Forget artificial sweeteners. Researchers are now developing new forms of real sugar, to deliver sweetness with fewer calories. But tricking our biology is no easy feat. From a report: Until the late eighteenth century, when sugar production started to become mechanized, most people consumed very little of what nutritionists call "free" or "added" sugars -- sweeteners other than, say, the lactose naturally present in milk and the fructose naturally present in fruit. In 1800, an average American would have lived and died never having encountered a single manufactured candy, let alone the array of sugar-sweetened yogurts, snacks, sauces, dressings, cereals, and drinks that now line supermarket shelves. Today, that average American ingests more than nineteen teaspoons of added sugar every day. Not only does most of that never come into contact with our taste buds; our sweet receptors are also less effective than those for other tastes. Our tongues can detect bitterness at concentrations as low as a few parts per million, but, for a glass of water to taste sweet, we have to add nearly a teaspoon of sugar. DouxMatok's method of restructuring sugar crystals was invented by Baniel's father, Avraham, an industrial chemist. He patented the technique five years ago, when he was ninety-six; today, at the age of a hundred and one, he has finally retired. At one point during my visit, Eran sifted through a pile of his father's memorabilia -- black-and-white photographs, identification cards, university certificates -- to find illustrations for a forthcoming presentation about the company. Many of the photographs were new to Eran, and, as he tried to place them, the outline of his father's life emerged: a six-year-old Polish boy sent to boarding school in what was then the British Palestine Mandate; a student at the University of Montpellier; a promising young scientist, strikingly handsome, exempted from serving in the British Army's Palestine Regiment so that he could make bombs in the basement of a paint factory near Haifa. [...] Estella Belfer, a pastry chef who is a judge on the TV show "Bake-Off Israel," hopes to use Incredo exclusively one day, but, recently, she told me about some of the challenges of cooking with it. "To make chocolate, it's easy. I just substitute the sugar with a smaller amount. In shortbread cookies, it is an improvement -- it makes them crispier," she said. "But in the cupcakes and the sponge cakes -- this is where there is an art to using Incredo sugar." Sugar is responsible for much of the tender, springy texture of a good cake; Incredo sugar behaves exactly the same way, but there's a lot less of it, which creates a problem. Belfer told me that she has successfully blended other ingredients, including soluble fibre and plant proteins, to restore the missing bulk and fluffiness -- "but it's not easy."

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University of California at Berkeley has made a big announcement: Transistors based on carbon rather than silicon could potentially boost computers' speed and cut their power consumption more than a thousandfold — think of a mobile phone that holds its charge for months — but the set of tools needed to build working carbon circuits has remained incomplete until now. A team of chemists and physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, has finally created the last tool in the toolbox, a metallic wire made entirely of carbon, setting the stage for a ramp-up in research to build carbon-based transistors and, ultimately, computers. "Staying within the same material, within the realm of carbon-based materials, is what brings this technology together now," said Felix Fischer, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry, noting that the ability to make all circuit elements from the same material makes fabrication easier. "That has been one of the key things that has been missing in the big picture of an all-carbon-based integrated circuit architecture." Heat was used to induce the molecules to join together, in a process Fischer compares to an atomic-scale set of Legos. "They are all precisely engineered so that there is only one way they can fit together. It's as if you take a bag of Legos, and you shake it, and out comes a fully assembled car. That is the magic of controlling the self-assembly with chemistry..." "I believe this technology will revolutionize how we build integrated circuits in the future..." Fischer said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The medal awarded on Friday lauded the "lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty" for work detecting land mines in Cambodia. Its recipient: a rat named Magawa. Magawais the first rat to receive the award -- a gold medal bestowed by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity, that is often called the "animal's George Cross" after an honor usually given to civilians that recognizes acts of bravery and heroism. Not since the fictional Remy of the 2007 Disney-Pixar film "Ratatouille" has a rat done so much to challenge the public's view of the animals as creatures more commonly seen scuttling through sewers and the subway: Magawa has discovered 39 land mines and 28 pieces of unexploded ordnance, and helped clear more than 1.5 million square feet of land over the past four years. More than five million land mines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during the ousting of the Khmer Rouge and internal conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. Parts of the country are also littered with unexploded ordnance dropped in United States airstrikes during the Vietnam War, a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service found. Since 1979, more than 64,000 people have been injured by land mines and other explosives in Cambodia, and more than 25,000 amputees have been recorded there, according to the HALO Trust, the world's largest humanitarian land mine clearance charity. Magawa, the most successful rat to have taken part in the program, was trained to detect TNT, the chemical compound within explosives. The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector. He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.

