For the first time ever, a Northwestern University-led research team has peered inside a human cell to view a multi-subunit machine responsible for regulating gene expression. Called the Mediator-bound pre-initiation complex (Med-PIC), the structure is a key player in determining which genes are activated and which are suppressed. Mediator helps position the rest of the complex -- RNA polymerase II and the general transcription factors -- at the beginning of genes that the cell wants to transcribe. The researchers visualized the complex in high resolution using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), ...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is already widely used in medicine for diagnostic purposes. Hyperpolarized MRI is a more recent development and its research and application potential has yet to be fully explored. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) have now unveiled a new technique for observing metabolic processes in the body. Their singlet-contrast MRI method employs easily-produced parahydrogen to track biochemical processes in real time. The results of their work have been published in Angewandte ...

At the heart of Cygnus, one of the most beautiful constellations of the summer sky, beats a source of high-energy cosmic ray particles: the Cygnus Cocoon. An international group of scientists at the HAWC observatory has gathered evidence that this vast astronomical structure is the most powerful of our galaxy's natural particle accelerators known of up to now. This spectacular discovery is the result of the work of scientists from the international High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory. Located on the slopes of the Mexican Sierra Negra volcano, the observatory records high-energy particles and photons flowing from the abyss of space. In the sky of the Northern Hemisphere, their brightest source is the region known as the Cygnus Cocoon. At the HAWC, it was established ...

Geologists have long thought tectonic plates move because they are pulled by the weight of their sinking portions and that an underlying, hot, softer layer called asthenosphere serves as a passive lubricant. But a team of geologists at the University of Houston has found that layer is actually flowing vigorously, moving fast enough to drive plate motions. In their study published in Nature Communications, researchers from the UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics looked at minute changes in satellite-detected gravitational pull within the Caribbean and at mantle tomography images - similar to a CAT Scan - of the asthenosphere under the Caribbean. They found ...

Alexandria, Va., USA -- Oral mucositis and taste dysfunction (dysgeusia) occurs in nearly all patients receiving head and neck radiotherapy and tremendously affects the quality of life and treatment outcome. The study "LiCl Promotes Recovery of Radiation-Induced Oral Mucositis and Dysgeusia" published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), investigated the hypothesis that lithium chloride (LiCl) can promote the restoration of oral mucosa integrity and taste function after radiation. LiCl is a potent activator of a key cell signaling pathway called Wnt/β-catenin that is critical for the development, regeneration and function of many tissue types. ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A University at Buffalo researcher's recent work on dyslexia has unexpectedly produced a startling discovery which clearly demonstrates how the cooperative areas of the brain responsible for reading skill are also at work during apparently unrelated activities, such as multiplication. Though the division between literacy and math is commonly reflected in the division between the arts and sciences, the findings suggest that reading, writing and arithmetic, the foundational skills informally identified as the three Rs, might actually overlap in ways not previously imagined, let alone experimentally validated. "These findings floored me," said Christopher McNorgan, PhD, the paper's author and an assistant professor in UB's Department of Psychology. "They elevate the ...

Researchers at Princeton have determined how five cellular proteins contribute to an essential step in the life cycle of hepatitis B virus (HBV). The article describing these findings appeared March 11, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications. Viruses have been with us, shaping our lives, societies and economies for millennia. While some viruses rapidly explode onto the world stage, others smolder in our communities for decades, shattering lives but making few headlines. Hepatitis B virus hasn't caused any nationwide lockdowns or stock market crashes because it is slow to spread from person to person and is rarely immediately fatal. It is nonetheless incredibly damaging because it can establish lifelong chronic infection ...

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- New Army-funded research could help lay the groundwork for future quantum communication networks and large-scale quantum computers. Researchers sent entangled qubit states through a communication cable linking one quantum network node to a second node. Scientists at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, funded and managed by the U.S. Army Combat Capability Development, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory's Center for Distributed Quantum Information, also amplified an entangled state via the same cable first by using the cable to entangle two qubits in each of two nodes, then entangling these qubits further with other qubits in the nodes. The peer-reviewed journal ...

