Eating is a dangerous business. Naturally occurring toxins in food and potentially harmful foodborne microbes can do a number on our intestines, leading to repeated minor injuries. In healthy people, such damage typically heals in a day or two. But in people with Crohn's disease, the wounds fester, causing abdominal pain, bleeding, diarrhea and other unpleasant symptoms. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Cleveland Clinic have discovered that a fungus found in foods such as cheese and processed meats can infect sites of intestinal damage in mice and people with Crohn's and prevent healing. Moreover, treating infected mice with antifungal medication eliminates the fungus and allows the wounds ...

Insights into how bacterial proteins work as a network to take control of our cells could help predict infection outcomes and develop new treatments. Much like a hacker seizes control of a company's software to cause chaos, disease-causing bacteria, such as E. coli and Salmonella, use miniature molecular syringes to inject their own chaos-inducing agents (called effectors) into the cells that keep our guts healthy. These effectors take control of our cells, overwhelming their defences and blocking key immune responses, allowing the infection to take hold. Previously, studies have investigated single effectors. Now a team led by scientists at Imperial College London and The Institute of Cancer ...

A team led by Christoph Utschick and Prof. Rudolf Gross, physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a coil with superconducting wires capable of transmitting power in the range of more than five kilowatts contactless and with only small losses. The wide field of conceivable applications include autonomous industrial robots, medical equipment, vehicles and even aircraft. Contactless power transmission has already established itself as a key technology when it comes to charging small devices such as mobile telephones and electric toothbrushes. Users would also like to see contactless charging made available for larger electric machines such as industrial robots, medical equipment and electric vehicles. Such devices could ...

How do you turn "dumb" headphones into smart ones? Rutgers engineers have invented a cheap and easy way by transforming headphones into sensors that can be plugged into smartphones, identify their users, monitor their heart rates and perform other services. Their invention, called END ...

Irvine, Calif., March 11, 2021 - Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage - from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to metal space trusses that give way after the warping of a single strut. In a study published this week in Advanced Materials, engineers at the University of California, Irvine and the Georgia Institute of Technology describe the creation of a new class of mechanical metamaterials that delocalize deformations to prevent failure. They did so by turning to tensegrity, a century-old design principle in which isolated ...

LAWRENCE -- Much like coronavirus, circulating HIV-1 viruses mutate into diverse variants that pose challenges for scientists developing vaccines to protect people from HIV/AIDS. "AIDS vaccine development has been a decades-long challenge partly because our immune systems have difficulty recognizing all the diverse variants of the rapidly mutating HIV virus, which is the cause of AIDS," said Brandon DeKosky, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and chemical & petroleum engineering at the University of Kansas. In the past five years, tremendous progress has been ...

Philadelphia, March 12, 2021 - Researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have determined what happens at a cellular level as the lung alveolus forms and allows newborns to breathe air. Understanding this process gives researchers a better sense of how to develop therapies and potentially regenerate this critical tissue in the event of injury. The findings were published online today by the journal Science. The lung develops during both embryonic and postnatal stages, during which lung tissue forms and a variety of cell types perform specific roles. During the transition from embryo to newborn is when the alveolar region of the lung ...

Skoltech researchers were able to show that patterns that can cause neural networks to make mistakes in recognizing images are, in effect, akin to Turing patterns found all over the natural world. In the future, this result can be used to design defenses for pattern recognition systems currently vulnerable to attacks. The paper, available as an arXiv preprint, was presented at the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21). Deep neural networks, smart and adept at image recognition and classification as they already are, can still be vulnerable ...

An enzyme called MARK2 has been identified as a key stress-response switch in cells in a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Overactivation of this type of stress response is a possible cause of injury to brain cells in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The discovery will make MARK2 a focus of investigation for its possible role in these diseases, and may ultimately be a target for neurodegenerative disease treatments. In addition to its potential relevance to neurodegenerative diseases, the finding is an advance in understanding basic cell biology. The paper describing ...

RICHLAND, Wash.--As part of a marathon research effort to lower the cost of carbon capture, chemists have now demonstrated a method to seize carbon dioxide (CO2) that reduces costs by 19 percent compared to current commercial technology. The new technology requires 17 percent less energy to accomplish the same task as its commercial counterparts, surpassing barriers that have kept other forms of carbon capture from widespread industrial use. And it can be easily applied in existing capture systems. In a study published in the March 2021 edition of International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory--along with collaborators from ...

MADISON, Wis. -- Mexican wolves in the American Southwest disappeared more quickly during periods of relaxed legal protections, almost certainly succumbing to poaching, according to new research published Wednesday. Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that Mexican wolves were 121% more likely to disappear -- despite high levels of monitoring through radio collars -- when legal rulings permitted easier lethal and non-lethal removal of the protected wolves between 1998 and 2016. The disappearances were not due to legal removal, the researchers say, but instead were likely caused by poachers hiding evidence of their activities. The findings suggest that consistently strong protections for endangered predators lead ...

Fossil sites sometimes resemble a living room table on which half a dozen different jigsaw puzzles have been dumped: It is often difficult to say which bone belongs to which animal. Together with colleagues from Switzerland, researchers from the University of Bonn have now presented a method that allows a more certain answer to this question. Their results are published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica. Fossilized dinosaur bones are relatively rare. But if any are found, it is often in large quantities. "Many sites contain the remains of dozens of animals," explains Prof. Dr. Martin Sander from the Institute ...