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Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals. STAT reports: "Together, the two papers show that intelligence/consciousness are grounded in connectivity and activity patterns of neurons" in the most neuron-dense part of the bird brain, called the pallium, neurobiologist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, who wrote an analysis of the studies for Science, told STAT. "Brains can appear diverse, and at the same time share profound similarities. The extent to which similar properties present themselves might be simply a matter of scale: how many neurons are available to work." The study shows that neurons in the most complex part of the crows' brain, the pallium, "do have activity that represents not what was shown to them, but what they later report," said Herculano-Houzel. Neurons "represent what the animals next report to have seen -- whether or not that is what they were shown," she said. The neurons figure this out, so to speak, during the time lapse between when Nieder tells the birds the rule and when they peck the target to indicate their answer. "That's exactly what one would expect from neurons that participated in building the thoughts that we later report," she said, suggesting that corvids "are as cognitively capable as monkeys and even great apes." A second study, also in Science, looked in unprecedented detail at the neuroanatomy of pigeons and barn owls, finding hints to the basis of their intelligence that likely applies to corvids', too. STAT reports: Specifically, the pigeons' and owls' neurons meet at right angles, forming computational circuits organized in columns. "The avian version of this connectivity blueprint could conceivably generate computational properties reminiscent of the [mammalian] neocortex," they write. "[S]imilar microcircuits ... achieve largely identical cognitive outcomes from seemingly vastly different forebrains." That is, evolution invented connected, circuit-laden brain structure at least twice. "In theory, any brain that has a large number of neurons connected into associative circuitry ... could be expected to add flexibility and complexity to behavior," said Herculano-Houzel. "That is my favorite operational definition of intelligence: behavioral flexibility." That enables pigeons to home, count, and be as trainable as monkeys. But for sheer smarts we're still in the corvid camp.

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In mice and one person, scientists were able to reproduce out-of-body experiences often associated with ketamine by inducing certain brain cells to fire together in a slow-rhythmic fashion. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. NPR reports: "There was a rhythm that appeared and it was an oscillation that appeared only when the patient was dissociating," says Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Stanford University. Dissociation is a brain state in which a person feels separated from their own thoughts, feelings and body. It is common in people with some mental illnesses, or who have experienced a traumatic event. It can also be induced by certain drugs, including ketamine and PCP (angel dust). Deisseroth's lab made the discovery while studying the brains of mice that had been given ketamine or other drugs that cause dissociation. The team was using technology that allowed them to monitor the activity of cells throughout the brain "It was like pointing a telescope at a new part of the sky," Deisseroth says. "And something really unexpected jumped out at us." What jumped out was a very distinct rhythm produced by cells in an area involved in learning and navigation. Those cells were firing three times each second. To learn more, the team used a tool called optogenetics, which Deisseroth helped invent. It uses light to control the firing of specific cells in the brain. As a result, the team was able to artificially generate this rhythm in the brains of mice. We could see, right before our eyes, dissociation happening," Deisseroth says.

