Posts

“From detailed analysis of the structure, we can make inferences about the principles of community growth and organization,” says senior author Gary Borisy, of the Forsyth Institute and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. “Bacteria on the tongue are a lot more than just a random pile. They are more like an organ of our bodies.” The human oral microbiome is a complex ecosystem. The spatial organization of microbial communities in the mouth is affected by a variety of factors, including temperature, moisture, salivary flow, pH, oxygen, and the frequency of disturbances such as abrasion or oral hygiene....

The new imaging technology uses the way light from lasers interacts with cancerous and healthy tissues to distinguish between them in real-time and with no physical contact, an advancement with the potential to eliminate the need for secondary surgeries to get missed malignant tissue. “This is the future, a huge step towards our ultimate goal of revolutionizing surgical oncology,” said Parsin Haji Reza, a systems design engineering professor who leads the project....

Researchers from UPMC and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory (CCDC-ARL) created an individual biocontainment unit, or IBU, to keep front line health care workers safe while they provide life-saving care. The device is described in a study published today in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Earlier attempts to minimize exposure to health care workers involved placing a plexiglass intubation box over a patient’s head and shoulders....

Saturn’s rings are made up of ice particles whose orbital velocity increases the closer they are to the planet. The Cassini Division is a wide, dark band located between Saturn’s two most visible rings, in which the particle density is considerably lower than that inside the rings. The researchers suspected a link between Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons, and the band, since there is a region at the inner edge of the Division where the particles orbit around Saturn exactly twice as fast as Mimas....

Wake up pancreas, it’s time for work! Researchers led by Osaka University in Japan have now identified a mechanism by which a lack of insulin may be reported back to the pancreatic cells that produce insulin. This discovery presents a potential new therapeutic target for diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is estimated to affect over 400 million people worldwide, including 35 million Americans. Despite this prevalence, insulin regulation in the body is still not fully understood....

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft took the color-enhanced image during its eleventh close flyby of the gas giant planet on February 7 at 7:11 a.m. PST (10:11 a.m. EST). At the time, the spacecraft was 74,896 miles (120,533 kilometers) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds at 84.9 degrees south latitude. Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager. This image was created by reprocessing raw JunoCam data using trajectory and pointing data from the spacecraft....

Countries that signed up to the 2015 Paris Agreement have committed themselves to keep the rise in average global temperature ‘well below’ 2 °C. Every five years, they are to issue so-called ‘nationally determined contributions’ (NDCs), describing their actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to climate change impacts. Therefore, countries will need to track their carbon emissions, not only at a national level, but also at the scale of individual ‘super-emitters’ such as power plants, megacities, refineries, and giant factories....

A new study from researchers at Harvard University shows that rates of protein synthesis are affected by environmental perturbations, resulting in certain sequences that manufacture proteins efficiently, while others that are ostensibly identical, produce almost none. Harvard scientists say they’ve solved a mystery that’s nearly as old as science’s understanding of the genetic code. Though the genetic code, the cell’s set of rules for transcribing DNA into RNA and translating RNA into proteins, has been understood for decades, scientists have puzzled over what seemed like a mathematical incongruity in the system....

Elementary school-age children who get less than nine hours of sleep per night have significant differences in certain brain regions responsible for memory, intelligence, and well-being compared to those who get the recommended nine to 12 hours of sleep per night, according to a new study led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers. Such differences correlated with greater mental health problems, like depression, anxiety, and impulsive behaviors, in those who lacked sleep....

In a paper published on March 11, 2022, in Sciences Advances, researchers in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine revealed new details about a key enzyme that makes DNA sequencing possible. The finding is a leap forward into the era of personalized medicine when doctors will be able to design treatments based on the genomes of individual patients. “Enzymes make life possible by catalyzing chemical transformations that otherwise would just take too long for an organism,” said Greg Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and a co-corresponding author of the new study....

