Posts

As part of OncoTrack project (an international consortium of scientists funded as part of the European Innovative Medicines Initiative), Dr. Joseph Regan and his colleagues at the Charité Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCCC) – working with scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, the Medical University of Graz and Bayer AG -investigated a treatment option aimed at treating cancers via the targeted elimination of cancer stem cells. Potentially capable of significantly improving treatment outcomes, this approach requires an in-depth understanding of both the relevant cellular communication pathways within the stem cells, and of the genes regulating them....

A new study of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies has found magnetic fields play an impressive role in the systems’ dynamics. In fact, in dozens of black holes surveyed, the magnetic field strength matched the force produced by the black holes’ powerful gravitational pull, says a team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany....

With SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source X-ray laser, timing is everything. Its pulses are designed to explore atomic-scale processes that are measured in femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second. Determining the instant in time at which the laser strikes a sample, either by itself or in concert with another laser pulse, can be vital to the success of an experiment. In the February 17 issue of the journal Nature Photonics, researchers detail a new set of tools that better pinpoints the arrival time of X-ray and other laser pulses to within a few femtoseconds of accuracy....

For about a dozen years, synthetic biologists have been working on ways to design genetic circuits to perform novel functions such as manufacturing new drugs, producing fuel or even programming the suicide of cancer cells. Achieving these complex functions requires controlling many genetic and cellular components, including not only genes but also the regulatory proteins that turn them on and off. In a living cell, proteins called transcription factors often regulate that process....

Researchers at the University of North Carolin School of Medicine have made important strides in the exciting fields of cellular reprogramming and organ regeneration, and their findings might have a major impact on the development of future treatments for damaged hearts. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists found a more streamlined and effective way to reprogram fibroblasts, which are the cells that make up scar tissue, to become healthy heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) in a study that was recently published in the journal Cell Stem Cell....

Spiral galaxies are some of the most spectacular sights in the sky, but to an observer, they do not all look the same. Some are seen edge-on, giving astronomers an excellent idea of the galaxy’s vertical structure; others are seen at an angle, providing a hint of the size and structure of the spiral arms; while others are seen face-on, showcasing their arms and bright core in all their beauty....

A large, long-term study of the impacts of COVID-19 on children has enrolled its first participant at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The study, which is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, will track up to 1,000 children and young adults who previously tested positive for COVID-19 and evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on their physical and mental health over three years....

But in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter season ranked among the top-10 warmest. February 2021 was the planet’s coolest February in seven years due to La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean and unusually brisk temperatures that enveloped much of North America and northern Asia. But vast temperature contrasts during February — and during the three-month season — were at play in other parts of the world. In fact, the Northern Hemisphere as a whole experienced its 8th-warmest winter (December through February) in 142 years, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information....

Rice University’s Han Xiao and Stanford University’s Zhen Cheng, along with collaborators, have created a non-invasive brain imaging tool that sheds light on previously inaccessible structures and functions. Their unique small-molecule dye, known as a fluorophore, is the first of its kind to penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Furthermore, in a study on mice, the dye was able to distinguish between healthy brain tissue and a glioblastoma tumor. “This could be very useful for imaging-guided surgery, for example,” Xiao said....

According to the researchers, their results, which are based on an examination of drug safety signals identified by the FDA from 2008 to 2019, show that the FDA is either taking regulatory measures on information that has not been made public or that more comprehensive safety evaluations may be required when possible safety signals are identified. Monitoring a medicine’s safety after it is made accessible to patients (known as post-marketing pharmacovigilance) is critical for monitoring drug safety....

As COVID-19 continues to put pressure on healthcare providers around the world, engineers at the University of Bath have published a mathematical model that could help clinicians to safely allow two people to share a single ventilator. Members of Bath’s Centre for Therapeutic Innovation and Centre for Power Transmission and Motion Control have published a first-of-its-kind research paper on dual-patient ventilation (DPV), following work that began during the first wave of the virus in March 2020....

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the importance of understanding precisely how diseases spread throughout networks of transportation. However, rigorously determining the connection between disease risk and changing networks — which either humans or the environment may alter — is challenging due to the complexity of these systems. In a paper publishing today (Thursday, June 10, 2021) in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Stephen Kirkland (University of Manitoba), Zhisheng Shuai (University of Central Florida), P....

New journal article recounts Rush pediatricians’ campaign to protect children from severe burns. A 15-year research and advocacy effort to make microwave ovens safer has led to a change in national manufacturing standards that will make microwaves more difficult for young children to open, protecting them from the severe microwave-related burns that scar hundreds of kids under 5 years old in the United States each year. Researchers at Rush University Medical Center and other leaders of the campaign, who worked diligently to document the frequency and severity of these injuries and young children’s vulnerability to them, published the results of their efforts in The Journal of Pediatrics on January 20, 2021....

People living in non-white and low-income communities breathe in more hazardous particles than in affluent white ones. This new study isn’t intended to speak on the racial disparity, but on the widening economic gap when it comes to air pollution. The findings are by Yale University and were published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. These communities face greater health risks even if their air quality meets federal health standards....

When extreme climate conditions interact with stressors to social systems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the consequences could be severe unless experts from diverse backgrounds work together to develop comprehensive solutions. When extreme climate conditions interact with stressors to social systems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the consequences could be severe unless experts from diverse backgrounds work together to develop comprehensive solutions to combat their negative impacts. That’s the recommendation of a new article in Nature Climate Change published Monday and co-authored by a University of Central Florida researcher....

The study, published on January 27, 2020, mapped over 100 locations where tropical forests and coral reefs have been affected by climate extremes such as hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, droughts, and fires. It provides an overview of how these very diverse ecosystems are being threatened by a combination of ongoing climate changes, increasingly extreme weather, and damaging local human activities. The international team of researchers argue that only international action to decrease CO2 emissions can reverse this trend....

In a paper published in Earth-Science Reviews, paleontologists studied fossil sites all over the world from the late Permian to get an idea of what lived where. They found an unusual assortment of species near the equator, and one that is comparable to the modern tropics–except that the array of large, carnivorous reptiles would look very out of place anywhere on Earth today. “The tropics act as a diversity center–stuff that has gone extinct elsewhere is still alive there, and there’s new stuff evolving,” explains Postdoctoral Researcher Brandon Peecook, co-author of the paper....

The researchers have determined that the mass of the neutrino should be no more than 1 electron volt. Scientists previously estimated the upper limit of the neutrino’s mass to be around 2 electron volts, so this new estimate shaves down the neutrino’s mass range by more than half. The new estimate was determined based on data taken by KATRIN, the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and reported at the 2019 Conference on Astroparticle and Underground Physics last week....

“We want to understand not just the nucleus, but everything that makes up the nucleus,” said FSU Professor of Physics Paul Eugenio. “We’re working to understand the particles and forces that make up our world.” FSU’s hadronic physics group is a leading member of the GlueX Collaboration at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The group ran highly sophisticated experiments around the clock for months at a time over several years starting in 2016....