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Scientists have produced gene-edited animals they say could serve as "super dads" or "surrogate sires." The BBC reports: The pigs, goats, cattle and mice make sperm carrying the genetic material of donor animals. The researchers used a hi-tech gene editing tool to knock out a male fertility gene in animal embryos. The animals were born sterile, but began producing sperm after an injection of sperm-producing cells from donor animals. The technique would enable surrogate males to sire offspring carrying the genetic material of valuable elite animals such as prize bulls, said a US-UK team. This would be a step towards genetically enhancing livestock to improve food production, they added. Further reading: EurekAlert

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The distinctive Pringles tube is being re-designed after criticism that it's almost impossible to recycle. The current container for the potato-based snack was condemned as a recycler's nightmare. It's a complex construction with a metal base, plastic cap, metal tear-off lid, and foil-lined cardboard sleeve. The Recycling Association dubbed it the number one recycling villain -- along with the Lucozade Sports bottle. Now Pringles' maker Kellogg's is trialling a simpler can -- although experts say it's not a full solution. The existing version is particularly troublesome because it combines so many different materials Some 90% of the new can is paper. Around 10% is a polyal (plastic) barrier that seals the interior to protect the food against oxygen and moisture which would damage the taste. But how about the lid? Well, two options are on trial in some Tesco stores -- a recyclable plastic lid and a recyclable paper lid. Kellogg's says these lids will still produce the distinctive "pop" associated with the product. [Simon Ellin from the Recycling Association] said the polyal-coated card might be recyclable but the product would need to be tested in recycling mills. And what of the much-criticised Lucozade Sports bottle? Mr Ellin said its unchanged basic design was still a big problem, as machines found it hard to differentiate the plastic in the bottle and the plastic that makes up its outer sleeve. He called on the makers, Suntory, to reduce the size of the external sleeve, as it has with the new Ribena bottle.

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fahrbot-bot writes: It's one of the oddest tenets of quantum theory: a particle can be in two places at once -- yet we only ever see it here or there. Textbooks state that the act of observing the particle "collapses" it, such that it appears at random in only one of its two locations. But physicists quarrel over why that would happen, if indeed it does. Now, one of the most plausible mechanisms for quantum collapse -- gravity -- has suffered a setback. The gravity hypothesis traces its origins to Hungarian physicists Karolyhazy Frigyes in the 1960s and Lajos Diosi in the 1980s. The basic idea is that the gravitational field of any object stands outside quantum theory. It resists being placed into awkward combinations, or "superpositions," of different states. So if a particle is made to be both here and there, its gravitational field tries to do the same -- but the field cannot endure the tension for long; it collapses and takes the particle with it. Still, the hypothesis seemed impossible to probe with any realistic technology, notes Diosi, now at the Wigner Research Center, and a co-author on the new paper. "For 30 years, I had been always criticized in my country that I speculated on something which was totally untestable." New methods now make this doable. In the new study, Diosi and other scientists looked for one of the many ways, whether by gravity or some other mechanism, that a quantum collapse would reveal itself: A particle that collapses would swerve randomly, heating up the system of which it is part. "It is as if you gave a kick to a particle," says co-author Sandro Donadi of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. If the particle is charged, it will emit a photon of radiation as it swerves. And multiple particles subject to the same gravitational lurch will emit in unison. "You have an amplified effect," says co-author Catalina Curceanu of National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Rome.

