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The US-led research is looking to develop effective immunotherapy via a new vaccine to remove ‘brain plaque’ and tau protein aggregates linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Recent success in bigenic mice models supports progression to human trials in years to come, the researchers say. A new paper in the journal Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy paves the way for more work in 2020, with medical researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine and University of California, Irvine (UCI) working with a successful vaccine formulated on adjuvant developed by Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky in South Australia....

Because exposing healthy people to radiation for clinical trials would be unethical, efforts to identify drugs that can mitigate the effects of radiation exposure have been limited to animal studies, which are notoriously poor predictors of how a given drug will behave in humans. Now, researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST, Portugal), Boston Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have published a study using an organ-on-a-chip (Organ Chip) model of the human gut that reveals the intestinal blood vessel cells may play an important part in radiation-induced intestinal injury, and it confirms that a potential radioprotective drug, dimethyloxaloylglycine (DMOG), suppresses the intestine’s responses to radiation injury....

“With detailed chemical fingerprints of these early galaxies, we see that they include what might be the most primitive galaxy identified so far. At the same time, we can connect these galaxies from the dawn of the universe to similar ones nearby, which we can study in much greater detail,” said James Rhoads, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who presented the findings at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle....

This gas has very few industrial applications. However, levels have been soaring because it is vented to the atmosphere during the production of another chemical widely used in cooling systems in developing countries. Scientists are concerned, because HFC-23 is a very potent greenhouse gas, with one ton of its emissions being equivalent to the release of more than 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Starting in 2015, India and China, thought to be the main emitters of HFC-23, announced ambitious plans to abate emissions in factories that produce the gas....

A new study shows that residents of long-term care facilities with lower nurse staffing levels, poorer quality scores, and higher concentrations of disadvantaged residents suffer from higher rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. “In nursing homes, quality and staffing are important factors, and there already exists system-wide disparities in which facilities with lower resources and higher concentrations of socio-economically disadvantaged residents have poorer health outcomes,” said Yue Li, Ph....

It may be surprising to hear that this new material is made of metal (mostly nickel) given that it is so light. Dr. Tobias Schaedler of HRL explains that “The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.” With this nanotechnology construction the material is 99.99% air, which is why it is so lightweight with a density of only 0....

New research from UC Berkeley suggests that sleep disruption in the elderly, mediated by structural brain changes, represents a contributing factor to age-related cognitive decline. The connection between poor sleep, memory loss and brain deterioration as we grow older has been elusive. But for the first time, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a link between these hallmark maladies of old age. Their discovery opens the door to boosting the quality of sleep in elderly people to improve memory....

Led by FRIC scientific director Michaela Gack, Ph.D., the team discovered that a coronavirus enzyme called PLpro (papain-like protease) blocks the body’s immune response to the infection. More research is necessary, but the findings suggest that therapeutics that inhibit the enzyme may help treat COVID-19. “SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — has evolved quickly against many of the body’s well-known defense mechanisms,” Gack said. “Our findings, however, offer insights into a never-before characterized mechanism of immune activation and how PLpro disrupts this response, enabling SARS-CoV-2 to freely replicate and wreak havoc throughout the host....

“Attention so far has focused on the importance of stratospheric warming in the Northern Hemisphere and its impact on extreme climate,” said study author Dr. Ghyslaine Boschat, a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and School of Earth, Atmosphere, and Environment at Monash. “Our study is significant because it is the first of its kind to identify and quantify a direct link between variations in the Antarctic polar vortex in spring and Australian hot and dry extremes from late spring to early summer,” she said....

Researchers have built the first-ever map showing every single neuron and how they’re wired together in the brain of the fruit fly larva. This huge step forwards in science will ultimately help us understand the basic principles by which signals travel through the brain at the neural level and lead to behavior and learning. The map of the 3016 neurons that make up the larva’s brain and the detailed circuitry of neural pathways within it is known as a ‘connectome’....

Perovskites are a class of materials that — with the right combination of elements — have a crystalline structure that makes them particularly well-suited for light-based applications. Their ability to absorb light and transfer its energy efficiently makes them a common target for researchers developing new types of solar cells, for example. The most common perovskite used in solar energy today, methylammonium lead iodide (MAPbI3), can convert light to energy just as well as today’s best commercially available solar panels....

To better understand the role of Nucb2, a research team led by Vishwa Deep Dixit, the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Comparative Medicine and professor of immunobiology, examined the gene — and the protein it encodes — in cells and in several mice models. They deleted the gene first from the whole animal, then specifically from neurons, fat cells, and immune cells. When they removed the gene from immune cells known as macrophages, and fed the mice a high-fat diet, the macrophages produced inflammation, which in turn caused insulin resistance in the animals lacking Nucb2....

Researchers have discovered that a particular protein can be used as a brain marker to indicate whether emotional memories can be changed or forgotten. This is a study in animals, but the researchers hope that the findings will eventually allow people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to return to leading a more balanced life. This work is presented at the ECNP Conference in Lisbon. Scientists know that long-term memories can broadly be divided into two types: fact-based memory, where we can recall such things as names, places, events, etc....

An international research group applied theoretical physics methods to investigate the Great Pyramid’s electromagnetic response to radio waves. Scientists predicted that under resonance conditions the pyramid can concentrate electromagnetic energy in its internal chambers and under the base. The research group plans to use these theoretical results to design nanoparticles capable of reproducing similar effects in the optical range. Such nanoparticles may be used, for example, to develop sensors and highly efficient solar cells....

Researchers from North Carolina State University have synthesized an analog of lipoxazolidinone A, a small molecule that is effective against drug-resistant bacteria such as MRSA. This molecule, a new synthetic compound inspired by a natural product, could be a useful chemical tool for studying other Gram-positive infections and may have implications for future drug creation. Lipoxazolidinone A is a natural product which had been previously isolated from bacteria living in marine sediments....

“More and more evidence is coming in that male and female hormones affect our immune system, but much remains to be done before sex can be included as a self-evident biological factor in medical research and therapy,” says the paper’s first author Fei He, a former visiting researcher at the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institute. “Our results provide new perspectives that can have a high impact on the treatment of cancer....

A planet’s global magnetic field arises from what scientists call a dynamo: a flow of molten metal within the planet’s core that produces an electrical current. On Earth, the dynamo is what makes compass needles point north. But Mars’ dynamo has been extinct for billions of years. New findings from UBC researchers working with colleagues in the U.S. and France, published May 1, 2020, in Science Advances, bring us closer to knowing the precise timing and duration of Mars’ dynamo....

“While we expect to find many significant rocks during both Mars 2020 and ExoMars missions, we also have to leave open the possibility we could find one or more very special rocks, the kind whose discovery would not only speak volumes about the history of Mars but contribute significantly to the discussion of life elsewhere in the universe,” said Ken Farley, Mars 2020 project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena. Could Mars ever have supported life?...

In a test of antiviral effectiveness against the virus that causes COVID-19, an extract from edible seaweeds substantially outperformed remdesivir, the current standard antiviral used to combat the disease. Heparin, a common blood thinner, and a heparin variant stripped of its anticoagulant properties, performed on par with remdesivir in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection in mammalian cells. Published online on July 24, 2020, in Cell Discovery1, the research is the latest example of a decoy strategy researchers from the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute are developing against viruses like the novel coronavirus that spawned the current global health crisis....

Using the gigantic telescope ALMA in Chile, a Chalmers-led team of scientists studied 15 unusual stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, the closest 5000 light years from Earth. Their measurements show that all the stars are double, and all have recently experienced a rare phase that is poorly understood, but is believed to lead to many other astronomical phenomena. Their results are published this week in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy....