In cancer therapy, the effectiveness of an approach is determined by its ability to preserve the non-cancerous cells. Simply put, the higher the collateral damage, the greater are the side-effects of a therapy. An ideal situation is where only the cancer cells can be targeted and destroyed. In this regard, photothermal therapy--an approach in which cancer cells infused with gold nanoparticles can be heated up and destroyed using near-infrared (NIR) light that is strongly absorbed by the gold nanoparticles--has emerged as a promising strategy due to its minimally invasive nature. "Because NIR light is able to penetrate biological tissues, it can illuminate ...

The Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology laboratory, led by ICREA Researcher Dr. Patrick Aloy, has completed the bioactivity information for a million molecules using deep machine-learning computational models. It has also disclosed a tool to predict the biological activity of any molecule, even when no experimental data are available. This new methodology is based on the Chemical Checker, the largest database of bioactivity profiles for pseudo pharmaceuticals to date, developed by the same laboratory and published in 2020. The Chemical Checker collects information from 25 spaces of bioactivity for each molecule. These spaces are linked to the chemical structure of the molecule, the targets with which it interacts or the changes ...

For the first time, scientists from the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK) partner site in Essen/Düsseldorf have discovered stem cells of the hematopoietic system in glioblastomas, the most aggressive form of brain tumor. These hematopoietic stem cells promote division of the cancer cells and at the same time suppress the immune response against the tumor. This surprising discovery might open up new possibilities for developing more effective immunotherapies against these malignant brain tumors. The DKTK is a consortium centered around the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, which has long-term collaborative partnerships with specialist oncological centers at universities across Germany. Glioblastomas ...

Metabolic activators were found to reduce recovery time by as many as 3.5 days in patients with mild-to-moderate Covid-19, according to a Swedish-British study published today in Advanced Science. The researchers also found that treatment with the metabolic activators improved liver health and decreased the levels of inflammation, as shown by inflammatory markers. Conducted by researchers at Science for Life Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, in collaboration with the Sahlgrenska Academy in Gothenburg and King's College, London, the ...

Want to have a happy relationship? Make sure both partners feel they can decide on issues that are important to them. Objective power measured by income, for example, doesn't seem to play a big role, according to a new study in the "Journal of Social and Personal relationships" by the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the University of Bamberg. Instead, how lovers perceive power dynamics in their relationship is most important for relationship satisfaction. Power is about being able to influence people and successfully resist the attempts of others to influence you. "It sounds like a dog-eat-dog world or the world of business. ...

The examined tissue does not need to be marked for this. The analysis only takes around half an hour. "This is a major step that shows that infrared imaging can be a promising methodology in future diagnostic testing and treatment prediction," says Professor Klaus Gerwert, director of PRODI. The study is published in the American Journal of Pathology on 1 July 2021. Treatment decision by means of a genetic mutation analysis Lung tumours are divided into various types, such as small cell lung cancer, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. Many rare tumour types and sub-types also exist. This diversity hampers reliable rapid diagnostic methods in everyday clinical ...

There are spiders that eat snakes. Observations of snake-eating spiders have been reported around the world. Two researchers from Basel and the US consolidated and analyzed over 300 reports of this unusual predation strategy. Spiders are primarily insectivores, but they occasionally expand their menu by catching and eating small snakes. Dr. Martin Nyffeler, arachnologist at the University of Basel, and American herpetologist Professor Whitfield Gibbons of the University of Georgia, USA, got to the bottom of this phenomenon in a meta-analysis. Their findings from ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Chunxiong Zheng, Mingqiang Li and Jianxun Ding from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China and Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Changchun, China discuss the challenges and opportunities of nanomedicines in clinical translation. Researchers are rapidly gaining a much deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities of nanomedicines allowing for improvements in disease treatment and improved patient survival. Deep exploration of the connections between preclinical and clinical ...

In March 2020, daily life in the United States changed in an instant as the country locked down to deal with the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. New research reveals how residents in one community returned to their routines as the restrictions lifted, according to a team of Penn State scientists. "We used sound signals captured by underground fiber-optic sensors to understand how COVID measures impacted human activities," said Junzhu Shen, a graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. "These sensors provide very accurate, high-resolution data that can help us understand what's happening in our communities." The scientists analyzed sound data recorded from March through June 2020 in and around the Penn State University Park campus and State College, ...

Researchers have developed smart wound dressings with built-in nanosensors that glow to alert patients when a wound is not healing properly. The multifunctional, antimicrobial dressings feature fluorescent sensors that glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in and can be used to monitor healing progress. The smart dressings, developed by a team of scientists and engineers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, harness the powerful antibacterial and antifungal properties of magnesium hydroxide. They are cheaper to produce than silver-based dressings but equally as effective in fighting bacteria and fungi, with their antimicrobial power lasting up to a week. Project leader Dr Vi Khanh Truong said the development of cost-effective antimicrobial ...

Results of this technique, known as transfer learning, achieved a 99.24 per cent success rate when detecting COVID-19 in chest x-rays. The study tackles one of the biggest challenges in image recognition machine learning: algorithms needing huge quantities of data, in this case images, to be able to recognise certain attributes accurately. ECU School of Science researcher END ...

Osaka, Japan - Scientists at Osaka University, Panasonic Corporation, and Waseda University used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray absorption spectroscopy to determine which additives induce crystallization in supercooled aqueous solutions. This work may lead to the development of new energy storage materials based on latent heat. If you put a bottle of water into the freezer, you will expect to pull out a solid cylinder of ice after a few hours. However, if the water has very few impurities and left undisturbed, it may not be frozen, and instead remain as a supercooled liquid. Be careful, because this state is very unstable, and the water will crystallize quickly if shaken or impurities are added - as many YouTube videos will attest. ...

A group of researchers at Nagoya University, Japan, have developed a new method for quickly and efficiently synthesizing nanographenes, a type of nanocarbon with great potential as a next generation material. Nanographenes are the part structures of graphene, which is a sheet of carbon atoms around 3 nanometers thick with particular potential for use in semiconductor development, having electron mobility several hundred times better than current generation materials. Graphene was first isolated in 2004, a discovery which received the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, making it a very new material which is currently the subject of a great deal of research. With ...

The buff-tailed bumblebee Bombus terrestris is one of the most common bumblebee species in Europe. It is not only active in nature as a pollinator - humans also use it in greenhouses and foil tunnels to get good harvests of tomatoes or strawberries. The buff-tailed bumblebee is also used in science: "Basic research is increasingly using it as a model organism to analyse learning and memory, the visual system, flight control and navigation abilities," says Dr. Keram Pfeiffer, Professor of neurobiology at the Biocenter of Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. Pfeiffer investigates the neuronal ...

A RMIT-led international collaboration published this week has achieved record-high electron doping in a layered ferromagnet, causing magnetic phase transition with significant promise for future electronics Control of magnetism (or spin directions) by electric voltage is vital for developing future, low-energy high-speed nano-electronic and spintronic devices, such as spin-orbit torque devices and spin field-effect transistors. Ultra-high-charge, doping-induced magnetic phase transition in a layered ferromagnet allows promising applications in antiferromagnetic spintronic devices. The FLEET collaboration of researchers at RMIT, UNSW, the University of Wollongong and FLEET partner ...

The invention of the laser has opened the era of nonlinear optics, which today plays an important role in many scientific, industrial and medical applications. These applications all benefit from the availability of compact lasers in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The situation is different at XUV wavelengths, where very large facilities (so called free-electron lasers) have been built to generate intense XUV pulses. One example of these is FLASH in Hamburg that extends over several hundred meters. Smaller intense XUV sources based on HHG have also been developed. However, these sources still have a footprint of tens of meters, and have so far only been demonstrated at a few universities and research institutes worldwide. ...

A naturally occurring peptide in sunflower seeds was synthetically optimised and has now been identified as a potential drug for treating abdominal pain or inflammation (in the gastrointestinal tract, abdominal area and/or internal organs). That is the finding of an international study led by Christian Gruber from MedUni Vienna's Institute of Pharmacology (Center for Physiology and Pharmacology), which was conducted jointly with the University of Queensland and Flinders University in Australia and has now been published. The scientific aim of the study is to find analgesics that are only active in the periphery and do not cross the blood-brain barrier, as an alternative to commonly used synthetic opioids. Gruber explains the background: "Morphine was one of the first ...

In a new scientific investigation headed by the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), water from African and Mongolian waterholes as well as bloodmeals from Southeast Asian leeches were assessed for the ability to retrieve mammalian viruses without the need to find and catch the mammals. The scientists analysed the samples using high throughput sequencing to identify known viruses as well as viruses new to science. Both approaches proved to be suitable tools for pandemic prevention research as they allow finding and monitoring reservoirs of wildlife viruses. For example, a novel coronavirus most likely associated with Southeast Asian deer species was identified. The results are ...

An international research team led by HKUST has developed a simple but robust blood test from Chinese patient data for early detection and screening of Alzheimer's disease (AD) for the first time, with an accuracy level of over 96%. Currently, doctors mainly rely on cognitive tests to diagnose a person with AD. Besides clinical assessment, brain imaging and lumbar puncture are the two most commonly used medical procedures to detect changes in the brain caused by AD. However, these methods are expensive, invasive, and frequently unavailable in many countries. Now, a team led by Prof. Nancy IP, Vice-President for Research and Development at HKUST, has identified 19 out of the 429 plasma proteins associated with AD to form ...

University of Otago, New Zealand, and UK researchers have developed a world-first weight-loss device to help fight the global obesity epidemic. DentalSlim Diet Control is an intra-oral device fitted by a dental professional to the upper and lower back teeth. It uses magnetic devices with unique custom-manufactured locking bolts. It allows the wearer to open their mouths only about 2mm, restricting them to a liquid diet, but it allows free speech and doesn't restrict breathing. Participants in a Dunedin-based trial lost an average of 6.36kg in two weeks and were motivated to continue with their weight loss ...

Coral bleaching and the ecological degradation of coral reefs have become increasingly severe due to the global warming and human activities. As "mixotrophic" organisms, scleractinian coral can not only obtain energy through photosynthesis of symbiotic zooxanthellae (autotrophy), but also ingest nutrients in seawater through the coral host (heterotrophy). However, the influence of coral's trophic flexibility on environmental adaptability remains unclear. Coral reefs are widely distributed in the South China Sea (SCS), spanning about 20 latitudes from north to south. The environmental conditions of coral reef areas at different latitudes are significantly different. ...

Thousands of scientific papers describing the inner workings of the brain and its dysfunction have been published using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI). This powerful tool allows researchers to look at each cubic millimeter of the brain, in voxels - the 3D version of a pixel. The average brain is well over 1,000,000 cubic mm, so researchers need to perform multiple comparisons correction (MCC) to reduce the possibility of making false claims, i.e., reduce the false positive rates. As part of this MCC, a smaller p value threshold is widely recommended for declaring ...

Multi-photon approaches provide printing rates of up to about ten million voxels per second. And, multi-photon-based 3D approaches structure matter with a resolution approaching sub-micrometer and nanometer feature sizes. Such spatial resolution is crucial for many applications in photonics and electronics and is inaccessible to most other 3D additive manufacturing approaches. However, the vast majority of 3D printed objects and devices made along these lines has been composed of only a single polymeric material. Multi-material architectures are much less investigated ...

The most significant feature of global land surface wind speed (SWS) recently is the long-term weakening trend since the 1960s, that is, the phenomenon known as global terrestrial stilling. Many studies have found that stilling is widespread worldwide. It has seriously affected the ecological environment and social economy, especially restricted the sustainable development of the wind energy industry. It is found that the stilling reversed around 2010 and global SWS is strengthening; then, has the stilling of surface wind speed ended in China? A recent study systematically answered this question. The related paper titled "Has the stilling of the surface wind ...

In the 1970s, Fleischmann, the scientist in British, discovered that on noble metallic nanostructure, the Raman scattering of pyridine was enhanced hundreds-hold. Then, the scientists attributed the enhancement to the localized electric field highly amplified near the surface of specific noble metallic nanostructures. Thus, this phenomenon was termed surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Currently, although the enhancement mechanism of SERS is still in the debate, the SERS exhibits incomparable abilities of monitoring and sensing with high sensitivity in diverse fields ...