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sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: About 3000 years ago, thousands of warriors fought on the banks of the Tollense river in northern Germany. They wielded weapons of wood, stone, and bronze to deadly effect: Over the past decade, archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of hundreds of people buried in marshy soil. It's one of the largest prehistoric conflicts ever discovered. Now, genetic testing of the skeletons reveals the homelands of the warriors—and unearths a shocker about early European diets: These soldiers couldn't digest fresh milk... The results leave scientists more puzzled than ever about exactly when and why Europeans began to drink milk. "Natural genetic drift can't explain it, and there's no evidence that it was population turnover either," says Christina Warinner, a geneticist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who was not involved with the study. "It's almost embarrassing that this is the strongest example of selection we have and we can't really explain it." Perhaps something about fresh milk helped people ward off disease in the increasingly crowded and pathogen-ridden European towns and villages of the Iron Age and Roman period, says the study's co-author. But he admits he's baffled too. "We have to find a reason why you need this drink."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The smell of summer in Los Angeles, or any major city, is often tinged with asphalt. A freshly paved road or a new tar roof doesn't just wrinkle your nose, however: A new study suggests fresh asphalt is a significant, yet overlooked, source of air pollution. In fact, the material's contribution to one kind of particulate air pollution could rival or even exceed that of cars and trucks. "It's a super cool paper," says Allen Robinson, an environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved with the research. "Asphalt could be a big, important contributor" to air pollution, he says. Air quality has improved over the past several decades in California and many other parts of the United States, largely because of cleaner exhaust from vehicles and power plants. Despite that, air pollution still contributes to many health problems -- ranging from asthma to heart attacks. And many sources of air pollution continue to be a problem, from livestock emissions to volatile organic compounds from paints, cleaning products, and personal care products (especially those that contain fragrances, such as shampoo). Yet, when scientists looked at all the known sources of air pollution in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, they didn't add up. Some sources had not yet been identified. "Asphalt was something that jumped out to us," says Drew Gentner, an environmental engineer at Yale University who led the new study. The material, made from crude oil or similar substances, contains the kinds of semivolatile organic compounds that lead to some types of air pollution. There's also a lot of it. Gentner and colleagues gathered two types of fresh road asphalt and heated them in a laboratory furnace. They also tested new asphalt shingles and liquid asphalts used for roofing. They reasoned that new material should release more chemicals than older material, and they wanted to see how the emission rate changes as the fresh asphalt ages.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Engineers at Purdue University have created a printing process by which you can coat paper or cardboard with "highly fluorinated molecules." This then makes the coated paper dust, oil, and water-repellent, meaning you can then print multiple circuit layers onto the paper without smudging the ink. According to a paper the engineers published in Nano Energy, these "triboelectric areas" are then capable of "self-powered Bluetooth wireless communication." That's science-speak to say that paper printed and coated in this way doesn't require external batteries as it generates electricity from contact with a user's finger. You can see a demonstration of how the tech works in these two videos. In the first video, Purdue engineers have a paper keypad that's been treated with the aforementioned "omniphobic" coating. The paper keypad is then doused in some neon-green solution. In the second video, you can then see a person use the paper keypad to actually type on a laptop with a disabled keyboard. In a third video, Purdue's team printed a forward, back, mute, and volume bar on the back of a piece of paper. In it, you can see someone controlling audio playback by dragging their finger along the volume bar, as well as skipping forward and back in the music queue. While the tech itself is pretty cool, another neat aspect is that because it works on paper and cardboard, it would be relatively inexpensive, flexible, and quick to make. That makes it a good candidate for things like smart packaging.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The predation of livestock by carnivores, and the retaliatory killing of carnivores as a result, is a major global conservation challenge. Such human-wildlife conflicts are a key driver of large carnivore declines and the costs of coexistence are often disproportionately borne by rural communities in the global south. While current approaches tend to focus on separating livestock from wild carnivores, for instance through fencing or lethal control, this is not always possible or desirable. Alternative and effective non-lethal tools that protect both large carnivores and livelihoods are urgently needed. In a new study we describe how painting eyes on the backsides of livestock can protect them from attack. Many big cats -- including lions, leopards, and tigers -- are ambush predators. This means that they rely on stalking their prey and retaining the element of surprise. In some cases, being seen by their prey can lead them to abandon the hunt. We tested whether we could hack into this response to reduce livestock losses to lions and leopards in Botswana's Okavango delta region. This delta, in north-west Botswana, has permanent marshlands and seasonally flooded plains which host a wide variety of wildlife. It's a Unesco world heritage site and parts of the delta are protected. However, though livestock are excluded, the cordon fence is primarily intended to prevent contact and disease transmission between cattle and Cape buffalo. Large carnivores, and other wildlife including elephants, are able to move freely across it, and livestock losses to large carnivores are common in the area. In response, lethal control through shooting and poisoning can occur.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NewAtlas: After an almost two-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is beginning to fire back up for its next phase of probing the mysteries of physics. Its newest particle accelerator, Linac 4, completed its first test run over the past few weeks, with the potential to provide much more energetic beams than ever before. The LHC paused operations in December 2018, beginning a massive overhaul called the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). When it's fully finished and finally fired up in 2026, the upgraded facility will be seven times more powerful and will collect around 10 times more data in the following decade than it did during the previous run. And now, the first incremental stage of this upgrade is coming online. The new linear accelerator, called Linac 4, has been installed and tested over the last few weeks. This device is the starting point for accelerating protons, which are then injected into the Proton Synchrotron (PS) Booster and onto the rest of the accelerator complex. Linac 4 replaces Linac 2, which was in operation at CERN for 40 years. As you might expect the new model is significantly more powerful, injecting particles into the PS Booster at energies up to 160 MeV -- much higher than Linac 2's 50 MeV. By the time these beams are boosted, they'll reach energies of 2 GeV, compared to the 1.4 GeV that Linac 2 was capable of. This extra energy is thanks to the fact that scientists can tweak Linac 4's beams in much more detail than its predecessor. In the three weeks up to mid-August, Linac 4 was tested with low-energy beams of negative hydrogen ions, running only through the first part of the accelerator. On August 20, it was finally cranked right up to maximum energy, with beams accelerated through the whole machine. These were then sent into a "beam dump" at the end, a device that catches and absorbs the particles.

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Back in 2012, a team of Japanese and Belgian researchers in Antarctica found a golf ball-sized space rock resting in the snow. Now, NASA astronauts have had a chance to study a piece of that meteorite, Asuka 12236, and they say it may hold new clues about the development of life. From a report: Inside the meteorite, astrobiologists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center found a high concentration of amino acids, particularly aspartic and glutamic acids. Those are two of the 20 amino acids that make millions of proteins, which are essential for the bodily functions of animals. Researchers have found amino acids in other space rocks, but not at such a high concentration. Perhaps most surprisingly, Asuka 12236 contains more left-handed versions of some amino acids. While there are right-handed and left-handed versions of each amino acid, life as we know it uses only left-handed amino acids to build proteins. Researchers want to know why there was an imbalance toward left-handed amino acids and what kinds of space conditions might have led to that. They believe Asuka 12236 was exposed to very little heat or water -- two important clues.

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New submitter HotSyncer shares a report from Phys.Org: [I]n a paper published on Aug. 17, in Nature Nanotechnology, Stanford scientists demonstrate a new approach to slow light significantly, much like an echo chamber holds onto sound, and to direct it at will. Researchers in the lab of Jennifer Dionne, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, structured ultrathin silicon chips into nanoscale bars to resonantly trap light and then release or redirect it later. These "high-quality-factor" or "high-Q" resonators could lead to novel ways of manipulating and using light, including new applications for quantum computing, virtual reality and augmented reality; light-based WiFi; and even the detection of viruses like SARS-CoV-2. "We're essentially trying to trap light in a tiny box that still allows the light to come and go from many different directions," said postdoctoral fellow Mark Lawrence, who is also lead author of the paper. "It's easy to trap light in a box with many sides, but not so easy if the sides are transparent -- as is the case with many Silicon-based applications."

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Nearly 60 years ago, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner captured one of the many oddities of quantum mechanics in a thought experiment. He imagined a friend of his, sealed in a lab, measuring a particle such as an atom while Wigner stood outside. Quantum mechanics famously allows particles to occupy many locations at once -- a so-called superposition -- but the friend's observation "collapses" the particle to just one spot. Yet for Wigner, the superposition remains: The collapse occurs only when he makes a measurement sometime later. Worse, Wigner also sees the friend in a superposition. Their experiences directly conflict. Now, researchers in Australia and Taiwan offer perhaps the sharpest demonstration that Wigner's paradox is real. In a study published this week in Nature Physics, they transform the thought experiment into a mathematical theorem that confirms the irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the scenario. The team also tests the theorem with an experiment, using photons as proxies for the humans. Whereas Wigner believed resolving the paradox requires quantum mechanics to break down for large systems such as human observers, some of the new study's authors believe something just as fundamental is on thin ice: objectivity. It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact, one that is as true for me as it is for you.

