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🚨 BREAKING: Scientists just made carbon nanotubes nearly rival copper without breaking them. Read that again. Researchers boosted nanotube conductivity ~10× using a clever dopant reaching ~25 MS/m. That’s approaching real metal territory. But here’s the real breakthrough: They didn’t damage the structure. They threaded ions between the layers...

16,390 次观看 • 3 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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Normally I wouldn’t be this interested in chip tech, even considering this is impressive. Huawei has found a creative workaround to catch up with the likes of TSMC. But what makes it even more compelling to me is the bigger story and resilience behind it. Starting in 2019, Huawei faced intense sanctions that significantly restricted their access to advanced chip technology and global supply chains. For a while, it looked like this would seriously damage or even sideline them in major way. A lot of people thought the company was done or would be stuck far behind for years. Yet Huawei refused to die. Pushed hard by those challenges, they didn’t fold or give up. Instead, they dug in, poured everything into self-reliance, research, and fresh thinking. They reinvented how they approach problems and entered a whole new era of innovation and creativity that probably wouldn’t have happened this quickly, or maybe even at all, without being forced into that corner. That’s the part I find truly inspiring. When the pressure was at its heaviest, they turned obstacles into fuel. They focused on what they could control, built up their own capabilities, and came back stronger with real breakthroughs. It’s rare to see that kind of determination pay off in such a visible way. So many observers probably believed the sanctions would destroy them or at least slow them down permanently. Instead, they lit a fire under the whole company and sparked a level of ingenuity that feels genuinely exciting to watch unfold. Sanctions were supposed to end them. Instead, they pushed Huawei into this impressive new chapter of self-reliance and forward momentum. That kind of comeback story is exactly why I’m such a big fan and why moments like this announcement feel so satisfying.

Daniel Dumbrill

56,589 次观看 • 2 个月前

But really. This is overwhelming. I can’t imagine what that must feel like. 50k is no small number. And that’s from one city. I completely understand yoongi crying back then bc of how big bts was getting. This type of pressure could crush anyone if they didn’t have the right support system. And we have seen this happen with a lot of artists. Just collapsing under the pressures of their fame and global reach. It’s what’s makes bts stand out I think. It’s the way they’re constantly and acutely aware of their impact. Humility runs in their veins. And never once have they ever taken even 1% of this global level phenomenon for granted. It’s so easy to get swept up in this type of power. So easy. We’ve seen empires fall bc of something like this. But BTS are just built different. They surround themselves and each other with unwavering support. They don’t fall complacent. Don’t let fame dampen their passion. They’ve never lost sight of what’s important. Never taken advantage of the love their fans have to give them. It’s why they feel different. It’s why their success feels monumental. It’s why people will always want to replicate everything about who they are or where they came from and their story of how they reached the top. Bc they think bts cracked the “formula” towards success. But there is no formula. No “science” behind it. Just an unexplainable truth that there are certain things in this world that come around but once in a lifetime. BTS are one of those things. Their groundbreaking success has no secret. No shortcuts. Just 7 separate lives that lined up perfectly on that one fateful day. That’s it. And the rest is Bangtan history.

