An old technique flexes its muscles Sarcomeres are small repeating subunits of myofibrils, the long cylinders that bundle together to make the muscle fibres. Inside the sarcomeres, filaments of the proteins myosin and actin interact to generate muscle contraction and relaxation. So far, traditional experimental approaches to investigate the structure and function of muscle tissue were performed on reconstructed protein complexes or suffered from low resolution. "Electron cryo-tomography, instead, allows us to obtain detailed and artefact-free 3D images of the frozen muscle", says Raunser. Cryo-ET was for a long time an established yet niche methodology. But recent technical advances in electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM) as well as the new development of ...

In the heart of black cherry's native range, including a part of the Allegheny Hardwoods that bills itself as the "Black Cherry Capital of the World," the tree's regeneration, growth and survival have all been declining for more than a decade. In a new analysis, a team of USDA Forest Service and University of Missouri scientists identify likely factors behind the tree's decline and, more significantly, conclude that black cherry may be the tip of the iceberg in terms of change in eastern deciduous forests. Scientists used a combination of synthesis of existing research and new analyses to examine the leading hypotheses for black cherry's regeneration failure. They conclude that the two factors that are ...

Family-centered prevention programs that foster protective caregiving can buffer the negative effects of racial discrimination on young Black people, according to a study published by University of Georgia researchers. Research shows that Black youth exposed to various levels of racial discrimination--including slurs, threats and false accusations--are at a high risk for poor mental health outcomes such as hopelessness, conduct problems, drug use and depression. After participating in family-oriented programs, high school-age adolescents who encountered high levels of racial discrimination and received supportive caregiving evinced fewer increases in conduct problems and depression/anxiety symptoms two years later. "This research shows that ...

The high temperatures and pressures of the Earth's mantle forge carbon-rich minerals known as carbonates into diamond. But less is known about the fate of carbonates that travel even deeper underground -- depths from which no sample has ever been recovered. Now, Michigan State University's Susannah Dorfman and her team are unearthing an answer with lab tools that mimic these extreme conditions. "What we were interested in is, when is carbon not diamond?" added Dorfman. In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, scientists in Dorfman's Experimental ...

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have studied for the first time how chemical reactions in clouds can influence the global climate. They found that isoprene, the dominant non-methane organic compound emitted into the atmosphere, can strongly contribute to the formation of organic aerosols in clouds. They published their results today in the journal Science Advances. Aerosols, a mixture of solid or liquid particles suspended in the air, play an important role in Earth's climate. Aerosols originate either from natural or human sources. They influence Earth's radiation balance by interacting with sunlight and forming clouds. However, their effect remains the single most significant uncertainty ...

CHICAGO -- Immunotherapy, which recruits the body's own immune system to attack cancer, has given many cancer patients a new avenue to treat the disease. But many cancer immunotherapy treatments can be expensive, have devastating side effects, and only work in a fraction of patients. Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago have developed a new therapeutic vaccine that uses a patient's own tumor cells to train their immune system to find and kill cancer. The vaccine, which is injected into the skin just like a traditional vaccine, stopped ...

Addressing uncertainties about where large earthquakes are most likely to occur along the southern San Andreas fault, which splits into multiple strands east of Los Angeles, a new study identifies a strand that has largely flown under the radar of public concern as the region's greatest earthquake threat. The study determines that the Mission Creek strand, which passes through major water and power infrastructure for the greater Los Angeles region, may account for almost the entire slip rate of this portion of the fault, suggesting it may actually be the primary Pacific-North American plate boundary fault at this latitude. The San Andreas fault threatens large future earthquakes, since its southernmost section has not ruptured in almost 300 years ...

A 12-centimetre-thick sample of a deposit from a cave in the northeast of Greenland offers unique insights into the High Arctic's climate more than 500,000 years ago. The geologist and cave scientist Prof. Gina Moseley collected it during an exploratory expedition in 2015 for her palaeoclimatic research in one of the most sensitive areas of the world to climate change. The cave is located at 80° North 35 km from the coast and 60 km from the Greenland Ice Sheet margin. It was part of the Greenland Caves Project, funded by 59 different sponsors including the National Geographic Society. Moseley and her team are interested in the climate and environmental history captured by the unique cave deposit. "Mineral deposits formed ...

