Intelligent materials, the latest revolution in the field of materials science, can adapt their properties depending on changes in their surroundings. They can be used in everything from self-healing mobile phone screens, to shape-shifting aeroplane wings, and targeted drug delivery. Delivering drugs to a specific target inside the body using intelligent materials is particularly important for diseases like cancer, as the smart material only releases the drug payload when it detects the presence of a cancer cell, leaving the healthy cells unharmed. Now, researchers from the Centre ...

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis have designed a drug-like compound which effectively blocks a critical step in the malaria parasite life cycle and are working to develop this compound into a potential first of its kind malaria treatment. While drugs and mosquito control have reduced levels of malaria over recent decades, the parasite still kills over 400,000 people every year, infecting many more. Worryingly, it has now developed resistance to many existing antimalarial drugs, meaning new treatments that work in different ways are urgently needed. In their research, published in PNAS, the scientists developed a set of compounds designed to stop the parasite being able to burst out of red ...

Multiple sclerosis, or MS for short, manifests itself slightly differently in each person - which is why some call it "the disease of a thousand faces." Arguably the worst manifestation of MS is its chronic progressive form. Unlike the more common relapsing-remitting variant (RRMS), in which sufferers are often symptom-free for months or even years, patients with the primary progressive form of the disease (PPMS) see their condition steadily deteriorate with no remissions. Poorly insulated neurons die off Today's therapeutic approaches are based on the assumption that the immune system is making a mistake and waging an inappropriate attack on the layer of myelin that surrounds and insulates the nerve cells' long, ...

AdaptiFont has recently been presented at CHI, the leading Conference on Human Factors in Computing. Language is without doubt the most pervasive medium for exchanging knowledge between humans. However, spoken language or abstract text need to be made visible in order to be read, be it in print or on screen. How does the way a text looks affect its readability, that is, how it is being read, processed, and understood? A team at TU Darmstadt's Centre for Cognitive Science investigated this question at the intersection of perceptual science, cognitive ...

A giant mosasaur from the end of the Cretaceous period in Morocco that could have reached up to eight metres long is the third new species to be described from the region in less than a year, bringing the total number of species up to at least 13. The high diversity of the fauna shows how mosasaurs, giant marine lizards related to snakes and Komodo dragons, thrived in the final million years of the Cretaceous period before they, and most of all species on Earth, were wiped out by the impact of a giant asteroid 66 million years ago. The new species, named Pluridens serpentis, had long, slender jaws with over a hundred sharp, ...

Modern vaccines such as those against Sars-CoV-2 use tiny lipid spheres to transport genetic information into cells and let the body build up an immune defense against the virus. A team of scientists from Erlangen, Dresden, and London has now developed a completely new method to very efficiently deliver not only genes but also drugs and other substances into cells. The researchers from the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin (MPZPM) in Erlangen, the Technical University of Dresden, and The Institute of Cancer Research in London have named the method Progressive Mechanoporation and have now published it in the scientific journal "Lab on a Chip". They have also filed a patent. Ruchi Goswami and Alena Uvizl were part of a team of scientists led by Salvatore Girardo (Erlangen) ...

An enzyme could make a dream come true for the energy industry: It can efficiently produce hydrogen using electricity and can also generate electricity from hydrogen. The enzyme is protected by embedding it in a polymer. An international research team with significant participation of scientists from Technical University of Munich (TUM) has presented the system in the renowned science journal Nature Catalysis. Fuel cells turn hydrogen into electricity, while electrolysers use electricity to split water to produce hydrogen. Both need the rare and thus expensive precious metal platinum as a catalyst. Nature has created a different solution: Enzymes, referred to as hydrogenases. ...

Experts in virtual reality locomotion have developed a new resource that analyses all the different possibilities of locomotion currently available. Moving around in a virtual reality world can be very different to walking or employing a vehicle in the real world and new approaches and techniques are continually being developed to meet the challenges of different applications. Called Locomotion Vault, the project was developed by researchers at the Universities of Birmingham, Copenhagen, and Microsoft Research. It aims to provide a central, freely-available ...

