This week in science: researchers functionally cure type 1 diabetes in mice; a strange new organism could represent a completely unknown branch of the tree of life; a physicist ponders the damage a tiny black hole would cause shooting through the human body; and much more!
Type 1 Diabetes Cured in Mice Given Experimental Hybrid Treatment
Scientists have functionally cured type 1 diabetes in mice, by 'rebooting' their immune systems and transplanting new stem cells.
The treated mice had their diabetes prevented or reversed, and none of them developed the graft-versus-host disease that often occurs in humans when cells are transplanted between people.
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Scientists Cracked Open a Lunar Rock And Found a Huge Surprise
Moon rocks collected 50 years ago by the Apollo missions have now been cracked open, revealing unusual, 4.5-billion-year-old sulfur isotopes.
"My first thought was, 'Holy shmolies, that can't be right,'" says planetary scientist James Dottin of Brown University in the US.
"So we went back to make sure we had done everything properly, and we had. These are just very surprising results."
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First-of-Its-Kind Treatment Boosts Vision in Human Trial, Scientists Report
A new stem cell treatment for restoring vision lost to age-related macular degeneration has proven safe in the first human clinical trials.
Significantly, each patient experienced an improvement in vision in the eye that received the transplant that was not apparent in the other, suggesting the stem cells were doing exactly what scientists had hoped they would.
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Newly Discovered Organism Could Represent a Whole New Branch in The Tree of Life
Solarion arienae, a strange organism recently discovered in Croatian waters, could represent a completely new branch of the tree of life.
"This organism allows us to look into a very ancient chapter of cellular evolution that we previously could reconstruct only indirectly," say protistologists Ivan Čepička and Marek Valt, from Charles University in the Czech Republic, lead authors of the study.
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What if a Tiny Black Hole Shot Through Your Body? A Physicist Did The Math
A Vanderbilt physicist has calculated what damage a tiny black hole would do if it shot through a human body. Spoiler: It's not pretty.
Only at a minimum threshold will the black hole's gravity be massive enough to stretch and spaghettify your tissue on significantly damaging scales – by which point the supersonic wake has probably done enough damage on its own.
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Supplement For High Blood Pressure Clears Signs of Alzheimer's in Mice
Arginine, a supplement used to treat high blood pressure, has been shown to reduce toxic protein clumps associated with Alzheimer's in the brain.
"What makes this finding exciting is that arginine is already known to be clinically safe and inexpensive, making it a highly promising candidate for repositioning as a therapeutic option for Alzheimer's disease," says neuroscientist Yoshitaka Nagai, from Kindai University.
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