Proteins aptly called transcription factors bind to a place in the gene — a promoter — as well as to a more distant DNA spot, an enhancer. Though scientists have long known that transcription factors dictate whether or not a gene powers up, it’s been mysterious how these proteins navigate the ridiculously crowded space in the nucleus to find their binding sites. Invented by cell biologist and microscopist Robert Singer and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, MS2 tagging allowed scientists to see mRNAs in living cells for the very first time.

While trying to work out how to spend her time while the elements calmed down, Madin happened across a large satellite image of the island and its surrounding lagoon. “It’s a teeming city on the reef and then when you move away, it’s like a desert,” says Madin. The idea is that fish and sea urchins that live within the reefs gobble up anything that grows nearby, leaving bare sand behind.

In recent years, numerous studies have shown that measurements of the Hubble constant from the cosmic microwave background—the faint afterglow of the infant universe—are at odds with estimates from far younger stars, such as those in our Milky Way, even after taking into account other mysterious cosmic forces such as dark energy, which is accelerating the universe’s expansion. But based on fresh measurements of our cosmic neighborhood from the Hubble Space Telescope, Riess and his colleagues say that the mismatch is not only real, it’s wider than ever. Calculating the Hubble constant, and thus the expansion rate of the universe, based on the movements of stars requires two kinds of data: how far away a given star is, and how quickly it’s receding from us.

The 2017 clinical trial, called CANTOS (Canakinumab Anti-Inflammatory Thrombosis Outcomes Study), is the result of a long-term collaboration between Paul Ridker and Peter Libby, who suspected as long ago as the 1980s that inflammation played a role in cardiovascular disease. Libby further found that IL-1, by altering gene expression in local blood vessel cells, amplifies its signal at the site of the disease. Roni Nowarski, assistant professor of neurology and immunology, explains that inflammation is important across a range of seemingly distinct pathologies because immune cells are everywhere, even resident in organs, where they play an important role in monitoring and maintaining health.

Credit: UCSFTo train the system, the researchers asked people without speech disabilities to carefully read sentences while the researchers recorded their neural activity. Mesgarani’s team focused on neural activity in the sensory cortex, the part of the brain where speech perception happens, while the UCSF team focused on the motor cortex, the part of the brain where the muscular movements behind speech production occurs. By modeling the vocal tract movements, “the authors tap into existing neural processes for speech production that are likely generative as they demonstrated in their mimed-speech condition, and somewhat more intuitive for individuals to use in future clinical applications to restore speech for individuals with severe speech and physical impairments,” says Jonathan Brumberg of the University of Kansas who was not involved with the study.

This vital umbilical cord to the world above carried power, communications, heat and air to his diving suit 100m (328ft) below the surface of the sea. Over the next 30 minutes at the bottom of the North Sea, Lemons would experience something that few people have lived to talk about: he ran out of air. The three climbed into the diving bell, which would be lowered from the ship, the Bibby Topaz, to the sea bed where they would carry out their repair work.

The authors behind this latest study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, say theirs is one of the first to look at what’s happening in the auditory cortex of people living with blindness. They scanned the auditory cortexes of people who were born blind or developed blindness early in life (including some people with anophthalmia, a condition where the eyes are completely absent) via MRI. In those who were blind, the auditory cortex appeared to be more attuned to frequencies of sound played in the test, based on the kinds of brain activity the researchers saw in the scans.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is the world’s second-largest reservoir of fresh water sitting on the world’s largest island. Suffice it to say: The Greenland Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to refill the Great Lakes 115 times over, is very large. A new study finds that the Greenland Ice Sheet added a quarter inch of water to global sea levels in just the past eight years.

Following Trelles’ lead, Cueto included Wollstonecraft’s work in the catalog bibliography for his own 2002 HistoryMiami Museum exhibit on Cuban flora and fauna without having laid eyes on it or knowing whether it had even survived. Cueto had searched for the manuscript perhaps a hundred times or more in online library catalogs to no avail, but in March 2018, it finally popped up. The author’s name was misspelled as “Wollstonecroft,” reflecting the ambiguous last cursive vowel on the manuscript’s title page.

Now that observatories have begun to record gravitational waves on a regular basis, scientists are discussing how dark matter—only known so far to interact with other matter only through gravity—might create gravitational waves strong enough to be found. Since that first detection, the LIGO collaboration—together with the collaboration that runs a partner gravitational-wave observatory called Virgo—has detected gravitational waves from at least 10 more mergers of black holes and, in 2017, the first merger between two neutron stars. By using gravitational waves to learn about the properties of black holes, LIGO might be able to prove or constrain this dark matter theory.