Atherosclerosis is the underlying condition that causes heart attacks and strokes. Researchers at Radboudumc in the Netherlands have discovered a protein that appears to play an important role in atherosclerosis. The protein is called Prosaposin, and its role in atherosclerosis was sofar unknown. "We identified Prosaposin as a new potential target for the Science Translational Medicine. Atherosclerosis is caused by cholesterol that builds up in the vessel wall and triggers chronic inflammation. It has been well established that cholesterol lowering drugs help to treat atherosclerosis. Recent research has shown that inhibiting inflammation can also help to prevent heart attacks and ...

What The Study Did: In this phase 1 study, a single immunization with Ad26.COV2.S (Janssen/Johnson & Johnson) vaccine induced rapid binding and neutralization antibody responses as well as cellular immune responses. Two phase 3 clinical trials are currently underway to determine the efficacy of the Ad26.COV2.S vaccine. Authors: Dan H. Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2021.3645) Editor's Note: Please see the article ...

Does a warmer climate mean more dry land? For years, researchers projected that drylands -- including deserts, savannas and shrublands -- will expand as the planet warms, but new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) challenges those prevailing views. Previous studies used atmospheric information, including rainfall and temperature, to make projections about future land conditions. The real picture is more complicated than that, said Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author ...

AMES, Iowa - Parents would never give their children the keys to the car without supervised training and driver's education. An Iowa State University researcher says parents and educators need to take a similar approach before handing children a keyboard to access the digital world. ISU psychology professor Douglas Gentile worked with the DQ (Digital Intelligence) Institute, an international think tank, to design a framework for digital literacy education. In a commentary, published by the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Gentile and his colleagues outlined how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated ...

What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to "the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The question that begets 42, at least in the ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Charitable donations account for about 2% of gross domestic product in the U.S., but it's not well-understood whether an event such as a deadly storm inspires increases in charitable giving or simply reallocates a fixed supply of donation dollars that would have otherwise gone to another cause. A new paper from a team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign experts finds that, in the aftermath of catastrophic tornadoes, charitable giving to alleviate an unanticipated event doesn't necessarily crowd out monetary donations to ...

Millions of people die prematurely every year from diseases and cancer caused by air pollution. The first line of defence against this carnage is ambient air quality standards. Yet, according to researchers from McGill University, over half of the world's population lives without the protection of adequate air quality standards. Air pollution varies greatly in different parts of the world. But what about the primary weapons against it? To find answers, researchers from McGill University set out to investigate global air quality standards in a study published ...

The idea was so far-fetched it seemed like science fiction: create an observatory out of a one cubic kilometer block of ice in Antarctica to track ghostly particles called neutrinos that pass through the Earth. But speaking to Benedickt Riedel, global computing manager at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, it makes perfect sense. "Constructing a comparable observatory anywhere else would be astronomically expensive," Riedel explained. "Antarctica ice is a great optical material and allows us to sense neutrinos as nowhere else." Neutrinos are neutral subatomic particles with a mass close to zero that can pass through solid materials at near the speed of light, rarely reacting with normal matter. They were first detected in the 1950s in experiments that operated ...

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that a planet orbiting a distant star may have lost its atmosphere but gained a second one through volcanic activity. The planet, GJ 1132 b, is hypothesized to have begun as a gaseous world with a thick hydrogen blanket of atmosphere. Starting out at several times the diameter of Earth, this so-called "sub-Neptune" is believed to have quickly lost its primordial hydrogen and helium atmosphere due to the intense radiation of the hot, young star it orbits. In a short period of time, such a planet would be stripped down to a bare core about the size of Earth. That's when things got interesting. To the surprise of astronomers, Hubble observed an ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Ten days after receiving a second dose of a messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccine for COVID-19, patients without COVID-19 symptoms are far less likely to test positive and unknowingly spread COVID-19, compared to patients who have not been vaccinated for COVID-19. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna messenger RNA vaccines for COVID-19 are authorized for emergency use in the U.S. With two doses of a messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine, people with no symptoms showed an 80% lower adjusted risk of testing positive for COVID-19 after their last dose. Those are the findings of a Mayo Clinic study of vaccinated patients. These finding appear in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The authors say these findings underscore ...

