Tag: Featured

Making a scientific discovery is an incredible achievement at any age — and Indeever Madireddy made one at just 17 years old. 

The Silicon Valley high school senior, avid fishkeeper, and 2022 Davidson Fellow channeled his curiosity about his pet fish, Calvin, who recently died, into a research project. The result: Madireddy made history, becoming the first person to sequence the genome of a freshwater angelfish.

“I did it because I wanted to learn more about my fish,” Madireddy told Indica News in December, adding: “I thought I could do this cool project where I contribute something new to science.” 

Prior to Calvin’s death in March of 2022, Madireddy learned that no one had ever successfully sequenced the genome of the fish species. So with some prior experience in molecular biology, along with $2,000 — half of which  was crowdfunded — he went to work to change that. 

Davidson Institute

After spending over a month learning genomics on his own, he worked on his project at BioCurious, a community lab in Santa Clara. There, he proceeded to get the raw sequencing data with a small sequencer made by Oxford Nanopore, according to New Scientist.

Once he analyzed his data, he published his findings in an October paper in an open access journal. His work quickly caught the attention of those in the scientific field — not only for the research itself, but also for how Madireddy maximized the use of accessible community resources.

RELATED: Meet Elliott Tanner: At Age 14, He’s Pursuing His Ph.D. in Physics

“This is a wonderful example of an inquisitive spirit and what young scientists can do when you remove technology barriers like cost and complexity,” Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore, told New Scientist of Madireddy’s achievement.

Davidson Institute

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t Madireddy’s only research project. The teen was awarded a $10,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for his research that hypothesizes that “the bacterial CRISPR-Ca9 system, which protects bacteria from viral infections, could be repurposed to function as an intracellular defense mechanism for human cells.”

“My work has a strong potential to impact people’s lives. By stably integrating Cas9 or a different RNA targeting Cas variant into the genome of humans, the body will be more equipped to handle viral infections,” he said to the Davidson Institute. 

With these projects under his belt, Madireddy has advice for other young researchers.

“Anyone can do research; you just have to get started. Find what you’re interested in and pursue it. Don’t be afraid of what other people think or even what the results will be,” he told 23andMe. 

Davidson Institute

As if Madireddy wasn’t busy enough making a name for himself as a researcher: He is also the founder of FireWorks, a nonprofit on a mission to “educate and to engage with the world’s youth to promote their future financial success and to preserve our environment, starting with students.” 

On top of leading his own organization and dedicating his time to research, the high school student is involved in the Boy Scouts, likes playing the Tabla (hand drums used in Indian music), “developed a patent-pending method to manufacture sustainable paper bags from kelp pulp,” and has dreams of owning a tropical fish store. We’d say he’s well on his way!

NASA is making big leaps in its goal of protecting Earth from cosmic threats. The space agency is currently working on a new telescope, dubbed the “next-generation asteroid hunter,” which promises to be a “game-changer” in identifying hazardous near-Earth objects.

In December, NASA announced in a press release that construction had begun on its Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) and outlined its goals for the telescope. The organization will send the device into space, to L1 Lagrange Point — 1 million miles from Earth, between our planet and the sun. Using two infrared heat sensors, NEO Surveyor will be able to identify both dark asteroids and comets and what NASA refers to as “Earth Trojans.”

Dark asteroids are currently harder to detect since they don’t reflect as much light. Likewise, Earth Trojans are cosmic bodies that travel from the direction of the sun. Due to the sun’s glare, it’s difficult for astronomers to identify these possible threats. Fortunately, NEO Surveyor would be able to spot these potential dangers, giving NASA early detection capabilities.

“For the first time in our planet’s history, Earth’s inhabitants are developing methods to protect Earth by deflecting hazardous asteroids,” Amy Mainzer, the mission’s survey director, said in a statement. “But before we can deflect them, we first need to find them. NEO Surveyor will be a game-changer in that effort.”

RELATED: NASA’s James Webb Telescope Delivers Deepest and Sharpest Infrared Image of Space

According to Cosmos Magazine, Earth is pummeled by 17 meteors each day, around 6,100 a year. Most of these pose little risk to humans, falling in uninhabited areas. In 2005, NASA made it its mission to identify 90% of near-Earth objects that are more than 460 feet in size and within 30 million miles of our orbit — objects that pose a significant risk should they impact the planet. 

Last year, the organization demonstrated its first planetary defense test against an asteroid, successfully changing its trajectory. NASA is no longer leaving Earth’s chances up to a game of blindly playing cosmic dodgeball, and NEO Surveyor is the next step in its plans.

So when should we expect the asteroid telescope to take to the stars? According to USA Today, it will be set to launch by June 2028. Back in November, the project passed a key technical and programmatic review milestone. But although construction is underway, it will take some time to complete. 

“The project team, including all of our institutional and industrial collaborators, is already very busy designing and fabricating components that will ultimately become flight hardware,” Tom Hoffman, NEO Surveyor project manager, said in the press release.

It won’t be long before NASA has a better surveillance of what is going on in our cosmic backyard. Cue audible sigh of relief.

It starts with acrobatic kicks and somersaults while still inside the womb, and progresses after birth to a never-ending stream of wiggles, wriggles, flailing arms, and jerking legs. When they’re not sleeping, babies certainly seem to always be on the move, long before they’re actually crawling or walking. And new research coming out of the University of Tokyo has determined that these seemingly purposeless movements are actually anything but.

In a recent study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this past December, shines a light on how the random exploratory behavior of newborns and babies plays a critical role in their ability to later perform deliberate sequential movements. 

The research team utilized detailed motion capture of newborns and young infants and combined that information with a musculoskeletal computer model to study how their muscles and sensations communicate throughout their entire bodies.

Prior to the study, knowledge of how newborns and infants learn movement had been limited. Project assistant professor Hoshinori Kanazawa, from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, explained how the new research has expanded awareness of how babies learn to control their muscles and movement, and develop coordination, which is the function of the sensorimotor system. 

“Previous research into sensorimotor development has focused on kinematic properties, muscle activities which cause movement in a joint or a part of the body,” Kanazawa stated via a press release.  “However, our study focused on muscle activity and sensory input signals for the whole body. By combining a musculoskeletal model and neuroscientific method, we found that spontaneous movements, which seem to have no explicit task or purpose, contribute to coordinated sensorimotor development.”

The research team first developed a whole-body, infant-scale musculoskeletal computer model. They next used motion capture technology to record the joint movements of 12 healthy newborns and 10 young infants, which provided data that allowed the team to estimate the babies’ muscle activity and sensory input signals. From there, computer algorithms made it possible to analyze interaction between the input signals and muscle activity.

“We were surprised that during spontaneous movement, infants’ movements “wandered” and they pursued various sensorimotor interactions. We named this phenomenon ‘sensorimotor wandering,’” said Kanazawa, later adding that the “results implied that infants develop their own sensorimotor system based on explorational behavior or curiosity, so they are not just repeating the same action but a variety of actions. In addition to this, our findings provide a conceptual linkage between early spontaneous movements and spontaneous neuronal activity.”

These findings may eventually allow doctors to diagnose developmental disorders much earlier than is currently possible. The team also hopes to study how these early movements impact later development, “such as walking and reaching, along with more complex behaviors and higher cognitive functions,” per the press release. 

For Kanazawa, the goal “is to understand the underlying mechanisms of early motor development and to find knowledge that will help to promote baby development.”