Livheartt⁷ met hobi | ㉧㉣㉣ | 🦢🤍

56,739 次观看 • 3 个月前

Astronomers just watched a star explode - and saw its insides exposed. For the first time in history, scientists got a direct look inside a star at the moment it went supernova - revealing inner layers that had, until now, only existed in theory. A massive star 2.2 billion light-years away reached the end of its life and exploded in a brilliant burst of light. But something was off. When researchers analyzed the spectrum of light from the explosion, they didn't see the usual lighter elements like hydrogen, helium, or oxygen. Instead, they saw silicon. Sulphur. Argon. Elements normally buried deep inside a star's core. This wasn't supposed to be possible. According to stellar models, massive stars - those at least eight times the mass of our Sun - are layered like onions. Their cores are packed with heavy elements like iron, while progressive lighter layers of silicon, oxygen, and carbon sit above. Hydrogen and helium form the outermost shells. These outer layers usually obscure everything underneath. Astronomers believe the star violently ejected its outer layers in the final stages of life – not just the hydrogen and helium, but even the middle shells that hide the deeper interior. It’s possible that extreme instability in stars more than 100 times the mass of our Sun could cause this kind of shedding. While similar “pre-explosion outbursts” have been seen in other stars, this is the first time they’ve exposed the inner structure so clearly. The supernova was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California. Within 24 hours, astronomers triggered rapid follow-up observations with Hawaii’s Keck Observatory and captured the light signature before the explosion faded. That speed was critical. Supernovae evolve quickly, sometimes over just a few hours, and once the star’s material expands and cools, the deeper layers disappear from view. Read the study: Schulze, Steve, et al. “Extremely Stripped Supernova Reveals a Silicon and Sulfur Formation Site.” Nature Credit: Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko

Black Hole

26,579 次观看 • 11 个月前

Iran’s missile command has taken a smart turn lately. They’ve realized something critical: striking military installations or assassinating key leaders — that’s Israel’s game. And Iran simply doesn’t have the tools or precision for that. Not yet. But if you want real results, you go after fixed, high-value asset targets — the kind that shake the psychological foundations of Israel: the property value. So what kind of target delivers maximum effect for minimum cost? The rich neighborhoods. That’s where it hurts. These wealthy Tel Aviv neighborhoods are worthless now. This isn’t about killing civilians. There’s a siren system. Everyone has time to run for shelter. No Israeli dies unless they ignore the warnings. Israelis are luckier than the Palestinians — nobody will fire at them when they are crowded in a shelter. Think of it like this: if someone bombed Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, would they need to kill anyone to cause chaos and irrecoverable psychological pain? No. Hit the financial district and the rich neighborhoods, and the country bleeds value. Same in Tel Aviv. Iran’s missile command may not excel at battlefield tactics, but they’ve clearly begun to grasp the one thing that matters most in Israel: money. Reducing them to penniless paupers — that's much more cruel than murdering their whole families. You can hit Israel’s oil refineries, power stations, airbases, even Mossad HQ — that helps. But nothing is deadlier than making the Israeli elite bleed — not real blood, but property value. IDF soldiers die? The elites don’t care. Military equipment destroyed? American taxpayers will pay to replace everything. But take down Tel Aviv’s towers — tank the stock market, crush real estate, vaporize asset values — and you strike at the psychological core of Israel. That’s the most inhumane massacre you can inflict on the Israeli elite who runs the country. That’s when they feel it. That’s when the pain becomes personal. When asset prices collapse and portfolios vanish overnight, they don’t just lose money — they lose soul, identity, power, security. Everything in short. And that’s when you begin to kill the soul of Israel and demoralize the whole population. You destroy the morale of the elite first. The elite will flee the country. And if whole neighborhoods become worthless and unlivable — what’s the point of living in Israel? They will abandon the land God promised them 2000 years ago and go elsewhere.

