Nature Hub

  Source:   From  - Rockefeller University,  Edited by-  Amal Udawatta, Close-up of a mosquito (stock image). Credit: © corlaffra / stock.adobe.com It's impossible to hide from a female mosquito -- she will hunt down any member of the human species by tracking our CO 2  exhalations, body heat, and body odor. But some of us are distinct "mosquito magnets" who get more than our fair share of bites. Blood type, blood sugar level, consuming garlic or bananas, being a woman, and being a child are all popular theories for why someone might be a preferred snack. Yet for most of them, there is little credible data, says Leslie Vosshall, head of Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. This is why Vosshall and Maria Elena De Obaldia, a former postdoc in her lab, set out to explore the leading theory to explain varying mosquito appeal: individual odor variations connected to skin microbiota. They recently demonstrated through a study that fatty acids emanating fr

  By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC, Edited by - Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, CORTICAL LABS Image caption, These 800,000 lab-grown brain cells can play a 1970s video game, albeit badly Researchers have grown brain cells in a lab that have learned to play the 1970s tennis-like video game, Pong. They say their "mini-brain" can sense and respond to its environment. Writing in the journal Neuron,  Dr Brett Kagan, of the company Cortical Labs, claims to have created the first ''sentient'' lab-grown brain in a dish. Other experts describe the work as ''exciting'' but say calling the brain cells sentient is going too far. "We could find no better term to describe the device,'' Dr Kagan says. ''It is able to take in information from an external source, process it and then respond to it in real time." IMAGE SOURCE, VAN WEEDEN Image caption, The human brain is more adaptable and learns faster than current artificial-int

By  Jacopo Prisco , CNN, Edited by - Vinuri Randhula Silva, The Frozen Zoo at San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research contains samples from more than 1,200 species and subspecies, and is the largest repository of its kind. Four endangered species have so far been cloned using genetic material stored there. They include Przewalski's horse, which is native to central Asia.  In 2020 a baby horse known as "Kurt" was born in Texas , cloned using cells from the Frozen Zoo -- the first successful cloning of the species.   When Kurt Benirschke started collecting skin samples from rare and endangered animals in 1972, he didn’t have a firm plan on what to do with them. As a researcher at the University of California San Diego, he believed that one day the tools would be developed to use them to save those animals. A few years later, he moved his collection to San Diego Zoo, and called it the Frozen Zoo. n 2003, the banteng, a species of wild cattle found in Southeas