Although plexiglass barriers are seemingly everywhere these days -- between grocery store lanes, around restaurant tables and towering above office cubicles -- they are an imperfect solution to blocking virus transmission. Instead of capturing virus-laden respiratory droplets and aerosols, plexiglass dividers merely deflect droplets, causing them to bounce away but remain in the air. To enhance the function of these protective barriers, Northwestern University researchers have developed a new transparent material that can capture droplets and aerosols, effectively ...

New York, NY (June 16, 2021) -- Immune cells that normally repair tissues in the body can be fooled by tumors when cancer starts forming in the lungs and instead help the tumor become invasive, according to a surprising discovery reported by Mount Sinai scientists in Nature in June. The researchers found that early-stage lung cancer tumors coopt the immune cells, known as tissue-resident macrophages, to help invade lung tissue. They also mapped out the process, or program, of how the macrophages allows a tumor to hurt the tissues the macrophage normally repairs. This process allows the tumor to hide from the immune system and proliferate into later, deadly stages of cancer. Macrophages play a key ...

June 16, 2021, CLEVELAND: New findings from Cleveland Clinic researchers show for the first time that the gut microbiome impacts stroke severity and functional impairment following stroke. The results, published in Cell Host & Microbe, lay the groundwork for potential new interventions to help treat or prevent stroke. The research was led by Weifei Zhu, Ph.D., and Stanley Hazen, M.D., Ph.D., of Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute. The study builds on more than a decade of research spearheaded by Dr. Hazen and his team related to the gut microbiome's role in cardiovascular health and disease, including the adverse effects of TMAO (trimethylamine N-oxide) - a byproduct produced when gut bacteria digest certain nutrients abundant in red meat and other animal ...

Our eyes move three times per second. Every time we move our eyes, the world in front of us flies across the retina at the back of our eyes, dramatically shifting the image the eyes send to the brain; yet, as far as we can tell, nothing appears to move. A new study provides new insight into this process known as "visual stabilization". The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our results show that a framing strategy is at work behind the scenes all the time, which helps stabilize our visual experience," says senior author Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth ...

A joint paper went out in Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering. Petroleum, being a liquid compound, has very good migratory properties, and recovery methods take account of that - using various methods, oilers displace petroleum through cavities and vugs and extract it. However, sometimes oil is "locked" in low-permeability reservoirs, and water displacement used in such cases poses a high risk of reservoir flooding and workplace emergencies. Many teams work on blocking high-permeability areas in order to make extraction a more controlled and safe process. In particular, there have yet been no efficient agents for reservoirs with high temperatures (up to 140 C) and mineralization (up to 250 grams ...

Professor Hermann Ehrlich places a piece of sponge in an alkaline, copper-containing ammonia solution that simulates a copper bath from the manufacture of circuit boards for electronic components. About 12 hours later the sponge has turned blue - when dry it is stronger than before, but still very light. "At a pH value of 9 the fibers of the spongin open and the organic compounds of the protein change," explains Prof. Hermann Ehrlich. The copper contained in the ammonia solution reacts immediately with the organic components of the spongin, especially with the amino acid residues, and forms the mineral atacamite. "Like a string, nanometer-sized crystals grow along with the spongin fiber," explains the scientist. ...

Olives, well-known for their characteristic bitter taste, are in high demand owing to the popularity of the oil that's derived from them. The health benefits of olive oil are well known, ranging from antiviral, anti-cancer, to even anti-hypertensive effects. These benefits are attributed to "oleuropein," the most abundant olive secoiridoid found in olives. An efficient method to enhance the quality of plant products is by using molecular methods to manipulate their genes and enhancing their yield. With olives, however, this is still a challenge, because of a lack of sufficient genome data. So far, the genomes of two European olive varieties have been sequenced. But to fully decipher ...

Lack of data on contraception uptake prior to the pandemic means no clear picture of the impact Covid-19 had on contraception use Study from Warwick Medical School highlights need to maintain access to contraception during disasters Researchers recommend making more contraception prescription-free and discuss the benefits and pitfalls of telehealth Limited data on the uptake of contraception prior to and during crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic could mean unforeseen issues for sexual and reproductive health services, research from the University of Warwick concludes. It identifies additional barriers that women faced in accessing contraception during the Covid-19 lockdown, including disruption to sexual health services and fears about contracting the virus, as ...

