Scientists discover an “impossible” cellular survival pathway that could help fight cancer - Science Daily

A lung affected by deadly forms of COVID-19 not only loses essential cells for breathing but also undergoes profound changes in its internal organization and the way its cells communicate with each other. A study involving the Sant Pau Research Institute (IR Sant Pau), published in Nature Communications, has created a spatial map of this transformation and identified some of the molecular mechanisms that accompany the progression of lung damage and fibrosis.

image: A circular lineage tree of a 13-day old mouse embryo, originating from a single cell at the center expanding outward over developmental time. Cells derived from the first cell division are marked in blue or red. How does a single fertilized egg produce all the cells in an animal’s body? This question has hung over science for decades, and it’s critical to understanding how diseases like cancer take hold and spread in the body. A new study in the journal Science led by researchers from the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology (Seattle Hub)—comprised of the Allen Institute, UW Medicine, and Biohub—moves us closer to the answer.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.