The team say their findings have implications for the treatment of viruses in future. Researchers from the Universities of York and Leeds, collaborating with the Hilvert Laboratory at the ETH Zürich, studied the structure, assembly and evolution of a 'container' composed of a bacterial enzyme. The study - published in the journal Science - details the structural transformation of these virus-like particles into larger protein 'containers'. It also reveals that packaging of the genetic cargo in these containers becomes more efficient during the later stages of evolution. They show that this is because the genome inside evolves hallmarks of a mechanism widely ...

The specific traits of a plant's roots determine the climatic conditions under which a particular plant prevails. A new study led by the University of Wyoming sheds light on this relationship -- and challenges the nature of ecological trade-offs. Daniel Laughlin, an associate professor in the UW Department of Botany and director of the Global Vegetation Project, led the study, which included researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig, Germany; Leipzig University; and Wageningen University & Research in Wageningen, Netherlands. "We found that root traits can explain species distributions across the planet, which has never been attempted ...

It's often cancer's spread, not the original tumor, that poses the disease's most deadly risk. "And yet metastasis is one of the most poorly understood aspects of cancer biology," says Kamen Simeonov, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. In a new study, a team led by Simeonov and School of Veterinary Medicine professor Christopher Lengner has made strides toward deepening that understanding by tracking the development of metastatic cells. Their work used a mouse model of pancreatic cancer and cutting-edge techniques to trace the lineage and gene expression patterns of individual cancer cells. They found a spectrum of aggression in the cells that arose, with cells ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- Many animals have evolved camouflage tactics for self-defense, but some butterflies and moths have taken it even further: They've developed transparent wings, making them almost invisible to predators. A team led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) scientists studied the development of one such species, the glasswing butterfly, Greta oto, to see through the secrets of this natural stealth technology. Their work was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Although transparent structures in animals are well established, they appear far more often in ...

Because of a phenomenon called gravitational locking, the Moon always faces the Earth from the same side. This proved useful in the early lunar landing missions in the 20th century, as there was always a direct line of sight for uninterrupted radiocommunications between Earth ground stations and equipment on the Moon. However, gravitational locking makes exploring the hidden face of the moon--the far side--much more challenging, because signals cannot be sent directly across the Moon towards Earth. Still, in January 2019, China's lunar probe Chang'e-4 marked the first time a spacecraft landed on the far side of the Moon. Both the lander and the lunar rover it carried have been gathering and sending back images and ...

Philadelphia, June 10, 2021 - A new study from researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 18- to 24-year-olds who use cell phones while driving are more likely to engage in other risky driving behaviors associated with "acting-without-thinking," a form of impulsivity. These findings suggest the importance of developing new strategies to prevent risky driving in young adults, especially those with impulsive personalities. The study was recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research Public Health. Cell phone use while driving has been linked to increased crash and near-crash risk. Despite bans on handheld cell phone use ...

Plants are constantly exposed to microbes: pathogens that cause disease, commensals that cause no harm or benefit, and mutualists that promote plant growth or help fend off pathogens. For example, most land plants can form positive relationships with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to improve nutrient uptake. How plants fight off pathogens without also killing beneficial microbes or wasting energy on commensal microbes is a largely unanswered question. In fact, when scientists within the field of Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions were asked to come up with their Top 10 Unanswered Questions, the #1 question was "How do plants engage with beneficial microorganisms while at the same time restricting ...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Imagine being woken up at 3 a.m. to navigate a corn maze, memorize 20 items on a shopping list or pass your driver's test. According to a new analysis out of West Virginia University, that's often what it's like to be a rodent in a biomedical study. Mice and rats, which make up the vast majority of animal models, are nocturnal. Yet a survey of animal studies across eight behavioral neuroscience domains showed that most behavioral testing is conducted during the day, when the rodents would normally be at rest. "There are these dramatic daily fluctuations--in metabolism, in immune function, in learning and ...