Prof Seales is the director of the Digital Restoration Initiative at the University of Kentucky (US), a research program dedicated to the development of software tools that enable the recovery of fragile, unreadable texts. According to Seales, “Diamond Light Source is an absolutely crucial element in our long-term plan to reveal the writing from damaged materials, as it offers unparalleled brightness and control for the images we can create, plus access to a brain trust of scientists who understand our challenges and are eager to help us succeed....

Researchers have identified what may be the key molecular mechanism responsible for COVID-19 mortality – an enzyme related to neurotoxins found in rattlesnake venom. An enzyme with an elusive role in severe inflammation may be a key mechanism driving COVID-19 severity and could provide a new therapeutic target to reduce COVID-19 mortality, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Researchers from the University of Arizona, in collaboration with Stony Brook University and Wake Forest University School of Medicine, analyzed blood samples from two COVID-19 patient cohorts and found that circulation of the enzyme – secreted phospholipase A2 group IIA, or sPLA2-IIA – may be the most important factor in predicting which patients with severe COVID-19 eventually succumb to the virus....

Such conditions include liver problems, acute pancreatitis, irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, and ulcers in the lining of the stomach or upper intestine. The post-COVID-19 GI tract also is associated with an increased likelihood of constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, bloating, and vomiting. “Gastrointestinal problems were among the first that were reported by the patient community,” said senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University who has studied extensively the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection....

Past year vaping of marijuana, which has more than doubled in the past two years, was reported at 20.8% among 12th graders, with 10th graders not far behind at 19.4% and eighth graders at 7.0%. Past month marijuana vaping among 12th graders nearly doubled in a single year to 14% from 7.5%–the second largest one-year jump ever tracked for any substance in the history of the survey. (The largest was from 2017-2018 with past month nicotine vaping among 12th graders)....

On November 26, 2018, the NASA InSight lander successfully set down on Mars in the Elysium Planitia region. Seventy Martian days later, the mission’s seismometer SEIS began recording the planet’s vibrations. A team of researchers and engineers at ETH Zurich, led by ETH Professor Domenico Giardini, had delivered the SEIS control electronics and is responsible for the Marsquake Service. The latter is in charge of the daily interpretation of the data transmitted from Mars, in collaboration with the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zurich....

Social networks among animals are critical to various aspects of their lives, including reproductive success and survival, and could even teach us more about human relationships. Dr. Amiyaal Ilany, a biologist at the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, integrates behavioral ecology, network science, and social science, to study broad aspects of social behavior in the wild. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, he developed, together with Dr....

Birch bark tar is a manufactured product with a history of production and use that reaches back to the Palaeolithic. It is very sticky, and is water resistant, and also has biocidal properties meaning that it has a wide range of applications, for example, as a multipurpose adhesive, sealant, and in medicine. Archaeological evidence for birch bark tar covers a broad geographic range from the UK to the Baltic and from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia....

The echiuran, or spoon worm, is one such animal. It is also called the penis worm. There is no “Save the Echiuran Foundation” and no influencers selling merchandise to help save them. But these phallic invertebrates are certainly worth your time as integral and fascinating members — of Australia’s marine ecosystems. What makes them so interesting? Taxonomists have classified echiurans in various different ways over the years, including as their own group of unique animals....

Most of the information we have about the Milky Way stellar halo comes from its inner region, which we can observe close to the solar neighborhood. However, for the first time the chemical properties of the external regions of the halo of our galaxy were explored with high resolution spectroscopy in the optical of a sample of 28 red giant stars at large distances from the Sun. The method that was used, i....

This enzyme is also of great interest to researchers who want to find new ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and turn them into useful carbon-containing compounds. Current industrial methods for transforming carbon dioxide are very energy-intensive. “There are industrial processes that do these reactions at high temperatures and high pressures, and then there’s this enzyme that can do the same thing at room temperature,” says Catherine Drennan, an MIT professor of chemistry and biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator....