Philadelphia, March 2, 2021 - Researchers from the Mitochondrial Medicine Frontier Program at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have demonstrated how one combination of therapies may be beneficial for patients with mitochondrial respiratory chain disorders. This preclinical research paves the way to develop more tailored treatment options for patients with inherited mitochondrial disease and acquired energy disorders. The findings emphasize the importance of rational therapeutic modeling to target specific cellular deficiencies and provide proper cellular nutrition as an effective means to manage mitochondrial disease. The findings were published online ...

Optomechanical microcavities are extremely small structures with diameters of less than 10 micrometers (about a tenth of a human hair) inside which light and mechanical vibrations are confined. Thanks to their small size and to efficient microfabrication techniques that enable them to hold intense light energy and interact with mechanical waves, microcavities can be used as mass and acceleration sensors and in Raman scattering (a spectroscopy technique deployed to analyze materials, including gases, liquids, and solids). A sound understanding of these phenomena can contribute in future to advances in areas such as biomedicine, including the development of ...

The study gives the first detailed description of a volcanic eruption from Sierra Negra found on Isla Isabela - the largest of the Galápagos Islands and home to nearly 2,000 people. The findings, published in Nature Communications, reveal how the volcano inflated and fractured before it erupted and captures a new level of detail for any eruption from a volcano on the islands. Networks of ground-based seismic and GPS monitoring stations, and satellites, captured data for 13 years before Sierra Negra's eruption, in June 2018. The surface of the volcano rose during this time, indicating a gradual accumulation of molten rock - known as magma - found in a reservoir under the ...

Ithaca, NY--The message about the bird-conservation benefits of shade-grown coffee may not be getting through to the people most likely to respond--birdwatchers. A team of researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Virginia Tech surveyed birdwatchers to learn if they drank shade-grown coffee and, if not, why not. Their findings were published today in the journal People and Nature. "One of the most significant constraints to purchasing bird-friendly coffee among those surveyed was a lack of awareness," said Alicia Williams, lead author and former research assistant at the Cornell Lab and Virginia Tech. "I was surprised to see that only 9 percent of those surveyed purchased bird-friendly ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The liver has a rare superpower among body organs - the ability to regenerate, even if 70% of its mass is removed. It also keeps up its metabolic and toxin-removing work during the process of regeneration, thanks to a subset of cells that expand their workload while the rest focus on multiplication, a new study in mice found. Furthermore, the cells of the liver communicate with each other to coordinate regeneration activity, which progresses from the center to the periphery of the missing liver lobes, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said. "It's remarkable how we still don't understand many aspects of liver regeneration," said Illinois biochemistry professor Auinash ...

Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a new drug that could prevent Alzheimer's disease by modulating, rather than inhibiting, a key enzyme involved in forming amyloid plaques in the brain. The study, which will be published March 2 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM), demonstrates that the drug is safe and effective in rodents and monkeys, paving the way for future clinical trials in humans. A key pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's disease involves the formation of amyloid plaques composed of small protein fragments known as amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides. These peptides are generated ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. - Attendance at regular mammography screening substantially reduces the risk of dying from breast cancer, according to a large study of over half a million women, published in the journal Radiology. Researchers said women who skip even one scheduled mammography screening before a breast cancer diagnosis face a significantly higher risk of dying from the cancer. Breast cancer screening with mammography has helped reduce disease-related deaths by enabling detection of cancer at earlier, more treatable stages. Despite mammography's well-established ...

Recently, research group led by Professor CHENG Lin from School of Microelectronics, University of science and technology of China has made significant achievements in the field of fully integrated isolated power chip design. They proposed a chip based on glass fan-out wafer-level package (FOWLP), achieving 46.5% peak transformation efficiency and 50mW/mm2 power density. Compared with the traditional isolated power supply chip, this new design interconnects the receiving and transmitting chips through the micro transformer made of the rewiring layer, showing no need of additional transformer chips. In this way, it lowered the need ...

The pandemic has impacted significantly on people who suffer chronic pain. A study performed by the eHealth Lab, a research group affiliated with the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's eHealth Center, has shown that 70% of the people with chronic pain have seen their condition worsen in terms of severity, frequency of episodes and interference in their daily activities. A total of 502 patients took part in the study; 88% were women aged between 30 and 59, with long-duration chronic pain (mean duration, 7 years). Most participants (87.6%) had pain in more than one point; the most frequent locations were the abdomen, lower back and neck. The participants answered online surveys, designed in accordance with ...

