Collection of starshade research helps advance exoplanet imaging by space telescopes

The study was conducted by an international collaboration involving the research team led by Luca Tiberi of the Armenise-Harvard Laboratory of Brain Cancer at the Department of Cellular, computational and integrative biology - Cibio of UniTrento, the Paris Brain Institute-Institut du Cerveau at Sorbonne Université in Paris, the Hopp Children´s Cancer Center (KiTZ) in Heidelberg, Germany, and Sapienza University in Rome. It was supported by Fondazione Armenise-Harvard, Fondazione Airc (Italian Association for Cancer Research) and Fondazione Caritro from Trento. The findings of the study, published in Science Advances, could lead to better and more effective treatments. The team of researchers is proud of the results achieved. Luca Tiberi, coordinator of the study and corresponding ...

Dmitry Blinov is a co-author of the article and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics, St Petersburg University. He notes that researchers have been studying the optical polarisation from active galactic nuclei for more than 50 years. Some of the first academic papers on this topic were published back in the 1960s by Vladimir Hagen-Thorn, Professor in the Department of Astrophysics, St Petersburg University, and Viktor Dombrovskiy, Associate Professor in the Department of Astrophysics, Leningrad State University. In the Universe, the main material is concentrated in galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars: there are about 200-400 of them in the Milky Way. At the centre of galaxies there are supermassive ...

An international team of researchers co-led by the University of Adelaide and the University of Arizona has analysed the genomes of more than 2,500 modern humans from 26 worldwide populations, to better understand how humans have adapted to historical coronavirus outbreaks. In a paper published in Current Biology, the researchers used cutting-edge computational methods to uncover genetic traces of adaptation to coronaviruses, the family of viruses responsible for three major outbreaks in the last 20 years, including the ongoing pandemic. "Modern human genomes contain evolutionary ...

Rheumatologists are familiar with the everyday use of immunomodulatory drugs. These are designed to treat the inflammation caused by autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. A EULAR taskforce was set up to develop a set of new points to consider to give guidance and advice on the best way to use these medicines to treat COVID-19. The taskforce included rheumatologists, immunologists, haematologists, paediatricians, patients and other health professionals. They looked at the published evidence on the use of immunomodulatory therapies to treat severe COVID-19. In total, there are two overarching principles and 14 points to consider. The principles stress that the picture of SARS-CoV-2 infection can be very different in different people. Infections range from asymptomatic ...

Measuring ethane in the atmosphere shows that the amounts of methane going into the atmosphere from oil and gas wells and contributing to greenhouse warming is higher than suggested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to an international team of scientists who spent three years flying over three areas of the U.S. during all four seasons. "Ethane is a gas that is related only to certain sources of methane," said Zachary R. Barkley, researcher in meteorology and atmospheric science, Penn State. "Methane, however, is produced by oil, ...

Understanding work participation is important, but the way in which this is defined and measured in clinical trials is not always the same, which has made it hard to compare data. EULAR set up a taskforce to draft points to consider when designing studies that use work participation as a measure. The taskforce included doctors, experts and patients from 11 countries. They used the published evidence to draw up a set of points to consider. Two overarching principles and nine points to consider were developed. The principles say that work participation is important for people with inflammatory arthritis, their ...

Paper Title: Analysis of Common Shoulder Injuries in Collegiate Baseball Players Journal: The Physician and Sportsmedicine (June 23, 2021, online edition) Authors: Alexis Chiang Colvin, MD, Professor, Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Daniel A. Charen, MD, Resident, Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; and other coauthors. Bottom Line: Baseball players are highly susceptible to shoulder injuries due to significant microtrauma including repetitive overhead throwing. Mount Sinai researchers investigated men's National Collegiate ...

Fibromyalgia is one of many chronic pain conditions that remains stubbornly difficult to treat. As the ravages of the opioid epidemic lead many to avoid these powerful painkillers, a significant number of people with fibromyalgia are finding an effective replacement in CBD-containing products, finds a new Michigan Medicine study. CBD, short for cannabidiol, is the second most common cannabinoid in the cannabis plant, and has been marketed for everything from mood stabilization to pain relief, without the intoxicating effects produced by the most common cannabinoid, THC. THC, which stands for ...

The cells of simple organisms, such as bacteria, as well as human cells are surrounded by a membrane, which fulfills various tasks including protecting the cell from stress. In a joint project, teams from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Forschungszentrum Jülich, with participation of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), have now discovered that a membrane protein found in bacteria has a similar structure and function as a group of proteins that are responsible for remodeling and rebuilding the cell membrane in humans. No connection between the two protein groups was known before. The team's research work has been published recently in the renowned journal Cell. PspA plays a key role in bacterial stress response The phage shock protein ...

Boston - In recent years, cancer immunotherapy has been effective in treating patients with immunogenic, or so-called "hot" tumors with increased levels of inflammation and the presence of immune cells in and around the tumors. Prostate cancer, however, is considered a "cold" tumor, with few immune cells recognizing and infiltrating prostate malignancies. Accordingly, prostate cancer has been found to respond poorly to the class of immunotherapies known as immune checkpoint inhibitors. In previous work, a team led by medical oncologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) identified a subset of prostate cancers that exhibited ...