The Top Science News

Plus: where the wild bees are; pandas feel SAD too; and more. [View in browser](| [Join Nautilus]( Newsletter brought to you by: Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here.]( This Tuesday, your FREE member newsletter includes the week’s top science news, plus one full story, below, from The Porthole, our section for short sharp looks at science. Enjoy! DISCOVERIES The Top Science News This Week [The People Who Oppose Big Wind Energy Projects]( Residents of these regions in North America might have a case of “energy privilege.” [PNAS→]( [Evidence for the Earliest Structural Use of Wood at Least 476,000 Years Ago]( Our pre-human ancestors long ago knew how to make Lincoln log-like structures. [Nature→]( [The Average Human Male Has Trillions of More Cells Than the Average Human Female]( The size difference between red blood cells and the largest muscle fibers is comparable to the mass ratio of a shrew to a blue whale. [PNAS→]( [Reducing Cartel Recruitment Is the Only Way to Lower Violence in Mexico]( “The secretive nature of cartels’ actions, as well as the insufficient amount of information accessible to map them, makes them conceptually similar to black boxes,” researchers write. [Science→]( [What Does Blue Light Have to Do with Puberty?]( Early puberty for most children does not have an obvious cause, but excess time on smartphones and tablets could play a role, a study on male rats suggests. [Frontiers in Endocrinology→]( [Queen’s Brian May Helped NASA Return Its First Asteroid Sample]( The famed classic-rock guitarist located a safe site to land and collect a sample from the asteroid. [CNN→]( [Mammals’ Time on Earth Is Half Over, Scientists Predict]( The next supercontinent—call it Pangea 2.0—won’t be kind to our kind. [The New York Times→]( [JWST’s First Triple-Image Supernova Could Save the Universe]( Named “Supernova H0pe,” it shows how JWST plus gravitational lensing can be used to solve the greatest puzzle facing astronomy today. [Big Think→]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [JOIN TODAY]( From The Porthole—short sharp looks at science MICROBIOLOGY A New Way to Make Cells from Scratch How scientists are engineering synthetic cells to be more life-like. BY BRIAN GALLAGHER You are a marvelous menagerie of cells, the building blocks of life. Some 30 trillion or so of these cells compose the human body, each of them operated by a walled-off command center—the central nucleus stowing DNA—along with smaller bits of machinery surrounding it that work like little organs. These organelles are responsible for specific tasks like generating energy, making proteins, and disposing waste. For decades, scientists have been trying to match nature’s virtuosity, tinkering with different methods and types of materials to piece together an artificial cell that mimics what living cells can do. The effort to overcome this challenge is aimed not just at solving the [origin of life](, but increasingly at [biotechnology]( applications. Scientists have shown that such artificial cells can be integrated into living systems and complex genetic circuitry and can perform specific tasks, such as [biosensing](, [drug delivery](, anti-cancer [therapeutics](, and artificial [photosynthesis](. Imagine an artificial cell that can sense cancer, produce a drug, and release it inside the body. One of the main engineering challenges for artificial cell design has been building the spaces where the little organs can reside. “The cells in your body are more complex than a bacterium, because they have this really complex spatial arrangement of things inside of them,” says Yuval Elani, a biophysicist at Imperial College London. Recently Elani’s team made an important advance on this front: They demonstrated a new way of producing these compartments that allowed them to easily insert multiple synthetic organelles with different functions in a single cell. For example, they were able to introduce magnetic particles (a rarity in nature) into their artificial cells. This let the researchers move the cell in any direction with a magnet. Another synthetic organelle they added enabled the cell to perform certain functions in response to temperature changes. The researchers [published]( their new results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings mark a significant step in the effort to build life-like artificial cells—ones that are able to do things like move around, sense their environment, release cargo, and communicate. Elani and his team used a material called [hydrogel](, made from a carbohydrate called [alginate](, to build the cells’ internal environment, which could be likened to the chassis, or base frame, of a car. Hydrogel is an increasingly [popular]( material for scientists engineering synthetic cells because of its versatile chemistry. [Like the story? Join Nautilus today]( Before now, researchers had not endowed hydrogel-based artificial cells with multiple organelles at the same time, Elani says. This creates the potential for, among other things, much more advanced drug-delivery systems. You can imagine injecting someone with an artificial cell that lies dormant for years, and then when it senses a cancerous environment, the cell produces and releases a drug inside the body. “That kills the cancer cells, the cell senses the threat’s been eliminated, and shuts back down,” Elani says. The researchers also show in their paper how it’s possible, using a technique called [microfluidics](, to reliably and quickly make the cells a consistent size and shape (around 125 micrometers in diameter). That’s crucial for use in industrial or clinical settings, Elani says. Regulators “really want to know that you have full control over every aspect of that synthetic cell.” Since they’re so short-lived, synthetic cells won’t be coming to market any time soon. “Once you make them, you have a day or two to use them,” Elani says. This is because they can’t harvest energy and materials from the environment like biological cells—yet. Elani’s team is working on this. “We’re engineering them to photosynthesize just like plant cells,” he says. Will Elani eventually engineer artificial cells that can replicate like a biological cell can? Sure, in perhaps 15 to 20 years. “It’s a very optimistic guess,” he says. “At the moment there’s no danger.” Lead image: Love Employee / Shutterstock More from The Porthole: • [Where the wild bees are]( • [Pandas feel SAD too]( Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher [Back to school discount image]( BECOME A MEMBER [Weaving Together Fantasy and Reality]( “There wasn't much that didn't capture my imagination! The setting is in the Tibetan Himalayas, and the story is about a caterpillar-zombifying fungus (which is a cousin to the fungi that was responsible for the zombies in HBO's The Last of Us). The article itself is fascinating and explores a scientific mystery, eventually unearthing new information about this fungus.” This is why Nautilus’ cover artist, Jennifer Bruce, was immediately drawn to Issue 51’s feature article, [“The Last of the Fungus.”]( An award-winning artist whose intricate illustrations have been featured on the covers of a plethora of fantasy novels, Bruce certainly judges a book by its cover. “I tend to pick up books based on whether or not the cover intrigues me. I think we all do that innately—the cover and title are the first representation of a story that a potential reader sees.” You can read more about Jennifer Bruce’s thoughts on our latest cover story, the “tortured artist” trope, and what scientists and artists can learn from one another in Nautilus. [Read Jennifer Bruce's Full Interview]( Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us?subject=&body=) your thoughts on today’s note. 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