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your STEM skills to the next level this
year exercise is an important part of
staying healthy but I'm sick of it what
if we could get the benefits of working
out without actually having to work out
it's 2020 well in a new study in Nature
communications researchers report a type
of protein that seems to confer the
healthy effects of exercise to be more
specific having higher levels of this
protein improved things like muscle tone
and endurance in flies and in mice but
the research does have important
implications for human health it could
help us better understand the exact
physiological changes that exercise
causes in our bodies and that knowledge
could help doctors care for a lot of
people just to be clear these
researchers were not trying to get me
out of going to the gym they were
searching for ways to help people stay
healthy when they can't exercise say due
to the effects of age or illness or
injury that work led them to study a
group of proteins called sistren
previous research has shown that sestra
--nz build up in muscles following
exercise but it wasn't clear why or what
they actually do so the international
research team designed a workout routine
for fruit flies sit but the Flies and
vials and then by shifting the position
of those vials the team encouraged the
Flies to repeatedly climb up the sides
basically a fly treadmill they also used
a similar technique to induce flies to
fly across the vial and some of these
flies were engineered to lack sestra
ng's over weeks of exercise the normal
flies experienced several health
benefits including a faster metabolism
and increased endurance supplies without
sestra pnes saw no such improvements so
the researchers tried essentially the
same thing with mice and it was the same
story the mice engineered tool access
trans didn't gain the usual benefits of
a workout regimen instead they got
winded when they ran on their little
wheels all that made it pretty clear
that sessions were required for the
benefits of exercise the researchers
tried dialing ups estrin levels instead
of lowering them and
I is engineered to overproduce s-trans
not only had stronger muscles and more
endurance they got buff without doing
their workouts researchers suspect that
sistrums are responsible for
coordinating the cellular pathways that
underlie the health effects of working
out and that might mean they can be used
to help people stay toned while they
can't exercise for example in a related
study published this week in Nature
communications researchers found that
the muscles of mice engineered to
overexpress s-trans
didn't weaken an atrophy when kept from
moving so it's possible that in the
future assess turns could help people
who are bedridden keep their muscles
healthy but if you're hoping to go to
the store and buy some sester and
supplements we are not anywhere close to
that
yeah it's none of the study animals were
fed sess turns to get these effects
instead the teams tinkered with their
genomes to get them to overproduce
s-trans where they are normally made
ancestor ins are large proteins so they
may not work well as pills your stomach
might just chop them up and digest them
like any other protein and if they're
absorbed they might not travel to where
they're needed
besides scientists have a lot more to
learn about these proteins and how they
work especially in humans since you know
we are not flies or mice but with more
research we might someday be able to use
the knowledge we gained about sestra
pnes to help people be healthier in
other news this week researchers have
made a totally new kind of robot one
that is alive seriously as reported in a
study in the journal PNAS researchers
designed and built tiny robots out of
living cells most machines are of course
made with artificial materials like
metal and plastic those are sturdy and
relatively easy to work with but they're
not perfect one of their big issues is
that they tend to contain substances
that damage the environment robots made
of live tissues might be less sturdy but
they could probably do a lot of the
things other machines do or even things
current machines can't do because
they're too big or too toxic like
performing tasks inside an organism so a
team of researchers from the university
of vermont decided to try building
robots out of living cells but they
began first with computer simulations
say
asked a super computer to design
theoretical robots out of two types of
cells skin cells because they're tough
and relatively sturdy and heart muscle
cells because they contract a computer
was given information about what the
cells could and couldn't do based on
that it was told to design robots of a
few hundred cells so less than a
millimeter wide that could move in a
single direction finally after hundreds
of simulations and refinements the team
compiled the designs that were most
likely to work if they actually built
them and then they built them they took
stem cells from embryos of the African
clawed frog or Xenopus laevis and with
some super small forceps and a tiny
electrode they assembled them to match
the designs they decided to call these
tiny machines
xeno BOTS after the frogs that provided
the building materials and for the most
part they worked like the computer
simulation said they would the living
BOTS were able to explore their
environment interact with each other and
even pushed tiny objects from place to
place the researchers are hopeful that
with some more development living robots
like these could be designed to perform
all sorts of tasks like gathering micro
plastics from the ocean or scraping
plaque from human arteries and unlike
machines made from metal or plastic they
are completely biodegradable they're
just skin and muscle cells when they're
done working if they fail to function
they just decompose they are also
self-healing when the researchers
intentionally cut the robots the cells
stitched themselves back together just
like your skin cells do when they're
damaged it's very exciting to consider
all of the possible applications of
living robots but the researchers are
just as excited about how much we'll
learn about ourselves in the process
they think designing and testing these
robots will teach us a lot about the
ways our own cells communicate and
connect and it just goes to show that
amazing things can happen when you
combine computer science and physics and
biology in fact that's basically the
entire premise behind the field of
computational biology and you can learn
all about that with brilliant org they
have an entire course on computational
biology which explains how algorithms
can help with biological questions like
how
particular string of amino acids folds
to make a protein and that is just one
of their courses they have dozens of
them covering topics in science computer
science math and engineering so you can
brush up on classical mechanics and then
dive into data structures and each is
designed to be hands-on and interactive
so you really learn the material and you
have fun doing it so if you're the kind
of person who's new year's resolution is
to learn more about how the world works
you might want to head over to brilliant
org slash
scishow to check out what brilliant has
to offer and as a special thank you for
being a scishow fan the first 200 people
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