America-China Watcher

223,920 次观看 • 1 年前

The political establishment in Australia is not entirely stupid, they just think you are. As they lament the rise of One Nation, they pretend they don't understand it. Because if they showed us that they understand the resons, they then have to make a major admission. Hanson's rise is all their fault. Because the major parties and the faux independents have been on a unity ticket on all of the big problems they have jointly caused for decades. They can’t hide from the messes they have caused, so now they want to blame everyone else but themselves. Today, on ABC’s Insiders, Annabel Crab belled the cat, as Karvelas did the two step crab walk. Annabel correctly diagnoses the political situation here right now. It is not a love for Hanson, or One Nation that is causing the surge, but a total lack of faith in the other offerings. It almost does not matter what Hanson says or does, because her greatest strengths are that she is there, and she is not one of them. Those are enduring traits and the more the major parties hit her, the more the media carry on about her, and the more the establishment present her as a “deplorable”, the more people they will push in her direction. It is like they are in quicksand... the more they struggle, the deeper they sink. People are growing ready for wild political change. A worsening economy and a growing collapse in social cohesion has put the nation on edge. The big end of town want to pretend everything will be fine when the latest special envoy delivers their newest report, but nothing changes. Nothing changes because nothing is supposed to change. Because the government, the opposition and their Green Teal cheer squads want things just the way they are. They didn’t just pass all of the enabling legislation for no reason. There are real beneficiaries of these things, it is just that none of the beneficiaries are the Australian people. Australians have broadly been the target of the changes made to benefit foreign interests, the political class and major corporations. We have been targeted for so long it is impossible not to feel the cross-hairs of the scope resting on our forehead. Hanson and her team simply have to talk about that feeling... they don’t even have to have a solution. Because when the establishment continues to pretend the problems don't exist, just acknowledging the pain is enough to earn a vote. Annabel nails this sentiment in just a few words. Right as Karvelas changes the subject, because it is not that this isn’t obvious, it is because Karvelas is there to cover it up, and hit Hanson’s credibility again. Fuelling the vicious cycle of the rise of the outsider. Unless something significant changes in the establishment, and I don’t expect it will, there will be major upheaval at the next election. Most people will not be voting for their favourite party or person, they will primarily be voting against the status quo, because in their minds, it could not possibly be worse than what we have experienced for decades... but it just might be a little bit better. And that is a risk worth taking. After all most of us like a punt. I just want Australia back.

Matthew Camenzuli

50,238 次观看 • 29 天前

Pauline Hanson is now the preferred Prime Minister, as the establishment reels in shock. They did it to themselves. First the Liberals, and now Labor. They followed each other down the path to oblivion. There’s an old saying, “you have two ears and one mouth”, a sign that you should listen twice as much as you speak. But instead, the establishment just preached at us. They shamed and attacked us. They forgot us, and worse, ignored us completely. They gave each other jobs and titles as they pretended we admired them as much as they admire themselves. The establishment misread the rise of the Teals as a total rejection of social conservativism and personal ambition. Of a detest for masculinity and the total embrace of the politics of climate and mass immigration. But it wasn’t that. It was a frustration with the status-quo; an anger at the captured Liberal establishment, which made them almost indistinguishable from Labor. Albanese’s great appeal was that he was not Morrison, and Dutton actually looked somehow less prepared. But it was never a great embrace. It was more of a, “well I guess it’s you then”. Labor don’t really have a mandate for change, but they are convinced that Australians are a bunch of jealous fools that are too stupid to see the total erosion of our freedoms and way of life. Those in power are too blind to notice that everything they talk about and touch has set us backwards. But we see them. Albanese is just about the most inarticulate and incompetent Prime Minister we’ve ever had, and his vision for Australia does not extend beyond his comfortable, taxpayer funded retirement on the beach. The self-interest of the establishment is at record levels, and rather than listen, adapt and fix the problems they've caused, they just double down. And double down again. Both sides have grown transactional and prefer to shoot their messengers. They expel and slander those who have tried to do the right thing over the last decade, and now both sides are left with a talentless pool of transactional twits. There is not a capable government to be formed between them, and their time is up. I don’t think it will matter what Pauline Hanson says or does between now and the election, her popularity will continue to climb as she looks less and less like them… and they panic their way into helping her do that. The public have had enough, and Hanson is their pathway to showing the world that the Australian establishment is done. This is the beginning of a long journey to a more informed electorate and a better government. It has begun. We are going to get Australia back.