Organometallic reagents are essential tools in synthetic chemistry. They work even better and more effectively in combination with alkali alkoxides. The exact nature of this effect has never been well understood. A team based in Switzerland has now performed a detailed study of the mechanism of reaction of aryl bromides with organo-magnesium reagents and lithium alkoxides. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a complex equilibrium of bimetallic intermediates plays a key role. Substituted aromatic ring systems are an important class of building block for the synthesis of many products, including pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and ...

Recently, the Laboratory of Micro and Nano Engineering, School of Engineering Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has made important progress in the field of structural chirality detection research using vortex light and found that photon orbital angular momentum can efficiently detect the optical chiral signal of structures. The achievement was published in an international well-known journal PNAS. Chiral structures are widely found in nature, such as DNA double helix structures, plant tendrils and shells. In addition to observing the geometry of objects, their chirality can also be distinguished by the interaction of light with matter. For example, the detection of circular ...

Aqueous free-radical precipitation polymerization is one of the most useful methods to prepare the uniformly sized hydrogel microspheres (microgels), and an understanding of the polymerization mechanism is crucial to control the structure or physicochemical properties of microgels. However, the details of the mechanism of precipitation polymerization remain unclear. Thus, first author Yuichiro Nishizawa, Prof. Daisuke Suzuki of the Graduate School of Textile Science & Technology, Shinshu University and Prof. Takayuki Uchihashi of Nagoya University set out to clarify the formation mechanism of microgels during precipitation polymerization by evaluating structural evolution and thermoresponsiveness of developing microgels during ...

The study examined the gender and affiliations of 1051 top-authors, those scientists with the most publications in 13 leading ecology and conservation journals. The results show that women and the Global South are barely represented on this list. "The overall list of top authors included only 11% women, while 75% of the articles were related to just five countries in the Global North," says Bea Maas, lead author from the University of Vienna. "This massive imbalance in scientific authorship is extremely concerning, especially in the field of ecology and conservation, ...

The formation of double bonds between two carbon atoms (C=C) is of central significance in natural organisms. The vast majority of natural substances therefore contain one or more of these double bonds. Compounds with C=C double bonds, the alkenes or olefins, also play a prominent role in the organic chemical industry. A great many chemical processes have therefore been developed over the years to control the formation of C=C bonds. One such process, olefin metathesis, has received particular attention over the last few decades and the 2005 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded in recognition of its significance. Despite the many ...

A technological and biological development that is unprecedented in Israel and the world has been achieved at Tel Aviv University. For the first time, the ear of a dead locust has been connected to a robot that receives the ear's electrical signals and responds accordingly. The result is extraordinary: When the researchers clap once, the locust's ear hears the sound and the robot moves forward; when the researchers clap twice, the robot moves backwards. The interdisciplinary study was led by Idan Fishel, a joint master student under the joint supervision of Dr. Ben M. Maoz of the Iby and Aladar Fleischman ...

Removal of pollutants from the air, or atmospheric deposition, is a natural cleaning mechanism. However, the removed toxic matters don't just disappear on the Earth. China's Soil Pollution Survey released in 2014 shows that 19.4% of the Chinese farmland soil was polluted and 82% of pollutant was toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, which can cause chronic health problems. Atmospheric deposition is an important source of these heavy metals in the soil but it tends to be neglected. Unlike sources from irrigation water, sewage sludge, fertilizers and livestock manures, atmospheric deposition can't easily be perceived. And the paucity of measurements also makes it difficult to track what ...

Currently, the roles of free D-amino acids and D-amino acid residues in proteins are garnering extensive attention in biological fields such as molecular biology, physiology, microbiology, and pathophysiology. Because it is crucial to analyze these materials rapidly and accurately, many methods have been employed. However, samples for measurement are currently limited to solutions containing target molecules in the pure form. Hence, there is need for an analytical method for the in situ measurement of biological samples placed on a solid support. We report the construction of a multidimensional ...

