Much of human invention and innovation has been the result of our discovery and replication of natural phenomena, from birds serving to inspire human flight, to whales allowing us to dive deep into the ocean with submarines. For the first time ever, researchers have captured at the nanometer level the gliding machinery of the bacterium Mycoplasma mobile. Their findings were published in mBio. This brings us closer to understanding the origin and operating principle of motility, which could serve as a basis for the next generation of nanoscale devices and pharmaceuticals. "My lab has been studying the molecular nature of bacteria from the Mycoplasma genus for years", ...

(Bethesda, MD - May 25, 2021) A new study published in Nature Scientific Reports has found that Methylene Blue, a century old medicine, has the potential to be a highly effective, broad-spectrum UV irradiation protector that absorbs UVA and UVB, repairs ROS and UV irradiation induced DNA damages, and is safe for coral reefs. The study suggests that Methylene Blue could become an alternative sunscreen ingredient that supports the environment and protects human skin health.80% of today's sunscreens use Oxybenzone as a chemical UV blocker, despite multiple studies that have shown it expedites the destruction of coral reefs. Several states and countries have now banned the use of Oxybenzone and its derivatives to stop the devastating ...

Viruses are perfect molecular machines. Their only goal is to insert their genetic material into healthy cells and thus multiply. With deadly precision, they thereby can cause diseases that cost millions of lives and keep the world on edge. One example for such a virus, although currently less discussed, is HIV that causes the ongoing global AIDS-epidemic. Despite the progress made in recent years, 690 000 people died in 2019 alone as a result of the virus infection. "If you want to know the enemy, you have to know all its friends," says Martin Obr, postdoc at the Schur group at IST Austria. Together with his colleagues, he therefore studies a virus belonging to the same ...

A new study exploits the characteristic epigenetic signatures of childhood tumors to detect, classify and monitor the disease. The scientists analyzed short fragments of tumor DNA that are circulating in the blood. These "liquid biopsy" analyses exploit the unique epigenetic landscape of bone tumors and do not depend on any genetic alterations, which are rare in childhood cancers. This approach promises to improve personalized diagnostics and, possibly, future therapies of childhood tumors such as Ewing sarcoma. The study has been published in Nature Communications. A study led by scientists from St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute (St. Anna CCRI) in collaboration with CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences provides an innovative ...

The technology using DNA-based genealogy that solved a double murder in Linköping opens completely new possibilities in investigating serious crime. LiU researchers are now involved in spreading new knowledge about the technology, which brings hope to police forces and has aroused major international interest. "We want to tell others about the problems that we faced when working with this pilot case, and how we dealt with them. We can prevent others reinventing the wheel, and make sure that the knowledge available is extended and improved", says Andreas Tillmar. He is forensic geneticist at the National Board of Forensic Medicine, and adjunct senior lecturer ...

People living in deprived, less affluent neighborhoods spent less time indoors at home during lockdown, according to a study that tracked data from millions of mobile phone users across the United States. The study, published in the journal Annals of the American Association of Geographers, adds to growing evidence that low earners are less likely to comply with stay-at-home orders, either because they simply can't afford to, or because they work in professions in which working from home is not possible. The finding is concerning given the fact that vulnerable groups are already at greater risk from COVID. In March 2020, the US like many countries in the world entered a state of lockdown, with its citizens advised to stay at home to curb the spread of Coronavirus. Non-essential ...

Plastic pollution has been found in seawater, on beaches and inside marine animals at the Galapagos Islands. A new study - by the University of Exeter, Galapagos Conservation Trust (GCT) and the Galapagos Science Center - found plastic in all marine habitats at the island of San Cristobal, where Charles Darwin first landed in Galapagos. At the worst "hotspots" - including a beach used by the rare "Godzilla" marine iguana - more than 400 plastic particles were found per square metre of beach. Plastic was also found inside more than half of the marine invertebrates (such as barnacles and urchins) studied, and on the seabed. The findings suggest most plastic pollution in Galapagos - a world-famous biodiversity haven - arrives on ocean currents. The study also ...

