Researchers from the University Hospitals in Zurich and Basel, ETH Zurich, University of Zurich and the pharmaceutical company Roche have set out to improve cancer diagnostics by developing a platform of state-of-the-art molecular biology methods. The "Tumor Profiler" project aims to derive the comprehensive molecular profile of tumours in cancer patients, which has the potential to predict the efficacy of a host of new cancer medications. It will therefore make it possible to offer treating physicians personalised and improved therapy recommendations. Three years ago, the researchers began a large-scale clinical study involving ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- When sheets of two-dimensional nanomaterials like graphene are stacked on top of each other, tiny gaps form between the sheets that have a wide variety of potential uses. In research published in the journal Nature Communications, a team of Brown University researchers has found a way to orient those gaps, called nanochannels, in a way that makes them more useful for filtering water and other liquids of nanoscale contaminants. "In the last decade, a whole field has sprung up to study these spaces that form between 2-D nanomaterials," said Robert Hurt, a professor in Brown's School of Engineering and coauthor of the ...

TROY, N.Y. -- Warnings about misinformation are now regularly posted on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, but not all of these cautions are created equal. New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that artificial intelligence can help form accurate news assessments -- but only when a news story is first emerging. These findings were recently published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports by an interdisciplinary team of Rensselaer researchers. They found that AI-driven interventions are generally ineffective when used to flag issues with stories on frequently covered ...

Among the materials known as perovskites, one of the most exciting is a material that can convert sunlight to electricity as efficiently as today's commercial silicon solar cells and has the potential for being much cheaper and easier to manufacture. There's just one problem: Of the four possible atomic configurations, or phases, this material can take, three are efficient but unstable at room temperature and in ordinary environments, and they quickly revert to the fourth phase, which is completely useless for solar applications. Now scientists at Stanford ...

Delivering a minor electric shock into a stream to reveal any fish lurking nearby may be the gold standard for detecting fish populations, but it's not much fun for the trout. Scientists at Oregon State University have found that sampling stream water for evidence of the presence of various species using environmental DNA, known as eDNA, can be more accurate than electrofishing, without disrupting the fish. "It's revolutionizing the way we do fish ecology work," said Brooke Penaluna, a research fish biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service who also has an appointment in OSU's Department ...

If you believe you are capable of becoming the healthy, engaged person you want to be in old age, you are much more likely to experience that outcome, a recent Oregon State University study shows. "How we think about who we're going to be in old age is very predictive of exactly how we will be," said Shelbie Turner, a doctoral student in OSU's College of Public Health and Human Sciences and co-author on the study. Previous studies on aging have found that how people thought about themselves at age 50 predicted a wide range of future health outcomes up to 40 years later -- cardiovascular events, memory, balance, will to live, hospitalizations; even mortality. "Previous ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - A 72-year-old woman was hospitalized with severe COVID-19 disease, 33 days after the onset of symptoms. She was suffering a prolonged deteriorating illness, with severe pneumonia and a high risk of death, and she was unable to mount her own immune defense against the SARS-CoV-2 virus because of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which compromises normal immunoglobulin production. But when physicians at the University of Alabama at Birmingham recommended a single intravenous infusion of convalescent blood plasma from her son-in-law -- who had recovered from COVID-19 disease ...

Microscopy is the workhorse of contemporary life science research, enabling morphological and chemical inspection of living tissue with ever-increasing spatial and temporal resolution. Even though modern microscopes are genuine marvels of engineering, minute deviations from ideal imaging conditions will still lead to optical aberrations that rapidly degrade imaging quality. A mismatch between the refractive indices of the sample and its immersion medium, deviations in the thickness of sample holders or cover glasses, the effects of aging on the instrument--such deviations ...

Contemporary robots can move quickly. "The motors are fast, and they're powerful," says Sabrina Neuman. Yet in complex situations, like interactions with people, robots often don't move quickly. "The hang up is what's going on in the robot's head," she adds. Perceiving stimuli and calculating a response takes a "boatload of computation," which limits reaction time, says Neuman, who recently graduated with a PhD from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Neuman has found a way to fight this mismatch between a robot's "mind" and body. The method, called robomorphic computing, uses a robot's physical layout and intended applications ...

BOSTON - Regular aspirin use has clear benefits in reducing colorectal cancer incidence among middle-aged adults, but also comes with some risk, such as gastrointestinal bleeding. And when should adults start taking regular aspirin and for how long? There is substantial evidence that a daily aspirin can reduce risk of colorectal cancer in adults up to age 70. But until now there was little evidence about whether older adults should start taking aspirin. A team of scientists set out to study this question. They were led by Andrew T. Chan MD, MPH, a gastroenterologist and chief of the Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit at ...

Diamond, like graphite, is a special form of carbon. Its cubic crystal structure and its strong chemical bonds give it its unique hardness. For thousands of years, it has also been sought after as both a tool and as a thing of beauty. Only in the 1950s did it become possible to produce diamonds artificially for the first time. Most natural diamonds form in the Earth's mantle at depths of at least 150 kilometres, where temperatures in excess of 1500 degrees Celsius and enormously high pressures of several gigapascals prevail - more than 10.000 times that of a well-inflated bicycle tyre. There are different theories for the exact mechanisms ...

The liquid electrolytes in flow batteries provide a bridge to help carry electrons into electrodes, and that changes how chemical engineers think about efficiency. The way to boost electron transfer in grid-scale batteries is different than researchers had believed, a new study from the University of Michigan has shown. The findings are a step toward being able to store renewable energy more efficiently. As governments and utilities around the world roll out intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, we remain reliant on coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants to provide energy when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. Grid-scale "flow" batteries are one proposed solution, storing energy for later use. But because they aren't very efficient, ...

New Rochelle, NY, January 20, 2020--SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, blocks the processes of innate immune activation that normally direct the production and/or signaling of type I interferon (IFN-I) by the infected cell and tissues. IFN-I is a key component of host innate immunity that is responsible for eliminating the virus at the early stage of infection, as summarized in a recent review article in Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research (JICR). By suppressing innate immunity, the virus replicates and spreads in the body unchecked, leading to the disease known as COVID-19. Click here to read the article now. "SARS-CoV-2 utilizes various approaches to evade host IFN-I response, including suppression of IFN-I ...

Even a modest sea level rise, triggered by increasing global temperatures, would place 100 airports below mean sea level by 2100, a new study has found. Scientists from Newcastle University modelled the risk of disruption to flight routes as a result of increasing flood risk from sea level rise. Publishing the findings in the journal Climate Risk Management, Professor Richard Dawson and Aaron Yesudian of Newcastle University's School of Engineering analysed the location of more than 14,000 airports around the world and their exposure to storm surges for current and future sea level. The researchers also studied airports' pre-COVID-19 connectivity and aircraft traffic, and their current level of flood protection. They ...

A brain pressure disorder that especially affects women, causing severe headaches and sometimes permanent sight loss, has risen six-fold in 15 years, and is linked to obesity and deprivation, a new study by Swansea University researchers has shown. Rates of emergency hospital admissions in Wales for people with the disorder were also five times higher than for those without. The condition is called idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH). It causes increased pressure in the fluid surrounding in the brain. This can lead to severely disabling headaches as well as vision loss, which ...

Despite the anticounterfeiting devices attached to luxury handbags, marketable securities, and identification cards, counterfeit goods are on the rise. There is a demand for the next-generation anticounterfeiting technology - that surpasses the traditional ones - that are not easily forgeable and can hold various data. A POSTECH research team, led by Professor Junsuk Rho of the departments of mechanical engineering and chemical engineering, Ph.D. candidates Chunghwan Jung of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Younghwan Yang of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, have together succeeded in making a switchable display device using nanostructures that is capable of encrypting full-color images depending on the polarization of light. These findings were recently published in ...

In a Nature Reviews Endocrinology article authors from the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) highlight the interconnection of obesity and impaired metabolic health with the severity of COVID-19. First, they provide information about the independent relationships of obesity, disproportionate fat distribution and impaired metabolic health with the severity of COVID-19. Then they discuss mechanisms for a complicated course of COVID-19 and how this disease may impact on the global obesity and cardiometabolic pandemics. Finally, they provide recommendations for prevention and treatment in clinical practice and in the public health sector to combat these global pandemics. Norbert Stefan, Andreas Birkenfeld and Matthias Schulze summarize ...