Earth's surface environments are highly oxygenated - from the atmosphere to the deepest reaches of the oceans, representing a hallmark of active photosynthetic biosphere. However, the fundamental timescale of the oxygen-rich atmosphere on Earth remains uncertain, particularly for the distant future. Solving this question has great ramifications not only for the future of Earth's biosphere but for the search for life on Earth-like planets beyond the solar system. A new study published in Nature Geoscience this week tackles this problem using a numerical model of biogeochemistry and climate and reveals that the future lifespan ...

In the group of Prof. Karl Leo, physicists, material scientists and engineers are working jointly on the development of novel organic materials and devices for high performance, flexible and possibly even biocompatible electronics and optoelectronics of the future. Increasing the performance of organic devices is one of the key challenges in their research. It was only last year, when the team headed by Dr. Hans Kleemann announced an important breakthrough with the development of efficient, printable vertical organic transistors. Now Dr. Zhongbin Wu, Dr. Yuan Liu, and PhD student Erjuan Guo present the first electronic device that combines a vertical organic permeable base transistor (OPBT) and an OLED. With this novel device concept of an organic permeable base light-emitting ...

Active or voluntary learning is a major topic in education, psychology, and neuroscience. Over the years, numerous studies have shown that when learning occurs through voluntary action, there is a modulation of attention, motivation and cognitive control that makes the process much more effective. Consequently, memory is benefited. However, although the physiological processes underlying this reality had been identified in the brain of mice, their existence in our species had not been corroborated. Now, an international group of researchers led by ICREA Research Professor Paul Verschure from the SPECS laboratory at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and Professor Nikolai Axmacher from the Department of Neuropsychology at Ruhr-Universität ...

The first observations of a space hurricane have been revealed in Earth's upper atmosphere, confirming their existence and shedding new light on the relationship between planets and space. Hurricanes in the Earth's low atmosphere are known, but they had never before been detected in the upper atmosphere. An international team of scientists led by Shandong University in China analysed observations made by satellites in 2014 to reveal a long-lasting hurricane, resembling those in the lower atmosphere, in the polar ionosphere and magnetosphere with surprisingly large energy and momentum deposition despite otherwise extremely quiet geomagnetic conditions. The analysis ...

The Acheulean was estimated to have died out around 200,000 years ago but the new findings suggest it may have persisted for much longer, creating over 100,000 years of overlap with more advanced technologies produced by Neanderthals and early modern humans. The research team, led by Dr Alastair Key (Kent) alongside Dr David Roberts (Kent) and Dr Ivan Jaric (Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences), made the discovery whilst studying stone tool records from different regions across the world. Using statistical techniques new to archaeological science, the archaeologists and conservation experts were able to reconstruct the end of the Acheulean period and re-map the archaeological record. Previously, ...

An impressive body of evidence published this week reveals the answer to a mystery that has puzzled plant scientists for more than 30 years: the role of the molecule suberin in the leaves of some of our most productive crops. This discovery could be the key to engineering better crops and ensuring future food security. Highly productive crops such as sugarcane, sorghum and maize belong to the type of plants that use the more efficient C4 photosynthetic pathway to transform water, sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugars. Scientists have known for a long time that one of key factors that makes C4 photosynthesis more efficient is that they have the capacity to ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 1, 2021-- A novel computer algorithm that could create a broadly reactive influenza vaccine for swine flu also offers a path toward a pan-influenza vaccine and possibly a pan-coronavirus vaccine as well, according to a new paper published in Nature Communications. "This work takes us a step closer to a pan-swine flu virus vaccine," said Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a co-author on the paper. "The hope is to eventually be prepared with an effective and rapid response if another swine flu epidemic begins to spread in humans, but this swine flu vaccine could also be useful in a veterinary setting." The immune responses to the vaccine showed very promising breadth against diverse viral variants. "The same basic principles ...

Nearly everything author Malcolm Gladwell said about how information spreads in his 2000 bestseller "The Tipping Point" is wrong, according to a recent study led by UCLA professor of sociology Gabriel Rossman. "The main point of 'The Tipping Point' is if you want your idea to spread, you find the most popular person in the center of any given network and you sell them on your idea, and then they'll sell the rest of the world on it," Rossman said. But Rossman's latest study, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pokes holes in that widely accepted notion ...