Philadelphia, June 10, 2021 - The collection of nasopharyngeal swab (NPS) samples for COVID-19 diagnostic testing poses challenges including exposure risk to healthcare workers and supply chain constraints. Saliva samples are easier to collect but can be mixed with mucus or blood, and some studies have found they produce less accurate results. A team of researchers has found that an innovative protocol that processes saliva samples with a bead mill homogenizer before real-time PCR (RT-PCR) testing results in higher sensitivity compared to NPS samples. Their protocol appears in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier. "Saliva as a sample type for COVID-19 testing ...

WASHINGTON, June 10, 2021 -- The demand for flexible wearable electronics has spiked with the dramatic growth of smart devices that can exchange data with other devices over the internet with embedded sensors, software, and other technologies. Researchers consequently have focused on exploring flexible energy storage devices, such as flexible supercapacitators (FSCs), that are lightweight and safe and easily integrate with other devices. FSCs have high power density and fast charge and discharge rates. Printing electronics, manufacturing electronics devices and systems by using conventional printing techniques, has proved to be an economical, simple, and scalable strategy for fabricating FSCs. Traditional micromanufacturing ...

An exploratory investigation into the behavior of materials with desirable electric properties resulted in the discovery of a structural phase of two-dimensional (2D) materials. The new family of materials are electrides, wherein electrons occupy a space usually reserved for atoms or ions instead of orbiting the nucleus of an atom or ion. The stable, low-energy, tunable materials could have potential applications in nanotechnologies. The international research team, led by Hannes Raebiger, associate professor in the Department of Physics at Yokohama National University in Japan, published their results on June 10th as frontispiece in Advanced Functional Materials. Initially, the team ...

Researchers from Skoltech have designed and conducted experiments measuring gas permeability under various conditions for ice-containing sediments mimicking permafrost. Their results can be useful both in modeling and testing techniques for gas production from Arctic reservoirs and in tracing methane emission in high latitudes. The paper was published in the journal Energy&Fuels. Permafrost, even though it sounds very stable and permanent, is actually quite diverse: depending on the composition of the frozen ground, pressure, temperature and so on, it can have varying properties, which are extremely important if you want to build something on permafrost, ...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (JUNE 10, 2021) -- Much like a supply truck crossing the countryside, the misfolded proteins that damage neurons in Alzheimer's disease travel the "roads" of the brain, sometimes stopping and sometimes re-routing to avoid roadblocks, reports a study published in END ...

MELVILLE, N.Y., June 10, 2021 -- The physiological impacts of COVID-19 seem almost limitless. Complications can range from loss of taste to respiratory distress, with many effects lasting for months. Evidence suggests auditory and vestibular effects should be added to the growing list of symptoms. During the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually June 8-10, Colleen Le Prell, from the University of Texas at Dallas, will talk about hearing and balance disorders associated with coronavirus infection and how pandemic-related stress ...

Paris, France and New York, NY June 10, 2021 - AP-HP Greater Paris University Hospitals, the leading European clinical trial center with the largest amount of healthcare data in France dedicated to research and Owkin, a startup pioneering Federated Learning and AI technologies for medical research and clinical development, announced the recent results of their ongoing strategic collaboration at ASCO 2021. The abstract and poster entitled "Identification of pancreatic adenocarcinoma molecular subtypes on histology slides using deep learning models" demonstrates the first ...

ROCKVILLE, Md. - June 10, 2021 - The Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP), the premier global, molecular diagnostic professional society, today published consensus recommendations to aid in the design and validation of clinical CYP2D6 assays, promote standardization of testing across different laboratories and improve patient care. The manuscript, "Recommendations for Clinical CYP2D6 Genotyping Allele Selection: A Joint Consensus Recommendation of the Association for Molecular Pathology, College of American Pathologists, Dutch Pharmacogenetics Working Group of the Royal Dutch Pharmacists Association, and European Society for Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Therapy," was released online ahead of publication in The Journal ...

Champaign, IL, June 10, 2021 - Present in blood, urine, and milk, the chemical compound urea is the primary form of nitrogen excretion in mammals. Testing for urea levels in dairy cows helps scientists and farmers understand how effectively nitrogen from feed is used in cows' bodies, with important economic implications for farmers in terms of feed costs, physiological effects for cows such as reproductive performance, and environmental impacts from excretion of nitrogen in dairy cow waste. Thus, accuracy in testing dairy cow urea levels is essential. Since the 1990s, mid-infrared testing of milk urea nitrogen (MUN) has been the most efficient and least invasive way to measure nitrogen use by dairy cows in large numbers. In a recent ...