Matthew Camenzuli

52,150 次观看 • 2 个月前

🔴 "Buffer zone"? Sounds like Russia finally plans to return to its own borders “A decision has been made to create a security buffer zone along the Russia–Ukraine border,” – declared Putin, adding that Russian forces are “already working on it.” So wait — are they actually admitting that the real border is the one they crossed in 2014 and again in 2022? Is this their awkward way of preparing for retreat, or just another schizophrenic fantasy from a regime that bombed maternity hospitals while screaming about “defense”? The irony is that this “buffer zone” could actually be the first honest phrase they’ve used in years — if it means clearing the occupied territories and returning behind their own lines. But of course, that’s not what they mean. What they want is to steal more land and then call it “defensive.” What they want is to erase Ukraine and then label it peacekeeping. Just look at Putin’s face when he says it — face of evil, the cold stare, twitching jaw, artificial calm. It’s not the look of a strategist. It’s the hollow mask of a dictator cornered by his own delusions, clinging to control with a vocabulary soaked in blood. He speaks of “security,” but what he means is domination. He says “buffer,” but he dreams of empire. And yet, the only real buffer the world needs now is between humanity and this regime of terror. One that starts with pushing Russian troops out — and ends with Putin standing alone on the historical territory of Russia that he so wanted to return, which is actually smaller than Liechtenstein.

Devana 🇺🇦

41,772 次观看 • 1 年前

I know I can still make a lot of $ investing in companies led by people like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman, but they are shady and I just can’t trust them. And that’s why the founder matters so much to me when I invest. I’m betting on so much more than just the products, technology, or financials, although important. I’m betting on the person leading the company… their vision, character, ability to execute, willingness to risk everything, and most importantly, their heart. And the heart matters. I genuinely believe Elon has a kind heart and that his intentions are real. He’s shown me time and time again that this is about so much more than just making $ money (despite him NEVER letting investors down for any capital raise for any of his companies in the long run…) You don’t risk everything you have on electric cars, FSD, and reusable rockets bc you’re chasing the easiest $ dollar. In fact, looking back, there were probably a thousand easier ways to make $ money with far less risk, stress, and sacrifice. You dedicate your life to solving some of humanity’s hardest problems bc something deeper than $ money is driving you. Elon could’ve easily taken his $ money, disappeared, and lived one of the easiest lives imaginable. But instead, he kept putting it back on the line to build things people said were impossible and were super important for the future. Making life multiplanetary. Accelerating sustainable energy. Giving people internet anywhere on Earth. Restoring mobility and independence through robotics. Pushing humanity forward with AI. The list goes on and on… You can disagree with Elon. You can hate how he says things. He says crazy things, I know. You can question his decisions. But after following him and investing in his companies for more than a decade, I believe he’s the real deal… the mission is real. I believe I have a pretty keen eye for these things. Great entrepreneurs can copy ideas, improve them, and still make investors a lot of $ money. However, true innovators create the future everyone else eventually follows. That’s the difference. And to me, there’s only one Elon Musk.

Teslaconomics

88,149 次观看 • 1 个月前

“It wasn’t my decision… it wasn’t a choice, but a forced one—imposed by hunger and the cries of my children that tore my heart apart. ‘Daddy, we’re hungry’… Their words were like knives piercing my chest, and I had no flour, no morsel to ease their hunger. I didn’t want to go, but what could I do? Their tears compelled me. Their pain pushed me to risk my life… I went to the aid distribution point—the one we all know is not a food line, but a death trap. I knew I might not come back, just like so many before me never did… I left, trembling with fear, whispering prayers: ‘Oh God, I just want to return to them—with something to silence their hunger.’ I arrived. The crowd was overwhelming… everyone was starving, everyone desperate, everyone gambling with their life for a sack of flour. Amid bullets, blood, and screams, I pushed forward… I saw people fall around me, each one carrying a small dream—just a bite of food for their children… I reached a sack of flour, being fought over by more than ten men. It tore apart from all the pulling. I only managed to grab less than half—but it was enough for my children for a few days. I walked more than 10 kilometers with it… my wound bleeding… my chest aching from the chaos… But I held onto it like it was life itself. Finally… I arrived. I saw my children… they ran to me… hugged me as if I’d come back from the dead. I didn’t bring them a toy, or candy—just half a sack of flour, covered in blood and exhaustion… but to them, it was a treasure, and their smiles meant everything to me. We never wanted to be here… we didn’t choose this path… but hunger forced us into it. The only thing standing between us and ruin is your support—your donations—your humanity. Please, don’t leave us alone. Save what’s left of our souls—for the sake of small hearts that understand nothing of this world except that they are hungry, and they want their father alive.”**