Researchers from Tulane University and University of Maryland published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the dynamic interplay between free and paid versions of an app over its lifetime and suggests a possible remedy for the failure of apps. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Managing the Versioning Decision over an App's Lifetime" and is authored by Seoungwoo Lee, Jie Zhang, and Michel Wedel. Is it really over for paid mobile apps? The mobile app industry is unique because free apps are much more prevalent than paid apps in most app categories, contrary to many other product markets where free products primarily play a supportive role to the paid products. Apps have been trending toward the free version in the past decade, such ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo is capable of assessing the severity of COVID-19 cases with a promising degree of accuracy. A study, which is part of the COVID-Net open-source initiative launched more than a year ago, involved researchers from Waterloo and spin-off start-up company DarwinAI, as well as radiologists at the Stony Brook School of Medicine and the Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Deep-learning AI was trained to analyze the extent and opacity of infection in the lungs of COVID-19 patients based on chest x-rays. Its scores were then compared to assessments of the ...

The next generation of electric vehicle batteries, with greater range and improved safety, could be emerging in the form of lithium metal, solid-state technology. But key questions about this promising power supply need to be answered before it can make the jump from the laboratory to manufacturing facilities, according to University of Michigan researchers. And with efforts to bring electric vehicles to a larger part of the population, they say, those questions need answering quickly. Jeff Sakamoto and Neil Dasgupta, U-M associate professors of mechanical engineering, have been leading researchers on lithium metal, solid-state batteries over the past decade. In ...

Paper Title: Predictive Approaches for Acute Dialysis Requirement and Death in COVID-19 Journal: The Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (published online May 24, 2021) Authors: Girish Nadkarni, MD, Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine (Nephrology), Clinical Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health, and Co-Chair of the Mount Sinai Clinical Intelligence Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Lili Chan, MD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine (Nephrology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Akhil Vaid, MD, postdoctoral fellow in the ...

Over half of the UK's arts and cultural venues and organisations believe they are at risk due to the decline in income during the pandemic, a new study from the University of Sheffield, University of Kent, and the Chartered Institute of Fundraising has shown. The only study of its kind, 'Dealing with the crisis: Creativity and resilience of arts and cultural fundraisers during Covid-19' (28 May 2021), gathered information about how arts and cultural fundraisers were impacted by, and managed the Covid-19 pandemic during 2020. Many artists, organisations and venues rely on fundraising as a significant part of their income, using a range of events and activities to fund creative ...

International research led by Monash University and the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity has achieved a proof of concept for a new, fast, portable saliva screening test that uses an infrared light technology to confirm infection with SARS-CoV-2. The research is published today in Angewandte Chemie. Professor Bayden Wood, from the Monash University School of Chemistry, Dr Phil Heraud formerly from the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute and collaborators Professors Dale Godfrey and Damian Purcell from the Doherty Institute, report on a new diagnostic approach, which involves the use of a portable infrared instrument to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus ...

On scales too small for our eyes to see, the business of life happens through the making of proteins, which impart to our cells both structure and function. Cellular proteins get their marching orders from genetic instructions encoded in DNA, whose sequences are first copied and made into RNA in a multi-step process called transcription. A research collaboration at Colorado State University specializes in high-resolution fluorescence microscopy and computational modeling to visualize and describe such stuff-of-life processes in exquisite detail, ...

SAN ANTONIO (May 27, 2021) -- One-fifth of babies who inherit a genetic variant located on chromosome 16 will develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by age 3. The variant is called 16p11.2 deletion. Noboru Hiroi, PhD, of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (also referred to as UT Health San Antonio), is studying mice that have this deletion. The team, which includes colleagues from Japan, Ireland and the U.S., is harnessing the power of machine learning to understand which vocalizations of the newborn mouse pups are most predictive of social abnormalities one month ...

Nobody likes driving in a blizzard, including autonomous vehicles. To make self-driving cars safer on snowy roads, engineers look at the problem from the car's point of view. A major challenge for fully autonomous vehicles is navigating bad weather. Snow especially confounds crucial sensor data that helps a vehicle gauge depth, find obstacles and keep on the correct side of the yellow line, assuming it is visible. Averaging more than 200 inches of snow every winter, Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula is the perfect place to push autonomous vehicle tech to its limits. In two papers presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2021, researchers from Michigan Technological University discuss solutions for snowy driving scenarios that ...

Ionizing radiation is used for treating nearly half of all cancer patients. Radiotherapy works by damaging the DNA of cancer cells, and cells sustaining so much DNA damage that they cannot sufficiently repair it will soon cease to replicate and die. It's an effective strategy overall, and radiotherapy is a common frontline cancer treatment option. Unfortunately, many cancers have subsets of cells that are able to survive initial radiotherapeutic regimens by developing mechanisms that are able to repair the DNA damage. This often results in resistance to further radiation as cancerous growth recurs. But until recently, little was known about exactly what happens in the genomes of cancer cells following radiotherapy. To probe the traits of post-radiotherapy cancer ...