Plastic bottles drifting in the sea; bags in the stomachs of turtles; Covid-19 masks dancing in the surf: few images are as unpleasant to look at as those that show the contamination of our oceans. And few environmental issues are as urgent and as present in the public awareness. "Most people have an emotional connection to the sea. They think of ocean pollution as an attack on a place they long for," said Nikoleta Bellou, marine scientist at Hereon's Institute of Coastal System - Analysis and Modeling. Between 1990 and 2015 alone, an estimated 100 million metric tons of mostly plastic waste entered the oceans. For that instance the study fits to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which started this year to emphasize a sustainable use of ...

(Boston)--Medical education aspires to mitigate bias in future professionals by providing a robust curriculum that includes perspectives and practices for caring for sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTQI) persons. To provide medical schools with a more systematic, uniform approach to teaching these topics in their curriculum, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in 2014 published 30 SGM competencies and topics that curricula should address. However, implementation of these ideals remains challenging. Building off the AAMC's comprehensive ...

Breakthrough in metamaterials: for the first time in the world, researchers at Tel Aviv University developed an innovative nanotechnology that transforms a transparent calcite nanoparticle into a sparkling gold-like particle. In other words, they turned the transparent particle into a particle that is visible despite its very small dimensions. According to the researchers the new material can serve as a platform for innovative cancer treatments. In a new paper published in Advanced Materials, an international team of scientists, coordinated by Dr. Roman Noskov and Dr. Pavel Ginzburg from the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Dmitry Gorin from the Center ...

Through the biological fixation of the element nitrogen by the enzyme nitrogenase, organisms gain access to molecular nitrogen (N2) in the Earth's atmosphere, which is essential for building cellular structures. In addition, a vanadium-dependent variant of nitrogenase can reduce the toxic gas carbon monoxide (CO) to hydrocarbons. These reductions of N2 and CO are among the most important processes in industrial chemistry, as they are used to produce both fertilizers and synthetic fuels. However, researchers have not yet been able to decipher the different pathways of the two reactions. Dr. Michael Rohde from Prof. Dr. Oliver Einsle's team at the Institute of Biochemistry at the ...

The consumption of raw materials has increased notably in industry in general, and in the construction industry in particular, amidst growing concerns over sustainability issues. Concrete and mortar are the most commonly used materials in construction, and many studies are currently under way to try and reduce the harmful effects of their manufacture. Concrete and mortar are made by mixing water, sand, cement and aggregates. "The main problem is the amount of cement used to produce this type of material; cement manufacturing uses a huge amount of energy and natural resources, which implies a high level of CO2 emissions. Diverse studies are under way aimed at reducing the quantity of cement required. We are working to replace cement and aggregates ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (06/10/2021) -- New findings from the University of Minnesota Medical School are helping uncover why some people are more likely to be overweight and develop Type 2 diabetes -- and it starts in the womb. Previous association studies have shown that low birthweight among infants is a strong determinant for eventual obesity and Type 2 diabetes. The placenta of infants with a low birthweight have reduced levels of mTOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin), and the placenta of bigger infants have increased levels of mTOR. Building off of that research, a U of M Medical ...

Genova (Italy) 10 June, 2021 - The U-Vip (Unit for Visually Impaired People) research team led by Monica Gori at the IIT- Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) has recently published a study which shows for the first time how children aged from 3 to 5 years old have problems in recognising the emotions of people wearing surgical masks. This collateral effect of the preventive measures linked to the Covid-19 health emergency could influence the correct development of children's capabilities of social interaction. The research paper has been published in Frontiers in Psychology. The use of facemasks for children ...

Actively restoring oyster reefs--beyond simply protecting them from harvest--can create big payoffs for habitat quality and the other species that flock to them. A new study from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), published June 3 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, compared restored, protected and harvested areas using photos and video footage from roughly 200 sites. Roughly a quarter of Maryland's oyster habitat lies protected in oyster sanctuaries. But only a small fraction of those sanctuaries have undergone full-scale restorations, with reconstructed reefs and new live oyster plantings. ...