SAN FRANCISCO, CA--July 22, 2021--To speed up a chemical reaction, a chemist might place the reactants over a Bunsen burner. Adding heat increases the degree of random movements and collisions of particles, accelerating the reaction. In cell biology, one important "reaction" is the transformation of stem cells into all the other cells in the body, a process known as differentiation. Gladstone Institutes researchers have now discovered a molecular mechanism that acts like a Bunsen burner to "turn up the heat" and accelerate differentiation. However, instead of boosting temperature, this process amplifies random fluctuations ...

New York, NY (July 23, 2021) -- Mount Sinai researchers have developed a therapeutic agent that shows high effectiveness in vitro at disrupting a biological pathway that helps cancer survive, according to a paper published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, in July. The therapy is an engineered molecule, named MS21, that causes the degradation of AKT, an enzyme that is overly active in many cancers. This study laid out evidence that pharmacological degradation of AKT is a viable treatment for cancers with mutations in certain genes. AKT is a cancer gene that encodes an enzyme that is frequently abnormally activated in cancer cells to stimulate tumor growth. Degradation of ...

Advanced technologies have been used to solve a long-standing mystery about why some people develop serious illness when they are infected with the malaria parasite, while others carry the infection asymptomatically. An international team used mass cytometry - an in-depth way of characterising individual cells - and machine learning to discover 'immune signatures' associated with symptomatic or asymptomatic infections in people infected with the Plasmodium vivax parasite. This uncovered an unexpected role for immune T cells in protection against malaria, ...

How does a view of nature gain its gloss of beauty? We know that the sight of beautiful landscapes engages the brain's reward systems. But how does the brain transform visual signals into aesthetic ones? Why do we perceive a mountain vista or passing clouds as beautiful? A research team from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has taken up this question and investigated how our brains proceed from merely seeing a landscape to feeling its aesthetic impact. In their study, the research team presented artistic landscape videos to 24 participants. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they measured the participants' brain activity as they viewed and rated the videos. Their findings have just been published in the ...

As Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University researchers completed their research on coloured architectural concrete, they found a surprising result--green pigmented cement had impurities that produced porous, poor quality concrete. Meanwhile, red and blue pigments had little effect. The research was conducted by Mehreen Heerah, a graduate of XJTLU's Department of Civil Engineering, Dr Graham Dawson of XJTLU's Department of Chemistry, and Isaac Galobardes of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. Pigmented architectural concrete is used as a visually appealing alternative to grey concrete, such as in Barcelona's Ciutat de la Justícia, explains Dr Dawson. As the demand for pigmented architectural concrete grows, so does the importance of this research. Not easy ...

New research from the University of Otago debunks a long-held belief about our ancestors' eating habits. For more than 60 years, researchers have believed Paranthropus, a close fossil relative of ours which lived about one to three million years ago, evolved massive back teeth to consume hard food items such as seeds and nuts, while our own direct ancestors, the genus Homo, is thought to have evolved smaller teeth due to eating softer food such as cooked food and meats. However, after travelling to several large institutes and museums in South Africa, Japan and the ...

About six gigatons -- roughly 12 times the mass of all living humans -- of carbon appears to be emitted over land every year, according to data from the Chinese Global Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Scientific Experimental Satellite (TanSat). Using data on how carbon mixes with dry air collected from May 2017 to April 2018, researchers developed the first global carbon flux dataset and map. They published their results in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The map was developed by applying TanSat's satellite observations to models of how greenhouse gasses are exchanged among Earth's atmosphere, land, ...

Reston, VA--A new radiotracer that detects iron in cancer cells has proven effective, opening the door for the advancement of iron-targeted therapies for cancer patients. The radiotracer, 18F-TRX, can be used to measure iron concentration in tumors, which can help predict whether a not the cancer will respond to treatment. This research was published in the July issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. All cancer cells have an insatiable appetite for iron, which provides them the energy they need to multiply. As a result, tumors have higher levels of iron than normal tissues. Recent advances in chemistry have led scientists to take advantage of this altered state, targeting the expanded cytosolic ...