A study of 49 patients reveals that toxins from the bacterial pathogen Staphylococcus aureus can destroy the body's blood-clotting platelets, raising the risk of death during bacterial blood infections. Further experiments in mice also showed that the approved drugs ticagrelor and oseltamivir protected platelets and helped treat infections, suggesting these compounds could be repurposed into badly needed therapies for blood infections. Bacterial blood infections have mortality rates as high as 20% to 30% even with supportive care, and these rates have remained high for decades. Blood infections can also cause complications such as sepsis and endocarditis, and the rise of multidrug resistance has only compounded what was already a serious ...

Immunotherapy, which recruits the body's own immune system to attack cancer, has given many cancer patients a new avenue to treat the disease. But many cancer immunotherapy treatments can be expensive, have devastating side effects, and only work in a fraction of patients. Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago have developed a new therapeutic vaccine that uses a patient's own tumor cells to train their immune system to find and kill cancer. The vaccine, which is injected into the skin just like a traditional vaccine, stopped melanoma tumor growth in mouse models. It even worked long-term, destroying new tumors long after the therapy was given. The results were published ...

Eating just one cup of leafy green vegetables every day could boost muscle function, according to new Edith Cowan University (ECU) research. The study, published today in the Journal of Nutrition, found that people who consumed a nitrate-rich diet, predominantly from vegetables, had significantly better muscle function of their lower limb. Poor muscle function is linked to greater risk of falls and fractures and is considered a key indicator of general health and wellbeing. Researchers examined data from 3,759 Australians taking part in Melbourne's Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute AusDiab study over a 12-year ...

Sight is by far the sense that we humans use the most when navigating an environment. When those who are blind or visually impaired walk alone, they put themselves at great risk of falling or colliding with obstacles, especially when traversing new places. Unfortunately, the number of visually impaired people throughout the world is likely to increase in the near future because of the rapidly aging population. Thus, there is an urgent need for innovative and cost-effective solutions to help visually impaired people navigate safely. A promising strategy that was first implemented in Japan and then replicated throughout the world is called tactile paving. Inspired by Braille, the reading system of the blind, tactile paving essentially consists of ...

When invaded by a virus, our body cells launch an alert to neighboring cells to increase their antiviral defenses to prevent the infection from spreading. Some viruses, however, manage to bypass this system by mimicking the host's RNA, preventing them from being detected by the infected cell and avoiding this alert. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, this mimicking uses a protein known as nsp14. This protein is also very important for virus multiplication, a task which is facilitated by its binding to the nsp10 protein, resulting in a protein complex. Interfering with nsp14 binding and with the nsp10-nsp14 protein complex is the aim of the most recent ITQB NOVA research in COVID-19, led by researchers Margarida Saramago, Rute Matos and Cecília Arraiano. The researchers ...

Researchers find that the earliest bacteria had the tools to perform a crucial step in photosynthesis, changing how we think life evolved on Earth. The finding also challenges expectations for how life might have evolved on other planets. The evolution of photosynthesis that produces oxygen is thought to be the key factor in the eventual emergence of complex life. This was thought to take several billion years to evolve, but if in fact the earliest life could do it, then other planets may have evolved complex life much earlier than previously thought. The ...

Beams of accelerated electrons power electron microscopes, X-ray lasers, medical accelerators and other devices. To optimize the performance of these applications, operators must be able to analyze the quality of the beams and adjust them as needed. For the past few years, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have been developing "virtual diagnostics" that use machine learning to obtain crucial information about beam quality in an efficient, non-invasive way. Now, a new virtual diagnostic approach, published in Scientific Reports, incorporates additional information about the beam that allows the method to work in situations where conventional ...

Despite aquaculture's potential to feed a growing world population while relieving pressure on badly depleted oceans, the industry has been plagued by questions about its environmental impacts. (Watch related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG_nl7-naYo) But over the years, the diverse industry - which ranges from massive open-ocean salmon cages to family farm freshwater tilapia ponds - has made significant strides toward sustainability, according to a new Stanford-led analysis. The study notes, however, that in order for the global aquaculture sector to deliver on its full promise, more effective oversight measures are ...

In a significant advance toward the future redefinition of the international unit of time, the second, a research team led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has compared three of the world's leading atomic clocks with record accuracy over both air and optical fiber links. Described in the March 25 issue of Nature, the NIST-led work is the first to compare three clocks, based on different atoms, and the first to link the most advanced atomic clocks in different locations over the air. These atomic clock comparisons place the scientific community one step closer to meeting the guidelines for redefinition of the second. "These comparisons are really defining ...

