American scientists Award

  “Bio-Economy and Space Economy are going to spearhead India’s future growth story” says Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh at the launch of ‘Impact Report 2024’ on National Biopharma Mission at the National Biopharma Mission Conclave celebrating its 5 years journey at the Dr. Ambedkar International Centre, New Delhi. Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology, Dr Jitendra Singh recalled the journey of National Biopharma Mission since its inception along with Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) “National Biopharma Mission (NBM) is Celebrating 5 Years of Pioneering Success” and called it a milestone. The National Biopharma Mission (NBM)- Innovate in India (I3) is an Industry-Academia Collaborative Mission for Accelerating Discovery Research for development of Biopharmaceuticals. BIRAC has the mandate to enable and nurture an ecosystem for preparing India’s technological and product development capabilities in bio pharmaceutica...

The human brain is an engineering marvel: 86 billion neurons form some 100 trillion connections to create a network so complex that it is, ironically, mind boggling. This week scientists published the highest-resolution map yet of one small piece of the brain, a tissue sample one cubic millimeter in size. The resulting data set comprised 1,400 terabytes. (If they were to reconstruct the entire human brain, the data set would be a full zettabyte. That’s a billion terabytes. That’s roughly a year’s worth of all the digital content in the world.) This map is just one of many that have been in the news in recent years. (I wrote about another brain map last year.) So this week I thought we could walk through some of the ways researchers make these maps and how they hope to use them. Scientists have been trying to map the brain for as long as they’ve been studying it. One of the most well-known brain maps came from German anatomist Korbinian Brodmann. In the early 1900s, he took section...

Neurodegenerative diseases occur when nerve cells in the brain and peripheral nervous system lose function and eventually die. They include Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease , and amyotrophic lateral sclerosisTrusted Source (ALS — also known as motor neuron disease), among othersTrusted Source In the United States, an estimated 6.9 million people aged 65 and over are living with Alzheimer’s disease, and around a million have Parkinson’s. ALS is less common; the CDC estimates that around 31,000 peopleTrusted Source in the U.S. have the condition. Current treatments can alleviate symptoms and some slow the progression of the diseases, but no cures are yet available. New monoclonal antibody treatments for Alzheimer’s have shown some potential for modifying the course of the disease, but many experts are concerned about side effects. In the search for new therapies, research from Penn State University has identified a group of proteins that could be a target for new treatments f...

A new report makes the strong case that a class of industrial chemicals called endocrine disruptors are behind many diseases on the rise globally. The report calls for stronger global regulations controlling their use and release into the environment. A joint effort by the Endocrine Society and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), the report includes fresh research from the past decade documenting evidence that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) contribute to reproductive disorders, cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, neurological conditions, reduced immune function, chronic inflammation, and other serious health conditions. Research shows the chemicals to be especially dangerous to pregnant women and to children. Endocrine disruptors interfere with natural human hormones and disrupt the smooth functioning of the endocrine system, which governs everything from fetal development and fertility to skin appearance, metabolism, and immune function. Some endo...

  When  Julie Moreno  arrived at Texas A&M University as a first-generation student in 2000, she wanted to work in veterinary medicine. But the opportunity to work in a research laboratory during her time as an undergraduate ignited her passion for science and changed the course of her life. “Before that, I was never exposed to research,” said Moreno. “I didn’t even know it was an option.” Once she had discovered this career path, she never looked back. After completing her undergraduate degree, she applied to a PhD program at Colorado State University (CSU), where her interest in neuroscience began to blossom.  “I love the brain,” she enthused. “It’s super exciting because there’s so many unknowns like a big puzzle that we haven’t figured out yet.”  In her graduate work, Moreno investigated the neurotoxi c effects of manganese exposure on brain development, exploring the roles of glial cells and neuroinflammatory pathways in mediating these effe...

  There’s a glaring gap in our knowledge of cell metabolism : in many cases, we still don’t know exactly how nutrients are transported into the cell. Without that understanding, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to develop treatments for the many diseases linked to the protein transporters that drive metabolism. Now, a new study in   Nature Genetics   presents a tool to map these metabolic gene functions more precisely. The platform, dubbed GeneMAP, has already identified one key gene-metabolite association at the heart of mitochondrial metabolism. GeneMAP was developed in the laboratory of Kivanç Birsoy, the Chapman Perelman Associate Professor at Rockefeller, and is available to the public via an online portal. The platform builds on prior models of gene expression, using existing datasets to determine the function of metabolic genes and link their resulting proteins to candidate metabolites—relying heavily on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) ...

  In the name of science,   Dr. Nico Dosenbach   had scanned his own brain dozens of times. But this was the first time he'd taken a mind-bending substance before sliding into the MRI tunnel. "I was, like, drifting deeper into weirdness, " he recalls. "I didn't know where I was at all. Time stopped, and I was everyone." Dosenbach, an associate professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, had been given a high dose of psilocybin, the active substance in magic mushrooms, by his colleagues. It was all part of a study of seven people designed to show how psilocybin produces its mind-altering effects. The results, which appear in the journal  Nature , suggest that psychedelic drugs work by disrupting certain brain networks, especially one that helps people form a sense of space, time and self. "For the first time, with a really high degree of detail, we're understanding which networks are changing, how intensely they...

A new "sleeping giant" black hole has been discovered in the Milky Way and it is the largest of its kind discovered in the galaxy. The European Space Agency on Tuesday said scientists uncovered a “sleeping giant” black hole in the constellation Aquila less than 2,000 light-years from our planet. It is nearly 33 times the mass of our Sun, and this is the first time such a big black hole of stellar origin this big has been discovered in the Milky Way . In fact, black holes of this type have only been discovered in very distant galaxies and the new discovery challenges scientific ideas about how massive stars come about and grow. In a black hole, matter is so densely packed that nothing can escape its colossal gravitational pull, not even light. Astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) have identified the biggest stellar black hole, named Gaia BH3 , discovered in the Milky Way, with a mass 33 times that of the Sun. This black hole was detected “by chance” during data co...