Genetic toggles, undersea farmers and exploding rockets

This week, medical researchers ruled out brainstem CT scanning alone for proof of neurologic death. Researchers at Yale presented new evidence that the brain stores and retrieves visuomotor associations in graph-like cognitive structures. And a new vision-language model generates inspection plans based on written descriptions without training.

Additionally, geneticists reported the identification of a bunch of genetic on-off switches, SpaceX blew up another Starship, and biologists identified a sea spider that farms microbes as a primary food source.

Binary expression

All known life uses gene expression to build the macromolecular machinery of cells, mostly complex proteins, using the information stored in DNA. Many genes are like dimmer switches, rising and falling with the needs of the cell at a particular point in life. But researchers at the University of Buffalo now report that roughly 20,000 human genes are either fully on or off, like circuit breaker switches. In their study, they identified 500 genes with either very high or very low expression across 27 tissue types.

The researchers linked many of these toggle genes to specific diseases and conditions, including impaired immune response to COVID-19, and vaginal atrophy, a common condition among postmenopausal women. Co-corresponding author Omer Gokcumen says, “We believe switch-like genes could one day be used to diagnose and perhaps even treat diseases. Ultimately, each of us is made up of molecular ingredients produced from our genes, and our health is directly tied to the precise and precarious combination of these ingredients. Make too much or too little, and you may have disease.”

Still yet another Starship explosion

Well, well, well. If it isn’t our old friend, an exploding SpaceX Starship. Late Wednesday, a SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a routine ground test at the Starbase launch facility. Starship is a two-stage, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to be fully reusable. However, this latest incident shines a light on the enormous challenge of sending a lift vehicle into orbit, where it would experience velocities of around 14,000 miles per hour, before a rapid-deceleration re-entry burn and either making a controlled landing or a splashdown in the ocean.

The SpaceX “fail fast, learn fast” ethos achieved the goal of a reusable booster rocket with the Super Heavy. But Super Heavy isn’t an orbital vehicle and never experiences the extreme forces the Starship would encounter, from launch to orbital insertion to atmospheric re-entry.

And NASA’s entire project—the Lunar Gateway, a return to the moon and a mission to Mars—depends on SpaceX achieving a reliable, cheaply reusable lift vehicle that can deliver heavy cargo to orbit, an engineering feat that has never been attempted or accomplished.

NASA currently has no other plans—without SpaceX, none of those exciting goals could happen. Reporting on NASA’s work toward the moon and Mars has to be considered incomplete without mentioning that the vehicle that underpins the entire venture does not actually exist.

Farmers of the deep

Researchers led by an Occidental College team have reported that three previously unknown species of Sericosura sea spiders host layers of methane- and methanol-consuming microbes on their exoskeletons, and that these microbes comprise a major source of nutrition for the host spiders. Undersea methane seeps, where methane gas escapes the Earth’s crust, foster ecosystems of microbes and animal life, including sea spiders. Researchers were baffled by the abundance of the spiders, which couldn’t be explained by predation or filter feeding.

The researchers captured 36 specimens from along the North American Pacific coast. In a shipboard experiment, spiders were incubated in methane-enriched seawater with a heavy stable carbon isotope, ¹³C, which is rare in nature. Microbes formed a biofilm on the surfaces of the spiders’ exoskeletons, and after five days, the spiders had significant ¹³C tissue enrichment, including in the gut epithelium, indicating that the microbes were ingested.

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