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) - in collaboration with several other universities - indicates that breastfeeding women with COVID-19 do not transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus through their milk, but do confer milk-borne antibodies that are able to neutralize the virus. The study, "Characterization of SARS-CoV-2 RNA, antibodies, and neutralizing capacity in milk produced by women with COVID-19," published on February 9 in the journal mBio - analyzed 37 milk samples submitted by 18 women diagnosed with COVID-19. None of the milk samples were found to contain ...

Fast radio burst (FRB) is a kind of mysterious radio flashes lasting only a few thousandths of a second. Confirmed to be the cosmological origin in 2016, FRB has the potential to provide insights into a wide range of astrophysical problems. Dr. NIU Chenhui from the team led by Dr. LI Di and Dr. ZHU Weiwei from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered three new FRBs with high dispersion measure from the massive data of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 3. The discovery indicated that these three FRBs happened billions of years ago when the ...

Intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) is common and concerning, but few therapeutic options exist for pregnant mothers who receive this diagnosis. IUGR is a condition in which a baby in the womb is measuring small for its gestational age, often because of issues with the placenta, resulting in compromised or insufficient transfer of oxygen and nutrients to the growing fetus. The developing fetal brain is particularly vulnerable to these effects. One out of every 10 babies is diagnosed with IUGR, and infants with IUGR are at increased risk of death and neurodevelopmental impairment. ...

Biologists from RUDN University suggested adding a marjoram-based supplement to the diet of common carp to support the growth of the fish and improve their resistance to bacterial infections. The results of the study were published in the Fish & Shellfish Immunology journal. Cyprinus carpio is a type of large omnivore fish that grows 35-40 cm long in three to five years. 4 mln tons of carps were bred in aquacultural farms in 2010. Such farms protect natural populations of Cyprinus carpio while at the same time satisfying the market demand. However, as farmers strive for higher productivity, aquacultural farms become more and more crowded which leads to the lack of nutrients and harms the health of the fish. A team of veterinarians ...

CABI scientist Dr Arne Witt has shared his expertise on invasive alien plant species as part of a new paper which argues that healthy ecosystems are vital in reducing the risk of future pandemics - such as coronaviruses (including COVID-19) - that threaten human health. The paper - 'Land use-induced spillover: priority actions for protected and conserved area managers' - is published as part of a special issue by the journal PARKS entitled 'COVID-19 and Protected Areas: Essential Reading for a World Haunted by a Pandemic.' Lead author Dr Jamie K. Reaser - along with a team of researchers from institutions including the African Wildlife Foundation, the University ...

Exposure to SARS-Co-V2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can put otherwise healthy children and adolescents at risk for Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), a rare but possibly life-threatening pediatric condition that can cause severe inflammation in organs like the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys and gastrointestinal system. Diagnosing and treating MIS-C -- which has affected 2,600 children since May 2020 and is known to occur in children who have tested positive for SARS-Co-V2 or been exposed to someone with COVID-19 -- is difficult because respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms can be similar to severe COVID-19. Other features of MIS-C are very similar to Kawasaki disease, which causes inflammation ...

Rare earth elements are the gold of the 21st century: rare and highly prized all over the world. Most known and economically viable sources of rare earths are located in China, where more than 80 percent of them are refined. This has resulted in a near monopoly situation, with China dominating international trade, particularly in heavy rare earths. Geologists and materials scientists at FAU have now discovered a new way of finding new and previously unknown deposits of rare earths, or rare earth metals, worldwide. They have published the findings of their study in the journal Geology. Rare earth metals are irreplaceable for manufacturing advanced high-tech industrial products due to their luminescent and ...