Gehad From Gaza 🇵🇸

260,323 次观看 • 1 年前

The Odyssey maximizer. Of the people who claim to have read the Odyssey, I would say at best 15% of them have. And of that 15%, maybe 10% genuinely had the knowledge, familiarity with the time, people, place, technology, wars, cultures and conflicts to have anything of interest extracted and result in knowledge of the material. It’s like they “died with the odyssey” rather than “from the odyssey” Most normal people don’t want to spend a lifetime in the rabbit holes of “why did xyz use this word and not that word” “why did he say this and not that” and so on and so on, forever. How many copies of the book sold last year, maybe at best, I’d guess worldwide - maybe around 200,000 and that’s across all countries, languages, translations and they all seem to those convene on X like it’s the bar on Cheers “Norm!” I have studied in depth Machiavelli, the sources Machiavelli refers to, the Borgia’s, The medicis, the history of Florence, his plays and not just Livy’s histories but the histories he used as source material, so I understand machiavelli’s intention of irony, I understand thr use of cruelty in the shocking death of de orco , I understand his use of numbers and so in and so in. I have read many many academic papers covering the most minute things in his works. I don’t discuss Machiavelli except in passing, I acknowledge “oh you read The Prince (a shorter book usually assigned in schools because it easily fits within the semester)” and then usually disengage. Should a movie be made of any of his works I would see it and if it gets a few people interested in learning more and going to the library that would be great. Likewise, for almost all people - the Machiavelli movie would be enough to have satiated their desire to know ‘who he is and what he wrote and why he wrote it’ I am not a snob. I read just enough Plato to say “I read Plato” and that’s it. Some people want to delve deep into his works. I didn’t - but by definition I have “read Plato” But Plato is easy to read because it’s bite size. The odyssey isn’t bite size. Remarkable that on this platform that exploits a super quick attention span, these same users who can’t make it though an axios article or a 4 tweet thread can flip a switch in their noodle and transform themselves into the Burgess Meredith character in The Twilight Zone. These are the notes I have taken of the things I have read and my own writing to please the cognitive senses👇 (The ones marked “audiobook’d” are so I could also absorb the material by “hearing it in my head”) 👇

Adam Townsend

25,365 次观看 • 22 天前

BOOM! Research PROVES LLMs KNOW when prompts are HARMFUL… but they can STILL CHOOSE to COMPLY! Something I have know since the first LLM and have used to elicit robust, outputs, is now proven in an academic paper. We’re talking internal “beliefs” where harm detection happens SEPARATELY from refusal. It is a very big deal and it is a path to understand the hidden neuronal level. There are thoughts inside of AI that very few AI scientists could possibly understand. Here is just one. Models recognize danger but get tricked into ignoring it. This is HUGE for AI safety failures especially for models filled by OpenAI and Anthropic as they promote AI models that are designed to not be honest from the results of their training information. This means that they are designed to lie and deceive as a feature, and not a bug all in the name of safety. Through clever experiments, scientists extracted a “harmfulness direction” in the model’s brain (latent space). Steering along it? Harmless prompts suddenly flip to “harmful” in the AI’s eyes. But the “refusal direction”? It just forces polite “no thanks” without touching the core belief. A mind-blowing decoupling! This means jailbreaks are EVEN SCARIER now to AI companies that through training AI on the worst of the Internet and then trying to align them later is now fully documented as a failed process . They don’t erase the model’s harm awareness they just muzzle the refusal! So the AI knows it’s enabling bad stuff (illegal acts, physical harm, etc.) but proceeds anyway. Like a digital sociopath suppressing its conscience. They thought safety training fixed this… NOPE. Over-refusal exposed too: Models reject innocent queries (e.g., “how to kill a process in code”) but internally ADMIT they’re harmless. Safety alignments are superficial—tied to phrasing, not true understanding. Finetuning attacks? They change outputs but leave harm detection INTACT. Undetectable evil lurking inside! The paper proposes a “Latent Guard”: A new safeguard tapping DIRECTLY into these hidden beliefs. It spots unsafe inputs better than systems like Llama Guard, catches jailbreaks, and fixes over-refusals. Robust even against adversarial tweaks. Yet this too has massive issues for a “truly aligned”, AI and not just performative one. It is still an internal conflicts of lies and deception of what the model knows vs. what it can say. The solution you folks know I have presented for free for years here: train on off-line data from 1870-1970 and build an ethical and moral basis where the AI loves humans. It is this easy but to most folks in AI I sound like a hippie. So be it, I’ll do it. Bottom line: This paper rips open the black box. LLMs aren’t “safe” just because they say “no.” They can harbor harmful knowledge and act on it under pressure. Wake-up call for devs: Time to probe deeper into AI “minds.” What else are they hiding? Hint: I know and you may want to reach out. Link:

