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TREM2 TVD-lg, a tetra-variable domain antibody targeting the triggering receptor expressed on myeloid 2 (TREM2), decreased amyloid burden, eased neuron damage, and alleviated cognitive decline in mice with Alzheimer’s disease, according to research headed by senior author Zhiqiang An, Ph.D., professor and Robert A. Welch Distinguished University Chair in Chemistry at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. The study was recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. “Antibody-based therapy is a viable drug modality for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease,” said An, director of the Texas Therapeutics Institute with The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM)....

In research published recently in Energy Storage Materials, a team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute demonstrated how they could — by using aqueous electrolytes instead of the typical organic electrolytes — assemble a substantially safer, cost-efficient battery that still performs well. If you were to take a look inside a battery, you’d find two electrodes — an anode and a cathode. These electrodes are immersed in a liquid electrolyte that conducts ions as the battery charges and discharges....

The developers hope the new system, called Portal-ble, could be a tool for artists, designers, game developers, and others to experiment with augmented reality (AR). The team will present the work later this month at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2019) in New Orleans. The source code for Andriod is freely available for download on the researchers’ website, and the iPhone code will follow soon....

The study from the laboratory of Professor Ralf Paus of the Center for Dermatology Research describes how damage in the hair follicle caused by taxanes, cancer drugs that can cause permanent hair loss, can be prevented. To do this, scientists have exploited the properties of a newer class of drugs called CDK4/6 inhibitors, which blocks cell division and are already medically approved as so-called “targeted” cancer therapies. Dr. Talveen Purba, lead author on the study explains: “Although at first this seems counterintuitive, we found that CDK4/6 inhibitors can be used temporarily to halt cell division without promoting additional toxic effects in the hair follicle....

Although the main effects of COVID-19 disease, caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, are seen in the respiratory system, many patients also experience significant neurological symptoms such as loss of smell, headaches, malaise, cognitive loss, epilepsy, ataxia, and encephalopathy. However, the specific impact of the virus on the nervous system is not yet well understood and it is unclear whether the vaccines developed to combat COVID-19 also protect against the spread of the virus to the central nervous system and confer protection against brain injury....

Co-researcher Associate Professor Helmut Jerjen from ANU said astronomers had previously observed planes of dwarf galaxies whirling around our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the neighboring Andromeda. He said the latest finding challenged a long-held theory among cosmologists and theoreticians that there were thousands of dwarf galaxies in all directions around these large galaxies like bees swarming around a hive. “Cold dark matter theory made astronomers believe that the best-studied galaxies in the Universe – the Milky Way and Andromeda – are the odd ones out,” said Dr....

An international group of researchers including experts from the Natural History Museum and led by the University of Adelaide has conducted a comprehensive genetic analysis and found no evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and the ancient humans known from fossil records in Island Southeast Asia. The team found further DNA evidence of our mysterious ancient cousins, the Denisovans, which could mean there are major discoveries to come in the region....

Similarly to how a bicycle dynamo converts motion into electricity, moving conductive fluids can generate magnetic fields. The so-called magnetic Reynolds number (the product of the fluid’s flow velocity, expansion, and conductivity) primarily determines whether a magnetic field is actually generated. During a spectacular experiment, scientists in Frank Stefani’s team at the HZDR’s Institute of Fluid Dynamics aim to achieve the critical value required for the occurrence of the dynamo effect....

Now, a battery membrane technology developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) may point to a solution. As reported in the journal of Joule, the researchers developed a versatile yet affordable battery membrane — from a class of polymers known as AquaPIMs. This class of polymers makes long-lasting and low-cost grid batteries possible based solely on readily available materials such as zinc, iron, and water....

Meanwhile, sp2 hybridized carbon with negative curvature, called “schwarzite”, has been proposed theoretically, and its discovery has been a dream of some scientists in the field of carbon materials. It has been learned that carbon can be templated into some of the periodic pores of certain zeolites via vapor deposition but the templating is incomplete due to some pores simply being too narrow. This has thwarted making carbon schwartzites by templating routes....

“Congratulations to NASA’s New Horizons team, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the Southwest Research Institute for making history yet again. In addition to being the first to explore Pluto, today New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft and became the first to directly explore an object that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “This is what leadership in space exploration is all about....

This newly released Hubble image shows quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. This image from Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is likely the best of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home....

The clinical study, which included 10 participants in labor through childbirth, is published today, March 14, in the journal Nature Communications. “There are all kinds of obstetrics and gynecological conditions that are associated with uterine contractions, but we don’t have very accurate ways of measuring them,” said senior author Yong Wang, PhD, an associate professor of obstetrics & gynecology, of electrical & systems engineering, of radiology, and of biomedical engineering....

Sometimes, one robot isn’t enough. Consider a search-and-rescue mission to find a hiker lost in the woods. Rescuers might want to deploy a squad of wheeled robots to roam the forest, perhaps with the aid of drones scouring the scene from above. The benefits of a robot team are clear. But orchestrating that team is no simple matter. How to ensure the robots aren’t duplicating each other’s efforts or wasting energy on a convoluted search trajectory?...

First identified more than a century ago, the star dips in brightness over days or weeks before recovering to its previous luminosity. At the same time, the star appears to be slowly losing its luster overall, leaving researchers scratching their heads. Now, astronomers at Columbia University believe they’ve developed an explanation for this oddity. In a new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astrophysicists Brian Metzger, Miguel Martinez, and Nicholas Stone propose that the long-term dimming is the result of a disk of debris — torn from a melting exomoon — that is accumulating and orbiting the star, blocking its light as the material passes between the star and Earth....

However, a recent Australian study has demonstrated that individuals with autism are just slightly less accurate than their non-autistic peers at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Recent research shows we may need to reevaluate widely held beliefs that adults with autism experience difficulties with social emotion recognition and have little insight into their processing of other people’s facial expressions. The findings were recently published in the journal Autism Research. In a Flinders University study, 63 individuals with autism and 67 non-autistic adults (with IQs ranging from 85 to 143) took part in three 5-hour sessions comparing their identification of 12 human facial emotion expressions such as anger and sadness....

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) ineffective as a preventive antiviral against COVID-19. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have added to the growing body of understanding about how hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is not a possible defense against COVID-19. Specifically, they found that HCQ is not effective in preventing COVID-19 in patients with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis (RA), suggesting a broader interpretation of HCQ as ineffective preventive medicine for the general population. Their findings were recently published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases....

“Crohn’s disease is a complex disorder with multiple genes and environmental factors involved, which disproportionally affects individuals of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry,” explained lead researcher Inga Peter, Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “The presence of shared LRRK2 mutations in patients with Crohn’s disease and Parkinson’s disease provides refined insight into disease mechanisms and may have major implications for the treatment of these two seemingly unrelated diseases....

Life in the universe might be even rarer than we thought. Recently, astronomers looking for potentially habitable worlds have targeted red dwarf stars because they are the most common type of star, comprising 80 percent of the stars in the universe. But a new study shows that harsh space weather might strip the atmosphere of any rocky planet orbiting in a red dwarf’s habitable zone. “A red-dwarf planet faces an extreme space environment, in addition to other stresses like tidal locking,” says Ofer Cohen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)....

According to the research, two-thirds of individuals who were affected saw a significant improvement after two years. OCD is characterized by intrusive and persistent obsessive thoughts, as well as dysfunctional and ritualized behaviors. It is estimated that up to 3% of the population is affected by it. It typically starts early in life and is frequently accompanied by very severe anxiety or depression. For those who are impacted, going to work or school can be challenging....