For the first time ever, a Northwestern University-led research team has peered inside a human cell to view a multi-subunit machine responsible for regulating gene expression. Called the Mediator-bound pre-initiation complex (Med-PIC), the structure is a key player in determining which genes are activated and which are suppressed. Mediator helps position the rest of the complex -- RNA polymerase II and the general transcription factors -- at the beginning of genes that the cell wants to transcribe. The researchers visualized the complex in high resolution using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), ...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is already widely used in medicine for diagnostic purposes. Hyperpolarized MRI is a more recent development and its research and application potential has yet to be fully explored. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) have now unveiled a new technique for observing metabolic processes in the body. Their singlet-contrast MRI method employs easily-produced parahydrogen to track biochemical processes in real time. The results of their work have been published in Angewandte ...

At the heart of Cygnus, one of the most beautiful constellations of the summer sky, beats a source of high-energy cosmic ray particles: the Cygnus Cocoon. An international group of scientists at the HAWC observatory has gathered evidence that this vast astronomical structure is the most powerful of our galaxy's natural particle accelerators known of up to now. This spectacular discovery is the result of the work of scientists from the international High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory. Located on the slopes of the Mexican Sierra Negra volcano, the observatory records high-energy particles and photons flowing from the abyss of space. In the sky of the Northern Hemisphere, their brightest source is the region known as the Cygnus Cocoon. At the HAWC, it was established ...

Geologists have long thought tectonic plates move because they are pulled by the weight of their sinking portions and that an underlying, hot, softer layer called asthenosphere serves as a passive lubricant. But a team of geologists at the University of Houston has found that layer is actually flowing vigorously, moving fast enough to drive plate motions. In their study published in Nature Communications, researchers from the UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics looked at minute changes in satellite-detected gravitational pull within the Caribbean and at mantle tomography images - similar to a CAT Scan - of the asthenosphere under the Caribbean. They found ...

Alexandria, Va., USA -- Oral mucositis and taste dysfunction (dysgeusia) occurs in nearly all patients receiving head and neck radiotherapy and tremendously affects the quality of life and treatment outcome. The study "LiCl Promotes Recovery of Radiation-Induced Oral Mucositis and Dysgeusia" published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), investigated the hypothesis that lithium chloride (LiCl) can promote the restoration of oral mucosa integrity and taste function after radiation. LiCl is a potent activator of a key cell signaling pathway called Wnt/β-catenin that is critical for the development, regeneration and function of many tissue types. ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A University at Buffalo researcher's recent work on dyslexia has unexpectedly produced a startling discovery which clearly demonstrates how the cooperative areas of the brain responsible for reading skill are also at work during apparently unrelated activities, such as multiplication. Though the division between literacy and math is commonly reflected in the division between the arts and sciences, the findings suggest that reading, writing and arithmetic, the foundational skills informally identified as the three Rs, might actually overlap in ways not previously imagined, let alone experimentally validated. "These findings floored me," said Christopher McNorgan, PhD, the paper's author and an assistant professor in UB's Department of Psychology. "They elevate the ...

Researchers at Princeton have determined how five cellular proteins contribute to an essential step in the life cycle of hepatitis B virus (HBV). The article describing these findings appeared March 11, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications. Viruses have been with us, shaping our lives, societies and economies for millennia. While some viruses rapidly explode onto the world stage, others smolder in our communities for decades, shattering lives but making few headlines. Hepatitis B virus hasn't caused any nationwide lockdowns or stock market crashes because it is slow to spread from person to person and is rarely immediately fatal. It is nonetheless incredibly damaging because it can establish lifelong chronic infection ...

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- New Army-funded research could help lay the groundwork for future quantum communication networks and large-scale quantum computers. Researchers sent entangled qubit states through a communication cable linking one quantum network node to a second node. Scientists at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, funded and managed by the U.S. Army Combat Capability Development, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory's Center for Distributed Quantum Information, also amplified an entangled state via the same cable first by using the cable to entangle two qubits in each of two nodes, then entangling these qubits further with other qubits in the nodes. The peer-reviewed journal ...

Atherosclerosis is the underlying condition that causes heart attacks and strokes. Researchers at Radboudumc in the Netherlands have discovered a protein that appears to play an important role in atherosclerosis. The protein is called Prosaposin, and its role in atherosclerosis was sofar unknown. "We identified Prosaposin as a new potential target for the Science Translational Medicine. Atherosclerosis is caused by cholesterol that builds up in the vessel wall and triggers chronic inflammation. It has been well established that cholesterol lowering drugs help to treat atherosclerosis. Recent research has shown that inhibiting inflammation can also help to prevent heart attacks and ...

What The Study Did: In this phase 1 study, a single immunization with Ad26.COV2.S (Janssen/Johnson & Johnson) vaccine induced rapid binding and neutralization antibody responses as well as cellular immune responses. Two phase 3 clinical trials are currently underway to determine the efficacy of the Ad26.COV2.S vaccine. Authors: Dan H. Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2021.3645) Editor's Note: Please see the article ...

Does a warmer climate mean more dry land? For years, researchers projected that drylands -- including deserts, savannas and shrublands -- will expand as the planet warms, but new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) challenges those prevailing views. Previous studies used atmospheric information, including rainfall and temperature, to make projections about future land conditions. The real picture is more complicated than that, said Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author ...

AMES, Iowa - Parents would never give their children the keys to the car without supervised training and driver's education. An Iowa State University researcher says parents and educators need to take a similar approach before handing children a keyboard to access the digital world. ISU psychology professor Douglas Gentile worked with the DQ (Digital Intelligence) Institute, an international think tank, to design a framework for digital literacy education. In a commentary, published by the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Gentile and his colleagues outlined how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated ...

What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to "the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The question that begets 42, at least in the ...