M87* lashes out; a deep sleep discovery; proposal to build a digital cell

I love it when researchers observe an extra-weird particle, and this week, scientists reported the observation of a particle that only has mass when it’s moving in a single direction. Good enough! An ancient DNA analysis suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred for about 7,000 years. And a new paper characterized the timeless awareness reported by people in states of deep meditation. Plus: A possible explanation for memory consolidation during sleep, a massive outburst from a famous, photogenic black hole and a proposal to BUILD THE MATRIX (for a single cell):

Neocortex probed

Researchers from Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin have published a paper in Nature Communications presenting the results of a unique study that may provide answers to an enduring mystery of sleep and memory formation.

Researchers believe that during sleep, the hippocampus replays the events of the day stored in short-term memory for transcription into long-term memory in the neocortex. Slow, synchronous oscillations of electrical voltage that occur during deep sleep control this process.

During these waves, the electrical voltage of neurons rises and falls synchronously once per second. Previous studies have shown that inducing these waves artificially during sleep improves memory, but electroencephalogram technology can’t provide a detailed view into what happens at the neuronal level.

So the researchers studied extremely rare living neocortical samples from 45 patients who had been surgically treated for epilepsy or brain tumors. Using a custom probe, they simulated the voltage fluctuations typical of slow-wave sleep and found that the synaptic connections between individual neurons are enhanced immediately after the voltage rises from low to high.

“During that brief time window, the cortex can be thought of as having been placed in a state of elevated readiness. If the brain plays back a memory at exactly this time, it is transferred to long-term memory especially effectively. So slow-wave sleep evidently supports memory formation by making the neocortex particularly receptive for many short periods of time,” says Franz Xaver Mittermaier, the study’s first author.

Object fervid

M87*, the supermassive black hole residing in the galaxy Messier 87, is famously the first black hole ever photographed by the Earth-based paparazzi at the Event Horizon Telescope project.

Now, the EHT multi-wavelength working group has announced the first-ever observation of a high-energy gamma-ray flare from this relativistic object based on nearly simultaneous spectra of the galaxy spanning the broadest wavelength range ever collected. Notably, the jet was enormous, lasting nearly three days and exceeding the size of the black hole’s event horizon by tens of millions of times.

“This marks the first gamma-ray flaring event observed in this source in over a decade, allowing us to precisely constrain the size of the region responsible for the observed gamma-ray emission. Observations—both recent ones with a more sensitive EHT array and those planned for the coming years—will provide invaluable insights and an extraordinary opportunity to study the physics surrounding M87’s supermassive black hole. These efforts promise to shed light on the disk-jet connection and uncover the origins and mechanisms behind the gamma-ray photon emission,” says Giacomo Principe, a researcher at the University of Trieste.

Proposal to imprison a unicellular Neo

A research collaborative comprising Stanford University, Genentech and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative says that cellular biology and artificial intelligence have advanced to a sufficient degree that creating a single virtual cell is feasible. A precise digital model of a human cell would conceivably provide information on the emergent properties of complex intracellular interactions and functions and create a path toward in silico experimentation that could supplant in vivo experimentation.

AI now provides tools that could underlie such a massive, dynamic system, but the sheer complexity of a single cell can’t be understated. The collaborative calls for cooperation across genetics, proteomics, medical imaging, computer science and stakeholders including academia, nonprofits and industry.

“This is a mammoth project, comparable to the genome project, requiring collaboration across disciplines, industries and nations, and we understand that fully functional models might not be available for a decade or more,” says Emma Lundberg, associate professor of bioengineering and of pathology in the schools of Engineering and Medicine at Stanford.

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