A study published in the journal Scientific Reports reveals the genetic structure of the land snail Xerocrassa montserratensis and it provides new scientific tools for the improvement of the conservation of this endemic and threatened species in Catalonia. This land mollusc, identified in the late 19th century in the Montserrat mountain, has a reduced geographical distribution limited to the province of Barcelona, and it is a protected species in the area of the natural parks of Montserrat and Sant Llorenç del Munt i l'Obac. The study is led by the lecturer Marta Pascual, from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the University of Barcelona ...

Skeletal muscles make a tremendous variety of actions stabilizing the body in different positions. Despite their endurance during daily activities, they can undergo several mild injuries caused by sport, accidental overstretching, or sudden overtwisting. Luckily mild injuries can be quickly healed; however, when a large part of muscles is damaged or resected surgically, the full recovery can be impossible. Muscle regeneration is challenging, but the development of innovative biocompatible materials tackles that problem. Recently, a multinational team of scientists led by dr. Marco Costantini from ...

Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B Volume 11, Issue 4 Publishes https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/acta-pharmaceutica-sinica-b/vol/11/issue/4 Special Issue: The Biological Fate of Drug Nanocarriers This special issue includes seven review and nine research articles from some leading scientists in the field that further the discussion on subtopics of in vivo fate of drug nanocarriers. Guest Editors: Wei Wu, Professor, Department of Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; Tonglei Li, Professor, Department of Industrial & Physical Pharmacy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA; Ying Zheng, Professor, State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, China. The Journal ...

How to predict the sound produced by a tonewood block once carved into the shape of a violin plate? What is the best shape for the best sound? Artificial Intelligence offer answers to these questions. These are the conclusions that researchers of the Musical Acoustics Lab of Politecnico di Milano presented in a study that was recently published in Scientific Reports. In the article "A Data-Driven Approach to Violinmaking" the Chilean physicist and luthier Sebastian Gonzalez (post-doc researcher) and the professional mandolin player Davide Salvi (PhD student) show how a simple and effective neural network is able to predict the vibrational be-havior of violin plates. This prediction is obtained from a limited set of geometric and mechanical ...

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) has helped Gaia achieve millimagnitude (mmag) precision in photometry, according to a study led by researchers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Beijing Normal University (BNU). Their study was published in The Astrophysical Journal. If you look at the sky on a clear, starry night, you may notice that Aldebran is relatively red and Rigel is blue. Why? The answer stems from their intrinsic physical properties. Precisely measuring magnitudes ...

The polar vortex is a large area of upper-atmosphere cyclonic air circulation surrounding both poles. It is bounded by the polar jet stream and its associated cold air is usually confined to the polar regions. Within the Antarctic circle, and southern polar vortex, ozone quantities are the lowest, globally. A research published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, led by Dr. LUO Yuhan, corresponding author and Associate Professor at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), suggests that the polar vortex plays a key role in Antarctic stratospheric ozone depletion. "The atmosphere over Antarctica is controlled by a strong ...

May 1, 2021 - Rheumatologists in Hong Kong joined hands to develop a set of consensus statements on COVID-19 vaccination for local adult patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases. These timely statements would serve to be a guide for rheumatologists, other specialists, family physicians, specialty nurses, and the public regarding COVID-19 vaccination for patients with rheumatic diseases. Vaccination against SAR-CoV-2 is a new campaign and a high immunization rate is believed to be the key to end the pandemic. Currently, there are two COVID-19 vaccines available in Hong Kong--the inactivated virus vaccine CoronaVac® ...

Parks played an important role for people seeking respite from the toll of social isolation during the pandemic, and according to new research from Drexel University, they did so without increasing the spread of COVID-19. The study looked at how people used 22 parks in Philadelphia and New York during the height of the pandemic and it found no strong correlation between park use and the number of confirmed cases in surrounding neighborhoods. Published in the Journal of Extreme Events, Drexel's study "Urban Park Usage During the COVID-19 Pandemic" surveyed park visitors over a three-month period from May to July 2020 at small and mid-size parks in New York and Philadelphia. And it compared park usage numbers ...

An essential preliminary to building and construction or resource extraction is studying the geological structure of the site. One of steps of this process is geophysical investigation. This provides a continuous overview of the geological horizons rather than just data on points: boreholes. The standard methods of geophysics help successfully solve this problem in comparatively simple conditions. Yet the classical direct current methods may lead to serious inaccuracy if we have to investigate geologically complex structures with thin layers of sandy and clayey soils. Among the most popular methods ...

