HOUSTON, TX - March 25, 2021 - Humans are born with tens of thousands of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that collectively ensure lifelong production of blood and immune cells that protect us from infections. HSCs can either duplicate to produce more stem cell progeny or differentiate to produce distinct immune cell lineages, an extremely critical decision that ensures that the body achieves the fine balance between having enough immune cells to fight invaders while still retaining enough HSCs to maintain future blood production. As we age, HSCs accumulate mutations that lead to the ...

More than 150 years ago, the Sun blasted Earth with a massive cloud of hot charged particles. This plasma blob generated a magnetic storm on Earth that caused sparks to leap out of telegraph equipment and even started a few fires. Now called the Carrington Event, after one of the astronomers who observed it, a magnetic storm like this could happen again anytime, only now it would affect more than telegraphs: It could damage or cause outages in wireless phone networks, GPS systems, electrical grids powering life-saving medical equipment and more. Sun-facing satellites monitor the Sun's ultraviolet (UV) light to give us advance warning of solar storms, both big ones that could cause a Carrington-like ...

NEW YORK, NY--Treatments for a rare retinal disease may be on the horizon after a new study has identified gene variants that cause a metabolic deficiency in the eye. The disease, macular telangiectasia type 2 (MacTel), has been a research focus of Rando Allikmets, PhD, a pioneer in the genetics of eye diseases, for nearly 15 years. MacTel occurs in approximately 1 in 5,000 adults over age 40 and slowly causes a significant loss of central vision, which can impair driving, reading, and other activities. "MacTel is clearly a genetic disease because it tends to run in families, but it's been a tough nut to crack," says Allikmets, the William and Donna Acquavella Professor of Ophthalmic Sciences ...

TAMPA, Fla. -- Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR T, is a relatively new type of therapy approved to treat several types of aggressive B cell leukemias and lymphomas. Many patients have strong responses to CAR T; however, some have only a short response and develop disease progression quickly. Unfortunately, it is not completely understood why these patients have progression. In an article published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Moffitt Cancer Center researchers use mathematical modeling to help explain why CAR T cells work in some patients and not in others. CAR T is a type of personalized immunotherapy that uses a patient's own T ...

ORLANDO, March 25, 2021 - Early screening can mean the difference between life and death in a cancer and disease diagnosis. That's why University of Central Florida researchers are working to develop a new screening technique that's more than 300 times as effective at detecting a biomarker for diseases like cancer than current methods. The technique, which was detailed recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, uses nanoparticles with nickel-rich cores and platinum-rich shells to increase the sensitivity of an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). ELISA is a test ...

Studying genetic material on a cellular level, such as single-cell RNA-sequencing, can provide scientists with a detailed, high-resolution view of biological processes at work. This level of detail helps scientists determine the health of tissues and organs, and better understand the development of diseases such as Alzheimer's that impacts millions of people. However, a lot of data is also generated, and leads to the need for an efficient, easy-to-use way to analyze it. Now, a team of engineers and scientists from the University of Missouri and the Ohio State University have created a new way to analyze data from single-cell RNA-sequencing ...

The very first moments of the Universe can be reconstructed mathematically even though they cannot be observed directly. Physicists from the Universities of Göttingen and Auckland (New Zealand) have greatly improved the ability of complex computer simulations to describe this early epoch. They discovered that a complex network of structures can form in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. The behaviour of these objects mimics the distribution of galaxies in today's Universe. In contrast to today, however, these primordial structures are microscopically small. Typical clumps have masses of only a few grams and fit into volumes much smaller than present-day elementary particles. The results of the study have been published ...

One-third of the Earth's surface is covered by more than 11,000 grass species -- including crops like wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane that account for the bulk of the world's agricultural food production and important biofuels. But grass is so common that few people realize how diverse and important it really is. Research published today in the journal Nature provides insights that scientists could use not only to improve crop design but also to more accurately model the effects of climate change. It also offers new clues that could help scientists use ...

Orthopaedic researchers are one step closer to preventing life-long arm and leg deformities from childhood fractures that do not heal properly. A new study led by the University of South Australia and published in the journal Bone, sheds light on the role that a protein plays in this process. Lead author Dr Michelle Su says that because children's bones are still growing, an injury to the growth plate can lead to a limb in a shortened position, compared to the unaffected side. "Cartilage tissue near the ends of long bones is known as the growth plate that is responsible for bone growth in children and, unfortunately, 30 per cent of childhood and teen fractures involve this growth ...

Researchers have used the evidence of pumice from an underwater volcanic eruption to answer a long-standing mystery about a mass death of migrating seabirds. New research into the mass death of millions of shearwater birds in 2013 suggests seabirds are eating non-food materials including floating pumice stones, because they are starving, potentially indicating broader health issues for the marine ecosystem. The research which was led by CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, and QUT, was published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, that examined a 2013 seabird "wreck" in which up to 3 million ...

A coordinated global effort to reduce the production of greenhouse gas emissions from industry and other sectors may not stop climate change, but Earth has a powerful ally that humans might partner with to achieve carbon neutrality: Mother Nature. An international team of researchers called for the use of natural climate solutions to help "cancel" produced emissions and remove existing emissions as part of a comprehensive plan to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius -- the point at which damage to human life and livelihoods could become catastrophic, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The researchers published their invited views on March 24 in ...

Recently, the team led by Professor WU Changzheng from School of Chemistry and Materials Science from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in cooperation with the team led by Prof. WU Hengan from School of Engineering Science, realized the homogenization of surface active sites of heterogeneous catalyst by dissolving the electrocatalytic active metal in molten gallium. The related results have been published on the Nature Catalysis on March 11th. Due to the existence of various defects and crystal faces, the active components on the surface of heterogeneous catalysts are often in different ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Physical exercise has long been prescribed as a way to improve the quality of sleep. But now, researchers from Japan have found that even when exercise causes objectively measured changes in sleep quality, these changes may not be subjectively perceptible. In a study published this month in Scientific Reports, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have revealed that vigorous exercise was able to modulate various sleep parameters associated with improved sleep, without affecting subjective reports regarding sleep quality. Exercise is ...

Lugano, Switzerland; Denver, CO, USA, 25 March 2021 - Clinical activity with a second drug inhibiting KRASG12C confirms its role as a therapeutic target in patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harbouring this mutation, according to results from a study with the KRASG12C inhibitor adagrasib reported at the European Lung Cancer Virtual Congress 2021. (1) "As we strive to identify the oncogenic driver in more and more of our patients with NSCLC, it becomes critical that we develop therapies that can target these identified oncogenic drivers," said lead author Gregory Riely, from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, ...

For the first time, activation of nuclear receptor coactivator 3 (NCOA3) has been shown to promote the development of melanoma through regulation of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) sensitivity, cell cycle progression and circumvention of the DNA damage response. Results of a pre-clinical study led by Mohammed Kashani-Sabet, M.D., Medical Director of the Cancer Center at Sutter's California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) in San Francisco, CA were published online today in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Our research suggests a previously unreported mechanism by which NCOA3 regulates the DNA damage response and acts as a potential therapeutic target in melanoma, whereby activation ...

Durham, NC - Depletion of a certain type of stem cell in the womb lining during pregnancy could be a significant factor behind miscarriage, according to a study released today in STEM CELLS. The study, by researchers at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, England, reports on how recurrent pregnancy loss is a result of the loss of decidual precursor cells prior to conception. "This raises the possibility that they can be harnessed to prevent pregnancy disorders," said corresponding author Jan J. Brosens, M.D., Ph.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Warwick Medical School (WMS). The womb lining - or endometrium - is a ...

Perhaps the best hope for slowing climate change - capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions underground - has remained elusive due in part to uncertainty about its economic feasibility. In an effort to provide clarity on this point, researchers at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have estimated the energy demands involved with a critical stage of the process. (Watch video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZPIwwQs9aM) Their findings, published April 8 in Environmental Science & Technology, suggest that managing and ...

Smoking cigarettes causes 480,000 premature deaths each year in the United States, due mainly to a two-fold risk of cardiovascular disease and a 20-fold risk of lung cancer. Although smoking rates have declined dramatically, there are currently 35 million smokers in the U.S. In a commentary published in the Ochsner Medical Journal, Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.PH, senior author, the First Sir Richard Doll Professor, and senior academic advisor in the Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University, and colleagues, highlight how failure to institute smoking cessation in hospitalized patients is a missed opportunity to avoid many premature deaths. Each year in the U.S., ...

An international team led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has found evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, infects cells in the mouth. While it's well known that the upper airways and lungs are primary sites of SARS-CoV-2 infection, there are clues the virus can infect cells in other parts of the body, such as the digestive system, blood vessels, kidneys and, as this new study shows, the mouth. The potential of the virus to infect multiple areas of the body might help explain the wide-ranging symptoms experienced by COVID-19 patients, including oral symptoms such as taste loss, dry mouth and blistering. Moreover, the findings ...

RICHLAND, WASH.--A large-scale demonstration converting biocrude to renewable diesel fuel has passed a significant test, operating for more than 2,000 hours continuously without losing effectiveness. Scientists and engineers led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory conducted the research to show that the process is robust enough to handle many kinds of raw material without failing. "The biocrude oil came from many different sources, including wastewater sludge from Detroit, and food waste collected from prison and an army base," said John Holladay, a PNNL scientist and co-director of the joint Bioproducts Institute, a collaboration between ...

LA JOLLA--(March 25, 2021) The brush of an insect's wing is enough to trigger a Venus flytrap to snap shut, but the biology of how these plants sense and respond to touch is still poorly understood, especially at the molecular level. Now, a new study by Salk and Scripps Research scientists identifies what appears to be a key protein involved in touch sensitivity for flytraps and other carnivorous plants. The findings, published March 16, 2021, in the journal eLife, help explain a critical process that has long puzzled botanists. This could help scientists better understand how plants of all kinds sense and respond to mechanical stimulation, and could also have a potential application in medical therapies that mechanically stimulate human cells such as neurons. "We know that plants ...

A multi-institutional collaboration has revealed that α-solanine, a toxic compound found in potato plants, is a divergent of the bitter-tasting α-tomatine, which is found in tomato plants. The research group included Associate Professor MIZUTANI Masaharu and Researcher AKIYAMA Ryota et al. of Kobe University's Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Assistant Professor WATANABE Bunta of Kyoto University's Institute for Chemical Research, Senior Research Scientist UMEMOTO Naoyuki of the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, and Professor MURANAKA Toshiya of Osaka University's Graduate School of Engineering. It ...

Salts are far more complicated than the food seasoning - they can even act as electrical conductors, shuttling current through systems. Extremely well studied and understood, the electrical properties of salts were first theorized in 1834. Now, nearly 200 years later, researchers based in Japan have uncovered a new kind of salt. The results were published on March 17 in Inorganic Chemistry, a journal of the American Chemical Society. The researchers were specifically investigating how one-dimensional versions of three-dimensional substances exhibit unique physical phenomena and functionality in a process called the ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A novel analysis of encounters between albatross and commercial fishing vessels across the North Pacific Ocean is giving researchers important new understanding about seabird-vessel interactions that could help reduce harmful encounters. The new research method, which combines location data from GPS-tagged albatross and commercial fishing vessels, allows researchers to accurately identify bird-vessel encounters and better understand bird behavior, environmental conditions and the characteristics that influence these encounters. "It is hard to conceptualize how often birds ...

For the first time, researchers from the SponGES project collected year-round video footage and hydrodynamic data from the mysterious world of a deep-sea sponge ground in the Arctic. Deep-sea sponge grounds are often compared to the rich ecosystems of coral reefs and form true oases. In a world where all light has disappeared and without obvious food sources, they provide a habitat for other invertebrates and a refuge for fish in the otherwise barren landscape. It is still puzzling how these biodiversity hotspots survive in this extreme environment as deep as 1500 metres below the water surface. With over 700 hundred ...