Inside the Global Scavenger Hunt to Beat the ‘Antibiotic Apocalypse’
Faced with a looming crisis, scientists are testing lizard blood, climbing mountains, and digging up graves
It’s said that for nearly 200 years, residents of a small rural area in Northern Ireland called Boho (pronounced “bo”), have practiced a strange and solemn pilgrimage to a local chapel. Over time, bacteria naturally evolve resistance to pharmaceutical antibiotics, but we have exacerbated the problem by overprescribing those antibiotics, both in human medicine and by giving the same drugs to animals. But for researchers, it is the hope of a new drug, a new class of antibiotics, that has them excited.

Within the cave’s cool confines in 1980, a local monk happened on something unexpected: a jaw with two huge teeth that, while human, was definitely not like that of humans today. A detailed analysis of its physical features as well as proteins extracted from the fossil suggest that the mandible, dated to 160,000 years ago, comes from the enigmatic human population known as the Denisovans—a sister group to the Neanderthals previously identified from scant remains found in a single cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. A study published earlier this year suggested that what we call Denisovans might actually be three distinct genetic lines, one of which is nearly as different from other Denisovans as they are from Neanderthals But the similarity of proteins across groups and through generations makes it difficult to pinpoint precisely how similar the owner of the jaw is to these three Denisovan lines—or if it was from yet another sister group.

“This is the first impact flash unambiguously recorded on the Moon during a lunar eclipse and discussed in the scientific literature,” the authors write. The night of the lunar eclipse in early 2019 did not coincide with any major meteor showers on Earth, and based upon their analysis, the Spanish scientists said they are 99 percent sure the impact was associated with a random or “sporadic” meteoroid—the same kind of meteors that people on Earth see in the night sky when there are no active meteor showers. These impacts can be fairly bright because the Moon lacks an atmosphere, and so some strikes hit the lunar surface traveling as fast as 30km/s, releasing a flash of light and heat that can be seen from Earth.

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.