilt. This deflects the front of the vehicle slightly upward, lessening the severity of the impact on passengers. As an added bonus, the bollard is also 10 times stronger than conventional, rigid ones. Uddin and his team are in the process of testing out the best configurations for integrating the bollard into the pole of a traffic light, giving the structure energy-absorbing qualities and durability that could end up saving lives. Hopes are high that the project can be completed in 12 months. Until then, drive safe, Australia!
 

[Image description: A traffic light with a red heart design lit up.] Credit & copyright: tomgirlby, Pixabay
 

It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi blockbuster, but NASA is testing out a very real asteroid-defense system. On November 23, the agency launched DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The experimental, 1,200-pound spacecraft, which launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is meant to crash into the asteroid Dimorphos in September. Although the 525-foot-long asteroid poses no threat to earth, If DART can knock Dimorphos off course, it would prove that averting future, earth-bound asteroids might be possible.
 
“Although there isn’t a currently known asteroid that’s on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,” Lindley Johnson, Planetary Defense Officer at NASA, said in a statement. “The key to planetary defense is finding them well before they are an impact threat.” In order for DART’s mission to be considered a success, the craft will have to use its onboard camera and navigation software to locate and slam into Dimorphos at over 14 thousand miles per hour. The crash would then need to cut at least 73 seconds off of Dimorphos’s usual 11-hour, 55-minute orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos, though mission organizers are hoping for an overall reduction of 10 minutes. Knocking an earth-bound asteroid off-course by even a small amount could save the planet, provided it was done far enough in advance. Of course, it’s not quite as dramatic as blowing up an asteroid Armageddon-style, but you can still blast Aerosmith while watching NASA’s DART livesteam.

[Image description: An illustration of an asteroid approaching Earth. Credit & copyright: 9866112, Pixabay