When a dog shakes water off its fur, the action is not just a random flurry of movements — nor a deliberate effort to drench anyone standing nearby.

This instinctive reflex is shared by many furry mammals including mice, cats, squirrels, lions, tigers and bears. The move helps animals to remove water, insects or other irritants from hard-to-reach places. But underlying the shakes is a complex — and previously mysterious — neurological mechanism.

Now, researchers have identified the neural circuit that triggers characteristic ‘wet dog’ shaking behaviour in mice — which involves a specific class of touch receptors, and neurons that connect the spinal cord to the brain. Their findings were published in Science on 7 November.

“The touch system is so complex and rich that [it] can distinguish a water droplet from a crawling insect from the gentle touch of a loved one,” says Kara Marshall, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. “It’s really remarkable to be able to link a very specific subset of touch receptors to this familiar and understandable behaviour.”

Research article was featured on the cover of this issue of Science, with a glorious picture of a brown bear doing the "wet dog shake" (https://www.science.org/toc/science/current)

Research article: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq8834

Please let me know if there is paywall

Brought to you by PubTator 3.0: an AI-powered literature resource for unlocking biomedical knowledge

(This is actually tooth loss but it was annotated as "/LOSS" in the data. Also this is not a paper on tooth loss)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/pubtator3/publication/30090999?text=@DISEASE_Tooth_Loss

Feeding a baby born by caesarean section milk containing a tiny bit of their mother’s poo introduces beneficial microbes to their gut, according to a clinical trial. The approach might one day help to prevent diseases during childhood and later in life.

Some studies show that babies born by c-section, rather than vaginal birth, have a higher risk of asthma, inflammation of the digestive system and other diseases associated with a dysfunctional immune system... Experiments have attempted to compensate for that by swabbing babies born by c-section with microbes from their mother’s vagina or giving them these microbes orally, a practice known as ‘vaginal seeding’. But this technique has had limited success, because vaginal microbes, scientists have learnt, cannot effectively colonize infants’ guts...

Helve and his colleagues have been pioneers in testing whether faecal transplants can instead improve the health of a baby’s microbiome. In their latest trial, which recruited women scheduled for a c-section at the Helsinki University Hospital, the researchers mixed a fluid containing 3.5 milligrams of a mother’s poo into milk and gave the concoction to the corresponding baby. They did this for 15 babies during their first feed. Another 16 babies received a placebo.

An important next step in the field, Shao says, would be to pinpoint the specific maternal gut microbes that are most likely to transmit to and colonize their babies’ guts. Shao asks: “If these species do exist across human populations, wouldn’t it be more effective and safer” to give newborns a laboratory-made transplant that’s guaranteed to be pathogen-free?

"This is the shit"

But seriously don't try this at home. Fecal matters can contain pathogens, in fact 54 of the 90 women screened were excluded because of detected pathogens. If this goes well maybe ppl can make some type of lab-made probiotics for C-section babies or stuff

The abstract presented at IDWeek 2024: https://idweek2024.eventscribe.net/index.asp?presTarget=2886841

A newly described species of tardigrade is giving scientists insights into what makes these tiny eight-legged creatures so resistant to radiation.

Now, scientists have sequenced the genome of a species new to science, and revealed some of the molecular mechanisms that give tardigrades their extraordinary resilience. Their study, published in Science on 24 October, identifies thousands of tardigrade genes that become more active when exposed to radiation. These processes point to a sophisticated defence system that involves protecting DNA from the damage that radiation causes and repairing any breaks that do occur.

The authors hope that their insights could be harnessed to help protect astronauts from radiation during space missions, clean up nuclear pollution or improve cancer treatment.

"Radiation and multi-omics sequencing go brrrr"

Original paper on Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl0799

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to create text and images almost indistinguishable from those created by humans is disrupting, if not revolutionizing, countless fields of human activity. Yet the potential for misuse is already manifest, from academic plagiarism to the mass generation of misinformation.

This week, Sumanth Dathathri at DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab in London, and his colleagues report their test of a new approach to ‘watermarking’ AI-generated text by embedding a ‘statistical signature’, a form of digital identifier, that can be used to certify the text’s origin. The word watermark comes from the era of paper and print, and describes a variation in paper thickness, not usually immediately obvious to the naked eye, that does not change the printed text. A watermark in digitally generated text or images should be similarly invisible to the user — but immediately evident to specialized software.