MUSC Hollings Cancer Center was one of 28 clinical sites around the world that participated in the LOTIS-2 trial to test the efficacy of Loncastuximab tesirine, a promising new treatment for aggressive B-cell lymphoma. The results of the single-arm, phase 2 trial were published online in May 2021 in Lancet Oncology. Brian Hess, M.D., a Hollings researcher and lymphoma specialist at MUSC Health, was instrumental in bringing the phase 2 trial to Hollings. The manufacturer of Loncastuximab tesirine, ADC Therapeutics S.A., sponsored the trial. B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is a blood cancer that begins in the lymph nodes, spleen or bone marrow. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common subtype of aggressive NHL. New treatment options are vital for patients with DLBCL. ...

Due to the global efforts to meet sustainability standards, many countries are currently looking to replace concrete with wood in buildings. France, for example, will require that all new public buildings will be made from at least 50 percent wood or other sustainable materials starting in 2022. Because wood is prone to degradation when exposed to sunlight and moisture, protective coatings can help bring wood into wider use. Researchers at Aalto University have used lignin, a natural polymer abundant in wood and other plant sources, to create a safe, low-cost and high-performing coating for use in construction. 'Our new coating has great potential to ...

A new optogenetic tool, a protein that can be controlled by light, has been characterized by researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). They used an opsin - a protein that occurs in the brain and eyes - from zebrafish and introduced it into the brain of mice. Unlike other optogenetic tools, this opsin is not switched on but rather switched off by light. Experiments also showed that the tool could be suitable for investigating changes in the brain that are responsible for the development of epilepsy. The teams led by Professor Melanie Mark from the Behavioural Neurobiology Research Group and Professor Stefan Herlitze from the Department ...

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 continues to evolve, immunologists and infectious diseases experts are eager to know whether new variants are resistant to the human antibodies that recognized initial versions of the virus. Vaccines against COVID-19, which were developed based on the chemistry and genetic code of this initial virus, may confer less protection if the antibodies they help people produce do not fend off new viral strains. Now, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and collaborators have created an "atlas" that charts how 152 different antibodies attack a major ...

Many species within Kenya's Tana River Basin will be unable to survive if global temperatures continue to rise as they are on track to do - according to new research from the University of East Anglia. A new study published in the journal PLOS ONE today outlines how remaining within the goals of the Paris Agreement would save many species. The research also identifies places that could be restored to better protect biodiversity and contribute towards global ecosystem restoration targets. Researcher Rhosanna Jenkins carried out the study as part of her PhD at UEA's School of Environmental Sciences. She said: "This research shows how many species within Kenya's Tana River Basin will be unable to survive if global temperatures continue to rise as they are on track to do. "But remaining ...

For young soccer players, participating in repetitive technical training activities involving heading during practice may result in more total head impacts but playing in scrimmages or actual soccer games may result in greater magnitude head impacts. That's according to a small, preliminary study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's Sports Concussion Conference, July 30-31, 2021. "Headers are a fundamental component to the sport of soccer. Therefore, it is important to understand differences in header frequency and magnitude across practice and game settings," said study author Jillian Urban, PhD, MPH, of Wake ...

University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have discovered a previously unknown repair process in the brain that they hope could be harnessed and enhanced to treat seizure-related brain injuries. Common seizure-preventing drugs do not work for approximately a third of epilepsy patients, so new and better treatments for such brain injuries are much needed. UVA's discovery identifies a potential avenue, one inspired by the brain's natural immune response. Using high-powered imaging, the researchers were able to see, for the first time, that immune cells called microglia were not just removing damaged material after experimental seizures but actually appeared to be healing damaged neurons. "There has been mounting generic support for the idea that microglia ...

WESTMINSTER, Colorado - July 23, 2021 - Horseweed is a serious threat to both agricultural crops and natural landscapes around the globe. In the U.S., the weed is prolific and able to emerge at any time of the year. Fall emerging horseweed overwinters as a rosette, while spring emerging horseweed skips the rosette stage and grows upright. In some instances, both rosette and upright plants emerge simultaneously in mid-summer. These unpredictable growth patterns create challenges for growers as they try to develop an appropriate weed management plan. In a study featured in the journal Weed Science, a team from Michigan State University explored whether environmental cues could be used to predict horseweed growth ...

A research team led by Dr Rosario Delgado from the UAB Department of Mathematics, in collaboration with the Hospital de Mataró, developed a new machine learning-based model that predicts the risk of mortality of intensive care unit patients according to their characteristics. The research was published in the latest edition of the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, with a special mention as a "Position paper". Under the framework of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning allows a model to gain knowledge based on the information provided by available ...