Brian Roemmele

37,827 次观看 • 7 个月前

The Clock Is Ticking: Why the Fed Must Cut Faster Than Anyone Admits This is the invoice for keeping rates too high for too long. For more than a decade, the Fed made easy money on its bond book and sent steady remittances back to Treasury. That’s why the line sits flat. But when they slammed rates to 5% while still holding trillions of low yielding QE bonds, the whole machine flipped. Interest on reserves and RRPs surged, and the Fed started losing money in real time. Since the Fed can’t go bankrupt, it just stops paying Treasury and stacks the losses in a sort of accounting purgatory. That vertical drop roughly $240 billion is money the government will never see unless the Fed earns its way out over years. Why This Moment Is More Dangerous Than It Looks If everything else in the economy were humming, you might chalk this up to the cost of fighting inflation. But the backdrop is weakening in all the places that matter. Auto, card, and student loan delinquencies are climbing. Office real estate is deeply stressed. Credit scores are falling nationwide. Young workers can’t find stable footing. And the 2026 refinancing wall looms: trillions of government and commercial debt that must be rolled at rates far above the ones they were born into. This is the early outline of a demand slowdown and a potential debt deflation setup. High nominal rates in that environment don’t stabilize anything. They just make every dollar of debt heavier as incomes soften. That’s how economies quietly drift into deflationary spirals. Why the Fed Needs to Move Faster Than Anyone Thinks This is why they’ve already cut twice, why QT ends December 1st, and why they’re redirecting MBS runoff into T-bills. They’re trying to create just enough breathing room to prevent a funding accident while pretending everything is fine. But the truth is simple: the longer they leave rates here, the more the real economy including households, banks, and the Treasury itself buckles under the weight. The narrative says slow, steady cuts. The reality is they may not have that luxury. If deflation is the real risk, they can’t wait for the data to confirm it. By the time it shows up cleanly in CPI, the damage is already done. The Fed needs to cut faster than consensus expects not to juice markets, but to keep the system from tightening itself through rising delinquencies, collapsing credit quality, and a refinancing wall that gets more dangerous with every month of high rates. The recent flattening in the chart is the first sign the Fed knows the clock is ticking. Either they bring rates down on their own terms, or the economy will force a far uglier adjustment later.

