Science & Technology
Scientists grow human brain cells in rats to study diseases
Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.
It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.
“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Approaches that don’t involve taking tissue out of the human brain are “promising avenues in trying to tackle these conditions.”
The research builds upon the team’s previous work creating brain “organoids,” tiny structures resembling human organs that have also been made to represent others such as livers, kidneys, prostates, or key parts of them.
To make the brain organoids, Stanford University scientists transformed human skin cells into stem cells and then coaxed them to become several types of brain cells. Those cells then multiplied to form organoids resembling the cerebral cortex, the human brain’s outermost layer, which plays a key role in things like memory, thinking, learning, reasoning and emotions.
Scientists transplanted those organoids into rat pups 2 to 3 days old, a stage when brain connections are still forming. The organoids grew so that they eventually occupied a third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain where they were implanted. Neurons from the organoids formed working connections with circuits in the brain.
Human neurons have been transplanted in rodents before, but generally in adult animals, usually mice. Pasca, a psychiatry professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, said this is the first time these organoids have been placed into early rat brains, creating “the most advanced human brain circuitry ever built from human skin cells and a demonstration that implanted human neurons can influence an animal’s behavior.”
To examine a practical use of this approach, scientists transplanted organoids into both sides of a rat’s brain: one generated from a healthy person’s cells and another from the cells of a person with Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic condition associated with heart problems and autism spectrum disorder.
Five to six months later, they saw effects of the disease related to the activity of the neurons. There were differences in the two sides’ electrical activity, and the neurons from the person with Timothy syndrome were much smaller and didn’t sprout as many extensions that pick up input from nearby neurons.
Researchers, whose study was funded partly by the National Institutes of Health, said they could do the same sorts of experiments using organoids made from the cells of people with disorders such as autism or schizophrenia — and potentially learn new things about how these conditions affect the brain, too.
Dr. Flora Vaccarino of Yale University – who previously grew lumps containing cerebral cortex that were made with DNA from people with autism – said the study moves the field forward.
Such experiments in animals raise ethical concerns. For example, Pasca said he and his team are cognizant of the rats’ well-being and whether they still behave normally with the organoids inside them, which he says they do. Still, Pasca does not believe this should be tried in primates. Ethicists also wonder about the possibility of brain organoids in the future attaining something like human consciousness, which experts say is extremely unlikely now.
Some scientists are studying human brain organoids outside of animals. For example, researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland published a study in Nature earlier this month describing how they are growing brain-like tissue from stem cells in the lab and then mapping the cell types in various brain regions and genes regulating their development. Some are using these structures to study autism.
Science & Technology
Ethiopian volcano erupts for first time in nearly 12,000 years
Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan.
The Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar region has erupted for the first time in almost 12,000 years, sending massive ash plumes soaring up to 14 kilometres into the atmosphere, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre.
The eruption began on Sunday and lasted several hours. Hayli Gubbi, located around 800 kilometres northeast of Addis Ababa near the Eritrean border, sits within the geologically active Rift Valley, where two major tectonic plates meet. The volcano rises roughly 500 metres above the surrounding landscape.
Ash from the eruption drifted across the region, spreading over Yemen, Oman, India, and parts of Pakistan. Satellite imagery and social-media videos captured a towering column of white smoke billowing into the sky.
The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program notes that Hayli Gubbi has no recorded eruptions during the Holocene, the period dating back about 12,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age.
Volcanologist Simon Carn of Michigan Technological University also confirmed on Bluesky that the volcano had “no record of Holocene eruptions.”
A global outage at web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare began to ease on Tuesday afternoon after preventing people from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT.
Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, said it started to investigate the internal service degradation around 6:40 a.m. ET. It has deployed a fix but some customers might still be impacted as it recovers service.
The incident marked the latest hit to major online services. An outage of Amazon’s cloud service last month caused global turmoil as thousands of popular websites and apps, including Snapchat, were inaccessible due to the disruption.
Cloudflare – whose shares were down about 5% in premarket trading – runs one of the world’s largest networks that helps websites and apps load faster and stay online by protecting them from traffic surges and cyberattacks.
The latest outage prevented users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, and ChatGPT, prompting users to log outage reports with Downdetector.
Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. “We saw a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services beginning at 11:20 UTC. That caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors,” the company said in an emailed statement.
“We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors.”
X and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. – REUTERS
China’s Shenzhou-21 space rocket and its crew including the youngest member of its astronaut corps blasted off on Friday atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, Chinese state media reported.
It was the seventh mission to the permanently inhabited Chinese space station since it was completed in 2022, Reuters reported.
Missions on China’s Shenzhou-21 spacecraft involve trios of astronauts on six-month stays in space, with veteran astronauts increasingly replaced by younger faces. First-timers Zhang Hongzhang, 39, and Wu Fei, 32 – China’s youngest astronaut to be sent to space – were picked to participate in the programme in 2020.
Commander Zhang Lu, 48, flew on the 2022 Shenzhou-15 mission.
FIRST SMALL MAMMALS ON SPACE STATION
The Shenzhou-21 astronauts will take over from the Shenzhou-20 crew who had lived and worked on board Tiangong, or “Heavenly Palace”, for more than six months. The Shenzhou-20 astronauts will return to Earth in the coming days.
The Shenzhou-21 crew were also joined by four black mice, the first small mammals to be taken to the Chinese space station. The mice will be used in experiments on reproduction in low Earth orbit.
Biannual launches have become the norm for the Shenzhou programme, which has in the past year reached new milestones with the deployment of Chinese astronauts born in the 1990s, a world-record spacewalk, and plans to train and send the first foreign astronaut, from Pakistan, to Tiangong next year.
The rapid advances have raised alarm bells in Washington, which is now racing to put a U.S. astronaut on the moon again before China does.
Both countries are also competing in nascent institution-building efforts, with the U.S.-led Artemis Accords on lunar exploration matched up against the Chinese and Russian-led International Lunar Research Station.
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