When can we say that a certain property of a system is robust? Intuitively, robustness implies that, even under the effect of external perturbations on the system, no matter how strong or random, said property remains unchanged. In mathematics, properties of an object that are robust against deformations are called topological. For example, the letters s, S, and L can be transformed into each other by stretching or bending their shape. The same holds true for letters o, O, and D. However, it is impossible to turn an S into an O without a discontinuous operation, such as cutting the O apart or sticking the two ends of the S together. Therefore, we say that the letters s, S and L have the same topology - as do the letters o, O and D - ...

Chemotherapy has helped make acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) one of the most survivable childhood cancers. Now, researchers working in the U.S., Germany and China have shown how chemotherapy drugs called thiopurines can lead to mutations that set patients up for relapse. The work appears today in the journal Nature Cancer. The research provides the first direct genomic and experimental evidence in pediatric cancer that drug-resistant mutations can be induced by chemotherapy and are not always present at diagnosis. "The findings offer a paradigm shift in understanding how drug resistance develops," said Jinghui Zhang, Ph.D., Department of Computational Biology chair at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. "The ...

Rivers are lifelines for many countries. They create valuable ecosystems, provide drinking water for people and raw water for agriculture and industry. In the Global South in particular, there is strong competition for access to freshwater resources. The increasing use of hydropower has recently intensified this competition further. Take Ethiopia, for example: when the country began filling the mega-?dam Gibe III on the Omo River in 2015, downstream users saw a drop in water volumes. Natural flooding declined, reducing the volume of fertile mud washed onto the floodplain. The level of Kenya's Lake Turkana, into which the Omo flows, fell temporarily by two metres, resulting in significant consequences for people and agriculture. Addressing ...

Scientists have identified five new plant species in the Bolivian Andes. The species are all part of the genus Jacquemontia, which are twining or trailing plants with pretty blue flowers. With rapid biodiversity loss taking place across South America and worldwide, identifying plant species is a vital step towards protecting them. The new study, which classifies and describes the 28 Jacquemontia species now known to live in Bolivia and Peru, was carried out by the universities of Exeter and Oxford, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. "Many plant species have not been identified and classified, especially in the tropics," said Rosie Clegg, of the University of Exeter and Kew. "If you don't know what a species is, you can't ...

Most children with a mental health disorder are not receiving services to address their needs--according to a new study from researchers at Simon Fraser University's Children's Health Policy Centre. Their research was published this week in the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health. Researchers found that of the one in eight children (12.7 per cent) who experience a mental disorder, less than half (44.2 per cent) receive any services for these conditions. "We have illuminated an invisible crisis in children's mental health and unacceptable service shortfalls in high-income countries -- including in Canada -- to a degree that violates children's rights," says study author Charlotte Waddell, ...

After gaining world attention by 'unboiling' egg protein, Flinders University scientists have now used an Australian-made novel thin film microfluidic device to manipulate Beta-lactoglobulin (β-lactoglobulin), the major whey protein in cow's, sheep's and other mammals. The so-called Vortex Fluidic Device has previously been used in an array of experiments to successfully 'un-boil' egg protein and even break the molecular bonds of one of the world's hardest material, carbon nanotubes. In the latest application, published in Molecules, College of Science and Engineering experts have combined the capabilities of the VFD with a new form of biosensor called TPE-MI, which is an aggregation-induced emission luminogen (AIEgen). "In the human body, protein folding is ...

The human body is essentially made up of trillions of living cells. It ages as its cells age, which happens when those cells eventually stop replicating and dividing. Scientists have long known that genes influence how cells age and how long humans live, but how that works exactly remains unclear. Findings from a new study led by researchers at Washington State University have solved a small piece of that puzzle, bringing scientists one step closer to solving the mystery of aging. A research team headed by Jiyue Zhu, a professor in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, recently identified a DNA region known as VNTR2-1 that appears to drive the activity of the telomerase gene, which has been shown to prevent ...

Almost all crop plants form associations with a particular type of fungi - called arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi - in the soil, which greatly expand their root surface area. This mutually beneficial interaction boosts the plant's ability to take up nutrients that are vital for growth. The more nutrients plants obtain naturally, the less artificial fertilisers are needed. Understanding this natural process, as the first step towards potentially enhancing it, is an ongoing research challenge. Progress is likely to pay huge dividends for agricultural productivity. In a study published in the journal PLOS Biology, researchers used the bright red pigments of beetroot - called betalains - to visually track soil fungi as they colonised plant roots in a living plant. "We can now ...