New research shows the UK's COVID-19 management decisions were based on an outdated pandemic modelling structure and suggests a more resilient approach would have been more effective. In the initial months of the pandemic, regular updates using graphs showing how the R number was behaving was the mainstay of the Government's strategy for tackling COVID-19. This type of infection transmission is usually mathematically-based on dividing the population into 'compartments'. Such an approach has been criticised for its limited scope and inability to capture critical factors, such as the ...

Results show BAT's Modern Oral nicotine pouches have a comparable toxicant profile to NRTs, which are currently considered the least risky of all nicotine products*† The Modern Oral products have far fewer and significantly lower levels of toxicants‡ than cigarette smoke Data demonstrates how BAT is building A Better Tomorrow™ by providing evidence to show how we are reducing the health impact of our business and delivering Tobacco Harm Reduction London, 16 June: New research published today indicates that BAT's modern oral (MO) products in the form of tobacco-free nicotine pouches have a toxicant profile that is comparable to nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs) and much lower than traditional oral ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC - UNC School of Medicine scientists led a collaboration of researchers to demonstrate a potentially powerful new strategy for treating cystic fibrosis (CF) and potentially a wide range of other diseases. It involves small, nucleic acid molecules called oligonucleotides that can correct some of the gene defects that underlie CF but are not addressed by existing modulator therapies. The researchers used a new delivery method that overcomes traditional obstacles of getting oligonucleotides into lung cells. As the scientists reported in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, they demonstrated the striking effectiveness of their approach in cells derived from a CF patient and in mice. "With our oligonucleotide delivery platform, we were able to restore the activity of ...

Stuttgart/Boulder - It is not the first time that spiders have served as biological models in the research field of soft robotics. The hydraulic actuation mechanisms they apply to move their limbs when weaving their web or hunting for prey give them powers many roboticists and engineers have drawn inspiration from. A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany and at the University of Boulder in Colorado in the US has now found a new way to exploit the principles of spiders' joints to drive articulated robots without any bulky components and connectors, which weigh down the robot and reduce portability and speed. Their slender and lightweight simple ...

Magnetic-spin interactions that allow spin-manipulation by electrical control allow potential applications in energy-efficient spintronic devices. An antisymmetric exchange known as Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI) is vital to form various chiral spin textures, such as skyrmions, and permits their potential application in energy-efficient spintronic devices. Published this week, a Chinese-Australia collaboration has for the first time illustrated that DMI can be induced in a layered material tantalum-sulfide (TaS2) by intercalating iron atoms, and can further be tuned by gate-induced proton intercalation. REALIZING AND TUNING DMI IN VAN-DER-WAALS MATERIAL TaS2 Searching ...

WASHINGTON --Just a small number of cells found in tumors can enable and recruit other types of cells nearby, allowing the cancer to spread to other parts of the body, report END ...

It sounds like a plot from a Quentin Tarantino movie -- something sets off natural killers and sends them on a killing spree. But instead of characters in a movie, these natural killers are part of the human immune system and their targets are breast cancer tumor cells. The triggers are fusion proteins developed by Clemson University researchers that link the two together. "The idea is to use this bifunctional protein to bridge the natural killer cells and breast cancer tumor cells," said Yanzhang (Charlie) Wei, a professor in the College of Science's Department of Biological Sciences. "If the two cells are brought close enough together through this receptor ligand connection, the natural killer cells can release what I call killing machinery to have the tumor cells killed." It's ...

A group of researchers from the University of Jyvaskyla and Stanford University were part of an expedition to French Guiana to study tropical frogs in the Amazon. Various amphibian species of this region use ephemeral pools of water as their nurseries, and display unique preferences for specific physical and chemical characteristics. Despite species-specific preferences, researchers were surprised to find tadpoles of the dyeing poison frog surviving in an incredible range of both chemical (pH 3-8) and vertical (0-20 m in height) deposition sites. This research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution in June 2021. Neotropical frogs are special because, unlike species in temperate regions, many tropical frogs ...

