Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this editorial the authors Hui Liu and Juan Chen from Shanxi Eye Hospital, Taiyuan, China discuss biophotonics in photomedicine. As a cross-disciplinary field, biophotonics is a natural platform for innovation, e.g. researchers have taken advantages of the recently developed nanostructures in Photomedicine to optimize imaging signals and improve drug delivery efficiency. Active investment in healthcare also contributes to the quick clinical transitions of biophotonic innovations. However, to genuinely and successfully improve people's lives, many gaps have to be bridged. Horizontally, ...

After reviewing a database of gene mutations in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a team of Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) researchers decided to study a specific gene mutation that likely caused ASD in a girl. They demonstrated that the mutation was damaging to the gene, and that female, but not male, mice lacking a working copy of the gene also showed ASD-associated symptoms. Better understanding the interplay between genetics and sex in ASD could set the stage for developing sex-specific treatments for autism. The MUSC team was led by Christopher Cowan, Ph.D., the William E. Murray SmartState Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and chair of the Department of Neuroscience, and Ahlem Assali, Ph.D., research assistant ...

A recent study from the University of Helsinki monitors the breakthrough progresses in the development of microneedles for immunotherapy and discusses the challenges regarding their production. Researchers suggest using microneedles for immunotherapy due to the high abundance of immune cells under the skin. The aim is to vaccinate or treat different diseases, such as cancer and autoimmune disorders, with minimal invasiveness and side effects. "Our study addresses the recent achievements in the development of microneedles for immunotherapy of hard-to-treat and chronic diseases to achieve the highest efficiency with minimal side effects," says ...

There is currently no consensus on what quality end-of-life care for children with cancer looks like, or how to measure and deliver it; however, investigators recently assembled an expert panel to help fill this void. In a study published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the panel endorsed 16 measures that cover different aspects of care that are important for children with cancer and their families. "Measuring the quality of the care delivered is an essential part of ensuring high quality end-of-life care ...

Coded messages in invisible ink sound like something only found in espionage books, but in real life, they can have important security purposes. Yet, they can be cracked if their encryption is predictable. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have printed complexly encoded data with normal ink and a carbon nanoparticle-based invisible ink, requiring both UV light and a computer that has been taught the code to reveal the correct messages. Even as electronic records advance, paper is still a common way to preserve data. Invisible ink can hide classified economic, commercial or military ...

Marine scientists are calling on the EU to adopt a comprehensive plan to protect dolphins and porpoises from fisheries bycatch in European waters. A team of conservation experts, including Newcastle University's Professor Per Berggren, highlight limitations in EU's efforts to address and mitigate bycatch. The scientists argue this infective response is a result of scattered and complicated management responsibility for the conservation of dolphins and porpoises in Europe, and from a lack of quantitative conservation objectives, including biological reference points ...

Reflexes protect our bodies - for example when we pull our hand back from a hot stove. These protective mechanisms could also be useful for robots. In this interview, Prof. Sami Haddadin and Johannes Kühn of the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) explain why giving test subjects a "slap on the hand" could lay the foundations for the robots of the future. In your paper, published in Scientific Reports, you describe an experimental setup where people were actually slapped on the hand - to study their reflexes.... Kühn: Yes, you can put it that way. For our study, in cooperation with Imperial College London, the test ...

Clothing, from tank tops to parkas, helps people adapt to temperatures outdoors. But you can only put on or take off so much of it, and fluctuations in weather can render what you are wearing entirely inadequate. In a new study in ACS' Nano Letters, researchers describe a high-tech alternative: a reversible textile they designed to trap warmth in the cold and reflect it during hot weather, all while generating small amounts of electricity. Previous attempts to develop such sophisticated textiles for outdoor use have generally focused on either capturing thermal radiation or dispersing it. To integrate the two, Qiang Li, Min Qiu and colleagues made a ...

More research is urgently needed into the impact that attending suicide events is having on paramedics and other first responders, a researcher at the University of Otago, New Zealand, says. PhD student Renan Lyra, a psychologist by training, says a significant proportion of police officers, firefighters and paramedics will attend at least one suicide event in their careers, but there has been little research into the impact this has on their personal and professional lives and on their own suicide risk. Mr Lyra has reviewed 25 research papers on the impact attending a suicide event has on those ...

A curiously yellow star has caused astrophysicists to reevaluate what's possible within our universe. Led by Northwestern University, the international team used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to examine the massive star two-and-a-half years before it exploded into a supernova. At the end of their lives, cool, yellow stars are typically shrouded in hydrogen, which conceals the star's hot, blue interior. But this yellow star, located 35 million lightyears from Earth in the Virgo galaxy cluster, was mysteriously lacking this crucial hydrogen layer at the time of its explosion. "We haven't seen this scenario before," said Northwestern's ...

CATONSVILLE, MD, May 4, 2021 - Paid video streaming services on your television, smart phone or other devices are increasingly replacing traditional video entertainment platforms of cable, satellite and broadcast TV. The growth of these services, known in the industry as over-the-top (OTT) media services, may be accompanied by a rise in pirated content, particularly where access to those services may be restricted, a group of researchers has found. The researchers studied the effects of the Netflix - one of the leading global companies in paid video streaming - and its growth in 40 Asian countries. They also studied one country where access to Netflix was restricted, which is where ...

Carnegie Mellon University's He Lab is focusing on noninvasive neuroengineering solutions that not only provide diagnostic techniques, but also innovative treatment options. Their latest research has demonstrated that noninvasive neuromodulation via low-intensity ultrasound can have cell-type selectivity in manipulating neurons. Parkinson's Disease, epilepsy and insomnia are just a few of the neurological disorders that use neuromodulation treatment techniques today. Neuromodulation delivers controlled physical energy to the nervous system to treat and improve patients' quality of life. Current neuromodulation approaches, while effective, bring both drawbacks and limitations. "Deep ...

When light hits certain molecules, it dislodges electrons that then move from one location to another, creating areas of positive and negative charge. This "charge transfer" is highly important in many areas of chemistry, in biological processes like photosynthesis and in technologies like semiconductor devices and solar cells. Even though theories have been developed to explain and predict how charge transfer works, they have been validated only indirectly because of the difficulty of observing how a molecule's structure responds to charge movements with the ...

Researchers from the UCLA School of Dentistry have discovered a key molecule that allows cancer stem cells to bypass the body's natural immune defenses, spurring the growth and spread of head and neck squamous cell cancers. Their study, conducted in mice, also demonstrates that inhibiting this molecule derails cancer progression and helps eliminate these stem cells. Published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the findings could help pave the way for more effective targeted treatments for this highly invasive type of cancer, which is characterized by frequent resistance to therapies, rapid metastasis and a ...

A hot topic symposia session during thePediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2021 Virtual Meeting will provide a forum for policy and physician experts to predict major child health legislative and policy changes which will occur over the next four years. The outcome of the presidential election has significant impact on the child health policy agenda. The goal of the session is to prepare academic pediatricians so they can be ideally positioned to promote or impede specific policies which are not evidenced-based to improve child health. "The subject matter ...

The emergence and spread of new forms of resistance remains a concern that urgently demand new antibiotics. Transcription is a vital process in bacterial cell, where genetic information in DNA is transcribed to RNA for the translation of proteins that perform cellular function. Hence, transcription serves as a promising target to develop new antibiotics because inhibition the transcription process should effectively kill the bacteria. Bacterial RNA Polymerase, the core enzyme for transcription, must load the DNA and separate the double-stranded DNA to single stranded DNA to read the genetic information to initiate transcription. This process is also called DNA melting and is facilitated ...

ORLANDO, May 5, 2021 - New research indicates that the legendary Sargasso Sea, which includes part of the Bermuda Triangle and has long featured in fiction as a place where ships go derelict, may actually be an important nursery habitat for young sea turtles. In a study led by a University of Central Florida researcher and published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers presented evidence of baby green sea turtles arriving at the Sargasso Sea after entering the ocean off the east coast of Florida. The study was the first time that green sea turtles have been tracked during their early "lost years," which is defined ...

A UBC Okanagan researcher is urging people to learn and then heed the symptoms of Atrial Fibrillation (AF). Especially women. Dr. Ryan Wilson, a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Nursing, says AF is the most commonly diagnosed arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) in the world. Despite that, he says many people do not understand the pre-diagnosis symptoms and tend to ignore them. In fact, 77 per cent of the women in his most recent study had experienced symptoms for more than a year before receiving a diagnosis. While working in a hospital emergency department (ED), Dr. Wilson noted that many patients came in with AF symptoms that included, but were not limited to, shortness of breath, feeling of butterflies (fluttering) in the chest, dizziness or general fatigue. Many women ...

Seeing through smog and fog. Mapping out a person's blood vessels while monitoring heart rate at the same time--without touching the person's skin. Seeing through silicon wafers to inspect the quality and composition of electronic boards. These are just some of the capabilities of a new infrared imager developed by a team of researchers led by electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego. The imager detects a part of the infrared spectrum called shortwave infrared light (wavelengths from 1000 to 1400 nanometers), which is right outside of the visible spectrum (400 to 700 nanometers). Shortwave infrared imaging is not to be confused with thermal imaging, which detects much longer infrared wavelengths ...

A new Tel Aviv University study has revealed, for the first time, that bats know the speed of sound from birth. In order to prove this, the researchers raised bats from the time of their birth in a helium-enriched environment in which the speed of sound is higher than normal. They found that unlike humans, who map the world in units of distance, bats map the world in units of time. What this means is that the bat perceives an insect as being at a distance of nine milliseconds, and not one and a half meters, as was thought until now. The Study was published in PNAS. In order to determine ...

PULLMAN, Wash. -- A count of the Western Monarch butterfly population last winter saw a staggering drop in numbers, but there are hopeful signs the beautiful pollinators are adapting to a changing climate and ecology. The population, counted by citizen scientists at Monarch overwintering locations in southern California, dropped from around 300,000 three years ago to just 1,914 in 2020, leading to an increasing fear of extinction. However, last winter large populations of monarchs were found breeding in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. Prior to last winter, it was unusual to find winter breeding by monarchs ...

The idea of deriving health benefits from live microorganisms is well known, but some non-living microorganisms, too, can have beneficial health effects. Yet even with an increasing number of scientific papers published on non-viable microbes for health, the category is not well defined and different terms are used in different contexts. Now, a group of international experts has clarified this concept in a recently END ...

A study published in Cretaceous Research expands the paleontological richness of continental fossils of the Lower Cretaceous with the discovery of a new water plant (charophytes), the species Mesochara dobrogeica. The study also identifies a new variety of carophytes from the Clavator genus (in particular, Clavator ampullaceus var. latibracteatus) and reveals a set of paleobiographical data from the Cretaceous much richer than other continental records such as dinosaurs'. Among the authors of the study are Josep Sanjuan, Alba Vicente, Jordi Pérez-Cano and Carles Martín-Closas, members of the Faculty of Earth Sciences and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona, in collaboration with the expert Marius Stoica, ...

Ishikawa, Japan - Inside our cells, and those of the most well-known lifeforms, exist a variety of complex compounds known as "molecular motors." These biological machines are essential for various types of movement in living systems, from the microscopic rearrangement or transport of proteins within a single cell to the macroscopic contraction of muscle tissues. At the crossroads between robotics and nanotechnology, a goal that is highly sought after is finding ways to leverage the action of these tiny molecular motors to perform more sizeable tasks in a controllable manner. However, achieving this goal will certainly be challenging. "So far, even though researchers ...

Singapore, 5 May 2021 - The rapid advancement of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) technology in recent years has changed transport systems and consumer habits globally. As countries worldwide see a surge in AV usage, the rise of shared Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMoD) service is likely to be next on the cards. Public Transit (PT), a critical component of urban transportation, will inevitably be impacted by the upcoming influx of AMoD and the question remains unanswered on whether AMoD would co-exist with or threaten the PT system. Researchers at the Future Urban Mobility (FM) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, and Massachusetts ...