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fuels plant growth. As carbon levels rise, it's appealing to think of supercharged plant growth and massive tree-planting campaigns drawing down the CO2 produced by fossil fuel burning, agriculture and other human activities. New research published March 24 in Nature, however, suggests that when elevated carbon dioxide levels drive increased plant growth, it takes a surprisingly steep toll on another big carbon sink: the soil. One likely explanation, the authors say, is that plants effectively mine the soil for nutrients they need to keep up with carbon-fueled growth. Extracting the extra nutrients requires revving up microbial activity, which then releases CO2 into the atmosphere that might otherwise remain locked in soil. The findings contradict ...

The secret to building superconducting quantum computers with massive processing power may be an ordinary telecommunications technology - optical fiber. Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have measured and controlled a superconducting quantum bit (qubit) using light-conducting fiber instead of metal electrical wires, paving the way to packing a million qubits into a quantum computer rather than just a few thousand. The demonstration is described in the March 25 issue of Nature. Superconducting circuits are a leading technology for making quantum computers because they are reliable and easily mass produced. But these circuits must operate at cryogenic temperatures, and schemes for wiring them to room-temperature electronics are complex and prone to ...

As the signs of today's human-caused climate change become ever more alarming, research into the ways past societies responded to natural climate changes is growing increasingly urgent. Scholars have often argued that climatic changes plunge communities into crisis and provide the conditions that lead societies to collapse, but a growing body of research shows that the impacts of climate change on past populations are rarely so straightforward. In a new paper published in Nature, scholars in archaeology, geography, history and paleoclimatology present a framework for research into what they term 'the History of Climate and Society' (HCS). The framework uses a series of ...

LEBANON, NH - Some melanoma patients respond very well to immunotherapy, experiencing profound and durable tumor regression. A fraction of these patients will also develop autoimmunity against their normal melanocytes--the cells that give rise to melanoma--a phenomenon called vitiligo. Melanoma survivors with vitiligo have long been recognized as a special group with an outstanding prognosis, and a strong response of immune system cells called T cells. Immunotherapy researchers at Dartmouth's and Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center (NCCC) led by Mary Jo Turk, PhD, and surgical oncologist Christina Angeles, MD (now of University of Michigan), have discovered how a subset ...

The ocean is dynamic in nature, playing a crucial role as a planetary thermostat that buffer global warming. However, in response to climate change, the ocean has generally become stabler over the past 50 years. Six times stabler, in fact, than previously estimated--as shown by a new study that researchers from the CNRS, Sorbonne University, and IFREMER have conducted within the scope of an international collaboration.* Warming waters, melting glaciers, and disrupted precipitation patterns have created an ocean surface layer cut off from the depths. Just as oil and ...

Training babies' brains and bodies might delay the onset of Rett syndrome, a devastating neurological disorder that affects about 1 in 10,000 girls worldwide. In experiments with mice that replicate the genetic disorder, scientists discovered that intense behavioral training before symptoms develop staves off both memory loss and motor control decline. Compared to untrained mice, those trained early in life were up to five times better at performing tasks that tested their coordination or their ability to learn, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Huda Zoghbi and her colleagues report March 24, 2021, in the journal Nature. Those data, from animals whose symptoms closely mimic the human disease, offers a clear rationale for genetically screening newborns for Rett syndrome, ...

New York, NY (March 24, 2021) -- Immunotherapy is not only significantly less effective in liver cancer patients who previously had a liver disease called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), but actually appears to fuel tumor growth, according to a Mount Sinai study published in Nature in March. NASH affects as many as 40 million people worldwide and is associated with obesity and diabetes. The researchers led a large international collaboration to investigate immunotherapy's effect on hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a deadly liver cancer, caused by NASH. They conducted a meta-analysis ...

New scientific findings bring hope that early training during the presymptomatic phase could help individuals with Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder, retain specific motor and memory skills and delay the onset of the condition. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital reported in the journal Nature that, in a mouse model of Rett syndrome, intensive training beginning before symptoms appear dramatically improved the performance of specific motor and memory tasks and substantially delayed the appearance of symptoms. The researchers propose that newborn genetic testing for Rett syndrome, followed by prompt intensive training in the skills that will be affected, such ...