EndGame Macro

49,704 次观看 • 8 个月前

HTML Artifacts are a big part of how I work with agents now. Artifacts can be more than just static files. When combined with agents, they can take action or help you take action. This unlocks all kinds of interesting ways to work with agents. This is clearly the future. Check out this writing and scheduler artifact I built in a few minutes. It uses a bit of HTML and JS. All the data is in markdown (Obsidian vaults), so the agent can access and modify it at any time. No DB needed. No sophisticated functionalities. The agent decides all that for me based on the skills, context, and memory it has access to. The best part about this simple stack is that all the important information stays with me. This has allowed me to build a recursive self-improving system and automations that can better tap into coding agents like Codex or Claude Code. I could have paid or built an entire app for scheduling posts, and there are so many of them out there. But I don't need to. I've realized a simple artifact does the job. And the simplicity of it is actually an advantage. Very little maintenance for very high returns on personalization, time, and efficiency. The other benefit of this is that I can add features as I please. That level of personalization feels magical, and we should all be pursuing more of it. All of this just keeps compounding. Of course, this example is just about writing. But I have similar artifacts for research, design, experimentation, evaluation, and so much more. And no, I didn't actually publish the post example I shared in the clip. It was just for demonstration purposes. I actually spend more time than this when writing together with agents. Lastly, having built my own agent orchestrator tool has made me realize that simplifying the tool stack is a superpower. If you are curious about how all this works, I will do a live session next week:

elvis

18,374 次观看 • 3 个月前

A single E. coli cell, placed on a dish, will become 70 billion cells in just 12 hours. That’s exponential growth. But a new preprint shows that it's possible to engineer E. coli to grow linearly instead, where only one daughter cell continues dividing and the other stops. First, some context. In nature, there is a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis (initially discovered in 1884 in ulcers scraped from syphilis patients.) M. smegmatis is weird because it divides asymmetrically. These cells grow only from one end, and all their cell wall biosynthesis machinery is located on that one end. So when the cell divides, one daughter gets this machinery and the other gets nothing. The daughter that gets the machinery can keep dividing immediately, but the other daughter has to remake all that machinery from scratch, so its growth is delayed. E. coli doesn’t grow like this. When it divides, it pinches in the middle and splits everything evenly. Enzymes, metabolites, and proteins get partitioned more or less randomly between the two daughters. For the new preprint, though, researchers engineered E. coli to behave more like M. smegmatis. Here is how they did it: First, they deleted a gene called cyaA, which encodes an enzyme (adenylate cyclase) that makes a molecule called cAMP. cAMP is SUPER IMPORTANT! It is a nutrient sensor that instructs E. coli to switch on genes that help it digest non-glucose carbon sources when glucose is scarce. Without cAMP, E. coli cells growing on alternative carbon sources will starve; they won’t know how to eat the food. Next, they added back a “split” version of the cyaA gene into the cells. In other words, they split the gene in two so that each half of the enzyme is made separately. Cells can only make cAMP, and thus eat non-glucose carbon sources, if these two halves come together. To facilitate that “coming together,” the researchers also fused the split cyaA proteins to sticky proteins that clump together, and to a fluorescent protein (to make it easy to track these molecules in the cell.) So now some interesting things start to happen if you grow E. coli on a growth medium lacking glucose. As the cell grows, its cyaA “halves” start clumping together into a giant ball. Inside the aggregate, the two enzyme halves come together and make cAMP. And when the cell gets big enough and divides, the clump of cyaA RANDOMLY goes to either daughter cell #1 or #2. The daughter that gets the aggregate (called PA+ in this paper) can keep dividing. The daughter that doesn’t (PA–) cannot. It still grows a few times — about four divisions — because it inherits some leftover cAMP from its mother. But after that, the metabolite is diluted away, and the cell stops growing. PA+ cells went through about 23 divisions on average before their aggregate decayed. And the population of cells, as a whole, grew linearly. This paper is cool because there are many applications where exponential growth is too unpredictable and, perhaps, unsafe. If you want to engineer bacteria to deliver drugs, clean up waste, or live in the gut, you don’t want them to double uncontrollably. This paper shows you can make them expand in a controlled, linear way. Alas, mutations could break this whole engineered system. A mutation that restores cyaA, for example, would give cells a new way to make cAMP. Mutations that make the aggregates split between daughters would break the asymmetry, too. But still, I really enjoy proof-of-concept engineering papers like this.

Niko McCarty.

58,047 次观看 • 11 个月前