May 27, 2021 - Patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty (THA) show significant reduction in pain and other symptoms and improvement in walking gait biomechanics. However, those improvements do not lead to increased daily physical activity levels, reports a study in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio in partnership with Wolters Kluwer. The findings "present a worrying picture that while patients have the opportunity to be more physically active through improvements in functional capacity, their physical behaviors do not change," according to the new research, led by Jasvir S. Bahl of the University of South Australia, Adelaide, in collaboration with the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, ...

In 29 new scientific papers, the Dark Energy Survey examines the largest-ever maps of galaxy distribution and shapes, extending more than 7 billion light-years across the Universe. The extraordinarily precise analysis, which includes data from the survey's first three years, contributes to the most powerful test of the current best model of the Universe, the standard cosmological model. However, hints remain from earlier DES data and other experiments that matter in the Universe today is a few percent less clumpy than predicted. New results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) use the largest-ever sample ...

LA JOLLA, CA--Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, most people in the United States already had been sick with a coronavirus, albeit a far less dangerous one. That's because at least four coronaviruses in the same general family as SARS-CoV-2 cause the benign yet annoying illness known as the common cold. In a new study that appears in Nature Communications, scientists from Scripps Research investigated how the immune system's previous exposure to cold-causing coronaviruses impact immune response to COVID-19. In doing so, they discovered one cross-reactive coronavirus antibody that's triggered during a COVID-19 infection. The findings will help in the pursuit of a vaccine or antibody ...

Although it is not spread through human contact, Francisella tularensis is one of the most infectious pathogenic bacteria known to science--so virulent, in fact, that it is considered a serious potential bioterrorist threat. It is thought that humans can contract respiratory tularemia, or rabbit fever--a rare and deadly disease--by inhaling as few as 10 airborne organisms. Northern Arizona University professor David Wagner, director of the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute's (PMI) Biodefense and Disease Ecology Center, began a three-year project in 2018 to better understand the life cycle and behavior of F. tularensis, ...

An estimated one in seven Ohio women of adult, reproductive age has visited a crisis pregnancy center, a new study has found. In a survey of 2,529 women, almost 14% said they'd ever attended a center. The prevalence was more than twice as high among Black women and 1.6 times as high among those in the lowest socioeconomic group, found a research team from The Ohio State University. Their study appears in the journal Contraception. Crisis pregnancy centers are often supported by religious organizations and are designed to discourage women with unintended pregnancies from choosing abortion, though they don't typically advertise themselves as anti-abortion. In Ohio, where more than 100 centers are spread throughout the state, they are funded by state dollars. In 2019, during ...

Local management of coral reefs to ease environmental stressors, such as overfishing or pollution, could increase reefs' chances of recovery after devastating coral bleaching events caused by climate change, a new study finds. The results suggest that caring for reefs on a local scale might help them persist globally. When waters warm, corals can die quickly and en masse in coral bleaching events. Marine warming due to climate change has resulted in sharp increases in both the frequency and magnitude of these mass mortality events, which have already caused severe ...

An exoskeleton can reduce the metabolic cost of walking not by adding energy or by recycling energy from one gait phase to another, as other exoskeletons have done, but by removing the kinetic energy of a striding person's swinging leg so they don't have to tense their muscles so much. Tested in ten healthy males, it also converted the extracted kinetic energy to useable electricity. Although humans are exceptional walkers, walking is metabolically expensive and requires more energy than any other activity of daily living. Exoskeletons and exosuits - wearable devices designed to work along with the body's musculoskeletal system - have been shown to reduce this cost by adding or recycling energy to assist the body's movement. These and other ...

There is heightened public awareness that the world's oceans are under duress, with over-fishing and plastic pollution as some of the more tangible problems. Now, seabirds are calling attention to another problem and have delivered a warning message. Serving as translators of the birds' message, an international team of 40 scientists led by William Sydeman at the Farallon Institute in northern California published findings on May 28 in the journal Science that some seabirds are struggling to raise young where the globe is most rapidly warming - in the northern hemisphere. Using over 50 years of data from 67 seabird species across the globe, the team found ...