Postdoctoral Researcher Outi Keinänen from the University of Helsinki developed a method to radiolabel plastic particles in order to observe their biodistribution on the basis of radioactivity with the help of positron emission tomography (PET). As a radiochemist, Keinänen has in her previous radiopharmaceutical studies utilised PET imaging combined with computed tomography (CT), which produces a very accurate image of the anatomical location of the radioactivity signal. In the recently completed study, radiolabelled plastic particles were fed to mice, and their elimination from the body was followed with PET-CT scans. This was the first time that ...

Research published today in the Journal of General Virology has identified missed cases of SARS-CoV-2 by retrospective testing of throat swabs. Researchers at the University of Nottingham screened 1,660 routine diagnostic specimens which had been collected at a Nottingham hospital between 2 January and 11 March 2020 and tested for SARS-CoV-2 by PCR. At this stage of the pandemic, there was very little COVID-19 testing available in hospitals, and to qualify patients had to meet a strict criterion, including recent travel to certain countries in Asia or contact with a known positive case. Three previously unidentified cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection were identified by the retrospective screening, including one from a 75-year-old ...

The phenomenon of quantum nonlocality defies our everyday intuition. It shows the strong correlations between several quantum particles some of which change their state instantaneously when the others are measured, regardless of the distance between them. While this phenomenon has been confirmed for slow moving particles, it has been debated whether nonlocality is preserved when particles move very fast at velocities close to the speed of light, and even more so when those velocities are quantum mechanically indefinite. Now, researchers from the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Perimeter Institute report in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters that ...

Tokyo, Japan - Colloids--mixtures of particles made from one substance, dispersed in another substance--crop up in numerous areas of everyday life, including cosmetics, food and dyes, and form important systems within our bodies. Understanding the behavior of colloids therefore has wide-ranging implications, yet investigating the rotation of spherical particles has been challenging. Now, an international team including researchers from The University of Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science has created particles with an off-center core or "eye" that can be tracked ...

Getting energy and nutrients from the environment - that is, eating - is such an important function that it has been regulated through sophisticated mechanisms over hundreds of millions of years. Some of these mechanisms are only now beginning to be unravelled. A group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has found one of their key components - a switch that controls the ability of organisms to adapt to low cellular nutrient levels. The protein involved is RagA, which is part of the mTOR molecular pathway, whose importance in metabolic activity regulation has been known for decades now. CNIO researchers have found that if RagA is continuously activated, cells do not know that there are no sufficient nutrients and so ...

The encryption algorithm GEA-1 was implemented in mobile phones in the 1990s to encrypt data connections. Since then, it has been kept secret. Now, a research team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), together with colleagues from France and Norway, has analysed the algorithm and has come to the following conclusion: GEA-1 is so easy to break that it must be a deliberately weak encryption that was built in as a backdoor. Although the vulnerability is still present in many modern mobile phones, it no longer poses any significant threat to users, according to the researchers. Backdoors not useful according to researchers "Even though intelligence services and ministers of the interior understandably want such backdoors ...

ENVIRONMENT Diesel-polluted soil from now defunct military outposts in Greenland can be remediated using naturally occurring soil bacteria according to an extensive five-year experiment in Mestersvig, East Greenland, to which the University of Copenhagen has contributed. Mothballed military outposts and stacks of rusting oil drums aren't an unusual sight in Greenland. Indeed, there are about 30 abandoned military installations in Greenland where diesel, once used to keep generators and other machinery running, may have seeped into the ground. This is the case with Station 9117 Mestersvig, an abandoned military airfield ...

These findings were published in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences on 8 June 2021. Huge splicing diversity in the brain The human genome was sequenced around 20 years ago. Since then, the sequence information encoding our proteins is known - at least in principle. However, this information is not continuously stored in the individual genes, but is divided into smaller coding sections. These coding sections, also known as exons, are assembled in a process called splicing. Depending on the gene, different exon combinations are possible, which is why they are referred to as different or ...

With increasing vaccination rates and decreasing numbers of infections, the population's feeling of safety is also rising. As the results of the 37th edition of the BfR-Corona-Monitor, a regular survey conducted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), show, the majority of the population in Germany thinks it can control its risk of an infection well. "62 percent are confident that they can protect themselves from an infection with the coronavirus," says BfR-President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel. "We see that the feeling of safety has increased considerably. ...