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Time magazine reports on is a big scientific advance: "the understanding that our bodies often operate according to different clocks." Although the federal government recommends that Americans sleep seven or more hours per night for optimal health and functioning, new research is challenging the assumption that sleep is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Scientists have found that our internal body clocks vary so greatly that they could form the next frontiers of personalized medicine... Human sleep is largely a mystery. We know it's important; getting too little is linked to heightened risk for metabolic disorders, Type 2 diabetes, psychiatric disorders, autoimmune disease, neurodegeneration and many types of cancer. "It's probably true that bad sleep leads to increased risks of virtually every disorder," says Dr. Louis Ptacek, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco... The ideal sleep duration has long been thought to be universal. "There are many people who think everyone needs eight to eight and a half hours of sleep per night and there will be health consequences if they don't get it," says Ptacek. "But that's as crazy as saying everybody has to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall. It's just not true..." About a decade ago, Ptacek's wife Ying-Hui Fu discovered the first human gene linked to natural short sleep; people who had a rare genetic mutation seemed to get the same benefits from six hours of sleep a night as those without the mutation got from eight hours. In 2019, Fu and Ptacek discovered two more genes connected to natural short sleep, and they'll soon submit a paper describing a fourth, providing even more evidence that functioning well on less sleep is a genetic trait... Doctors once dismissed short sleepers as depressed or suffering from insomnia. Yet short sleepers may actually have an edge over everyone else. Research is still early, but Fu has found that besides being more efficient at sleep, they tend to be more energetic and optimistic and have a higher tolerance for pain than people who need to spend more time in bed. They also tend to live longer.

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Squid are among the smartest ocean dwellers. Along with other ink-squirting cephalopods like octopuses and cuttlefish, squid boast the largest brains of all invertebrates. They also have an incredibly complex nervous system capable of instantaneously camouflaging their bodies and communicating with each other using various signals. From a report: Scientists have long marveled at these sophisticated behaviors and have tried to understand why these tentacled creatures are so intelligent. Gene editing may be able to help researchers unravel the mysteries of the cephalopod brain. But until now, it's been too hard to do -- in part because cephalopod embryos are protected by a hard outer layer that makes manipulating them difficult. Recently, a group of marine scientists managed to engineer the first genetically altered squid using the DNA editing tool CRISPR. In addition to being a big milestone in biology, the advance has potential implications for human health: Because of their big brains, cephalopods are used to study neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The ability to edit the genes of these animals could help scientists study the genes involved in learning and memory as well as specific cephalopod behaviors. "I think you're going to see a huge jump in the use of these [gene-edited] organisms by neurobiologists," Joshua Rosenthal, PhD, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and a key architect of the first genetically engineered squid, tells OneZero. Rosenthal and his colleagues used CRISPR to snip out a gene responsible for the coloring of the squid's skin. As a result, the edited squid were transparent instead of having their usual reddish spots. The results were published July 30 in the journal Current Biology. But why bother to create a colorless squid? Rosenthal says the pigmentation gene was a logical starting place for experimentation. "If you see the pigmentation go away, it's easy to see if the gene editing is working," he explains. Being able to tinker with cephalopod DNA will allow scientists to better study what their individual genes do at a very basic level. The accomplishment wasn't easy. Scientists have successfully made gene-edited mice, monkeys, and other research animals to help them study a range of behaviors and medical conditions. But until now, they hadn't been successful at manipulating the genes of cephalopods.

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