Leipzig/Jena/Ilmenau. Mobile apps like Flora Incognita that allow automated identification of wild plants cannot only identify plant species, but also uncover large scale ecological patterns. These patterns are surprisingly similar to the ones derived from long-term inventory data of the German flora, even though they have been acquired over much shorter time periods and are influenced by user behaviour. This opens up new perspectives for rapid detection of biodiversity changes. These are the key results of a study led by a team of researchers from Central Germany, which has recently been published in Ecography. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, plant species ...

The gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) is declining because of habitat loss and fragmentation, human interaction including collisions with vehicles, predation by domestic animals, and disease. These long-lived reptiles are found throughout Florida and are affected by various diseases including upper respiratory tract disease. A number of pathogens such as Mycoplasma spp., Herpesvirus, and Ranavirus are known to cause upper respiratory tract disease in gopher tortoises. Chronic disease resulting from these pathogens can lead to reduced reproduction, abnormal growth and development, increased susceptibility to secondary ...

Lysophospholipids are phospholipids that have just one fatty acid chain, and in recent years, the role of lysophospholipids in physiology and pathophysiology has attracted attention. Lysophosphatidylethanolamine (LPE) is a type of lysophospholipid that are reportedly present in the brain that consist of many species with different fatty acid chain lengths and degrees of unsaturation. The latest studies in animal models have reported elevated levels of LPE in the brain after traumatic brain injury and cerebral ischemia. Fluctuations in LPE concentration have also been reported in the plasma of patients with major depression and Alzheimer's disease. Although these reports suggest the involvement of LPE in brain function, the role of LPE in the brain has remained unclear. Therefore, ...

Smaller, faster, more energy-efficient: future requirements to computing and data storage are hard to fulfill and alternative concepts are continuously explored. Small magnetic textures, so-called skyrmions, may become an ingredient in novel memory and logic devices. In order to be considered for technological application, however, fast and energy-efficient control of these nanometer-sized skyrmions is required. Magnetic skyrmions are particle-like magnetization patches that form as very small swirls in an otherwise uniformly magnetized material. In particular ferromagnetic thin films, skyrmions are stable at room temperature, with diameters down to the ten-nanometer range. It is known that skyrmions can be created and moved by short pulses of electric current. Only recently it was discovered ...

Researchers have recently extracted the proton mass radius from the experimental data. A research group at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) presented an analysis of the proton mass radius in Physical Review D on May 11. The proton mass radius is determined to be 0.67 ± 0.03 femtometers, which is obviously smaller than the charge radius of the proton. In the Standard Model, the proton is a composite particle made of quarks and gluons and it has a non-zero size. The radius of the proton is a global and fundamental property of the proton. It is related to the color confinement radius -- a property governed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The radius of the proton is approximately 100,000 times smaller ...

Atoms are the basic building blocks for all materials. To tailor functional properties, it is essential to accurately determine their atomic structures. KAIST researchers observed the 3D atomic structure of a nanoparticle at the atom level via neural network-assisted atomic electron tomography. Using a platinum nanoparticle as a model system, a research team led by Professor Yongsoo Yang demonstrated that an atomicity-based deep learning approach can reliably identify the 3D surface atomic structure with a precision of 15 picometers (only about 1/3 of a hydrogen atom's radius). The atomic displacement, strain, and facet analysis revealed that the surface atomic structure and strain are ...

The study conducted by the University of Turku and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare together with an international research team is so far the largest population-level study in the world examining the connection between human gut microbiota and health and mortality in the following decades. The composition of the research subjects' gut microbiota was analysed from stool samples collected in 2002. The researchers had access to follow-up data on the subjects' mortality until 2017, i.e., close to the present day. "Many bacterial strains that are known ...

Acetone, a volatile solvent used for everything from removing nail polish and cleaning textiles to manufacturing plastics, could get a sustainability boost from a new strain of bacteria engineered by a research team based in Japan. They published the details of the heat-loving, acetone-producing bacteria called Moorella thermoacetica on April 23 in AMB Express. Acetone is typically produced through the widely used cumene method, which is cost-effective but not sustainable. The process, developed in 1942, involves converting two non-renewable resources into acetone and phenol, another chemical ...