Dathathri and his colleagues’ work represents an important milestone for digital-text watermarking. But there is still some way to go before companies and regulators will be able to confidently state whether a piece of text is the product of a human or a machine. Given the imperatives to reduce harm from AI, more researchers need to step up to ensure that watermarking technology fulfils its promise.

This is the official paper and the Nature News report related to the SynthID project. Basically, "watermarking" to make sure the model outputs can be easily recognized computationally... but it's not foolproof. Especially relevant in light of AI regulations. News article itself contains some interesting opinions

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08025-4

GitHub repo: https://github.com/google-deepmind/synthid-text

Image description: a black cat lying down on a ledge next to a window. Only one of the hind legs is visible on the cat.

AlphaFold predicted that three sperm proteins work together to form a complex. Two of these proteins were previously known to be important for fertility. Pauli and her colleagues then confirmed that the third is also critical for fertility in both zebrafish and mice, and that the three proteins interact with one another.

The team also found that, in zebrafish, the trio creates a place for an egg protein to bind, providing a mechanism by which the two cells could recognize one another. “It’s a way to say, ‘Sperm, you found an egg’ and ‘Egg, you found a sperm’,” says Andreas Blaha, a biochemist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology and co-author of the paper.

The findings might one day yield a way to screen people struggling with infertility, to find out whether problems with this complex could be the cause, says Wright.

And the results highlight a role for AlphaFold in studying fertilisation, he adds. “We’re limited in terms of experiments,” he says. “It might be that these modelling studies have an important role to play in the future.”

In other words, the team used AlphaFold to help with discovering a three-protein complex that allows sperm & egg to bind together. And this complex seems to be conserved between zebrafish and humans (!!). Despite the news title: this study is actually less about AlphaFold and more about using it to help do very important biochemistry

Original paper (open access): A conserved fertilization complex bridges sperm and egg in vertebrates. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.09.035

"Scientists have designed a new form of insulin that can automatically switch itself on and off depending on glucose levels in the blood. In animals, this ‘smart’ insulin reduced high blood-sugar concentrations effectively while preventing levels from dropping too low... A spokesperson for Novo Nordisk says that although this study is a proof of principle of NNC2215’s glucose-sensitive insulin properties, further research to optimize the molecule is ongoing."

From the research article: "Here we report the design and properties of NNC2215, an insulin conjugate with bioactivity that is reversibly responsive to a glucose range relevant for diabetes, as demonstrated in vitro and in vivo... In animal studies, the glucose-sensitive bioactivity of NNC2215 was demonstrated to lead to protection against hypoglycaemia while partially covering glucose excursions."

Brought to you by a passionate research group from Novo Nordisk, home of the $1,349 per month weight-loss drug Wegovy

This is still fairly early-stage research so the final commercialization might take quite some time

The article itself, open access: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08042-3

This is more of me trying to understand how people imagine things, as I almost certainly have Aphantasia and didn't realize until recently... If this is against community rules, please do let me know.

The original thought experiment was from the Aphantasia subreddit. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g1e6bl/ball_on_a_table_visualization_experiment_2/

Thought experiment begins below.

Try this: Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it) a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?

Laser-induced imaging of radioactive elements was used to work out the age of an ancient cave painting on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The results reveal that the narrative scene is 51,200 years old, making it the earliest known example of representational art. This study challenges previous dating methods and suggests a deeper origin for human image-making and storytelling.

TL;DR or if you don't have access to the article: the researchers invented a faster, less-destructive and more-accurate rock art dating method & applied it to humanity's oldest known rock art in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The art is at least 51,200 years old (authors' lower estimate)!

Edit: contrary to what the news title original stated: this is the oldest representational art, not the literal oldest human-created art.

The paper itself (open access): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7

Per their error message, "See 31 million of you on HIBP!"

If anyone can provide a slightly more up-to-date souce (their X post, for example) I'd appreciate it

Hacker News post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41792500

The Telomere-to-telomere consortium's primate project. We now have complete, diploid genomes of six ape species (chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan, and siamang). Maybe this will show up on Nature or somewhere next year :D

Manuscript is literally just out on biorxiv.org past Saturday... So title/details subject to change, and unfortunately there are no fancy news articles making it any easier to read

Links:

• Relevant T2T blog post on UCSC
• The GitHub repo
• Data uploaded to NCBI