Letters, syllables, words and sentences--spatially arranged sets of symbols that acquire meaning when we read them. But is there an area and cognitive mechanism in our brain that is specifically devoted to reading? Probably not; written language is too much of a recent invention for the brain to have developed structures specifically dedicated to it. According to this novel paper published in Current Biology, underlying reading there is evolutionarily ancient function that is more generally used to process many other visual stimuli. To prove it, SISSA ...

Research led by the universities of Kent and Oxford has found that fans of the least successful Premier League football teams have a stronger bond with fellow fans and are more 'fused' with their club than supporters of the most successful teams. The study, which was carried out in 2014, found that fans of Crystal Palace, Hull, Norwich, Sunderland, and West Bromwich Albion were found to have higher loyalty towards one another and even expressed greater willingness to sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of other fans of their club. This willingness was much higher than that of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or Manchester City fans. A decade of club statistics from 2003-2013 was used to identify the ...

Schools are closing again in response to surging levels of COVID-19 infection, but staging randomised trials when students eventually return could help to clarify uncertainties around when we should send children back to the classroom, according to a new study. Experts say that school reopening policies currently lack a rigorous evidence base - leading to wide variation in policies around the world, but staging cluster randomized trials (CRT) would create a body of evidence to help policy makers take the right decisions. The pandemic's rapid ...

Despite being the subject of increasing interest for a whole century, how preeclampsia develops has been unclear - until now. Researchers believe that they have now found a primary cause of preeclampsia. "We've found a missing piece to the puzzle. Cholesterol crystals are the key and we're the first to bring this to light," says researcher Gabriela Silva. Silva works at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Centre of Molecular Inflammation Research (CEMIR), a Centre of Excellence, where she is part of a research group for inflammation in pregnancy led by Professor Ann-Charlotte Iversen. The findings are good news for the approximately three per cent of pregnant ...

Amsterdam, NL, January 21, 2021 - The bacterial gut microbiome is strongly associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), but no studies had previously investigated he role of fungi in the gut. In this novel study published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease, a team of investigators at the University of British Columbia examined whether the fungal constituents of the gut microbiome are associated with PD. Their research indicated that gut fungi are not a contributing factor, thereby refuting the need for any potential anti-fungal treatments of the gut in PD patients. "Several studies conducted since 2014 have characterized changes in the gut microbiome," explained lead investigator Silke Appel-Cresswell, MD, Pacific Parkinson's Research Centre and Djavad ...

The cause of the inflammatory lung disease sarcoidosis is unknown. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have investigated whether a type of immune cell called a monocyte could be a key player in sarcoidosis pathogenesis and explain why some patients develop more severe and chronic disease than others. The study, which is published in The European Respiratory Journal, opens new possibilities for future diagnostic and therapeutic methods. Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease that in 90 percent of cases affects the lungs, but can also attack the heart, skin and lymph system. The cause of the disease is not yet established, and there is currently ...

Scientists have developed a pioneering new technique that could revolutionise the accuracy, precision and clarity of super-resolution imaging systems. A team of scientists, led by Dr Christian Soeller from the University of Exeter's Living Systems Institute, which champions interdisciplinary research and is a hub for new high-resolution measurement techniques, has developed a new way to improve the very fine, molecular imaging of biological samples. The new method builds upon the success of an existing super-resolution imaging technique called DNA-PAINT ...

Scientists have been pondering if the microbiome of plants is due to nature or nurture. Research at Stockholm University, published in Environmental Microbiology, showed that oak acorns contain a large diversity of microbes, and that oak seedlings inherit their microbiome from these acorns. "The idea that seeds can be the link between the microbes in the mother tree and its offspring has frequently been discussed, but this is the first time someone proves the transmission route from the seed to the leaves and roots of emerging plants", says Ahmed Abdelfattah, researcher at the Department of Ecology Environment and Plant ...