In a study published in Advanced Materials, the researchers from Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, the University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, using an electron-proton co-doping strategy, invented a new metal-like semiconductor material with excellent plasmonic resonance performance. This material achieves a metal-like ultrahigh free-carrier concentration that leads to strong and tunable plasmonic field. Plasmonic materials are widely used in the fields including microscopy, sensing, optical computing and photovoltaics. Most common plasmonic materials are gold and silver. Some other materials ...

Scientists at the University of Southampton's Centre for Cancer Immunology have gained new insight into how the immune system can be better used to find and kill cancer cells. Working with BioInvent International, a team led by Professor Mark Cragg and Dr Jane Willoughby from the Antibody and Vaccine Group, based at the Centre, have shown that antibodies, designed to target the molecule OX40, give a more active immune response when they bind closer to the cell membrane and can be modified to attack cancer in different ways. OX40 is a 'co-receptor' that helps to stimulate the production of helper and killer T-cells during an immune ...

When Michigan State University's Gemma Reguera first proposed her new research project to the National Science Foundation, one grant reviewer responded that the idea was not "environmentally relevant." As other reviewers and the program manager didn't share this sentiment, NSF funded the proposal. And, now, Reguera's team has shown that microbes are capable of an incredible feat that could help reclaim a valuable natural resource and soak up toxic pollutants. "The lesson is that we really need to think outside the box, especially in biology. We just know the tip of the iceberg. Microbes have been on earth for billions of years, and to think that they can't do something precludes us from so many ideas and applications," said Reguera, a professor in ...

Maize has a significantly higher productivity rate compared with many other crops. The particular leaf anatomy and special form of photosynthesis (referred to as 'C4') developed during its evolution allow maize to grow considerably faster than comparable plants. As a result, maize needs more efficient transport strategies to distribute the photoassimilates produced during photosynthesis throughout the plant. Researchers at HHU have now discovered a phloem loading mechanism that has not been described before - the bundle sheath surrounding the vasculature as the place for the actual transport of compounds such as sugars or amino acids. The development of this mechanism could have been ...

A unifying explanation of the cause of autism and the reason for its rising prevalence has eluded scientists for decades, but a theoretical model published in the journal Medical Hypotheses describes the cause as a combination of socially valued traits, common in autism, and any number of co-occurring disabilities. T.A. Meridian McDonald, PhD, a research instructor in Neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has spent 25 years researching autism, from a time she could read literally every research paper on the topic in the 1990s until now, when there is an overload of such studies. "Up until now there have been a lot of theories about the possible causes ...

In a letter published in the December issue of the American Heart Association's medical journal Circulation a group of researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) dispute the most recent findings of the incidence of myocarditis in athletes with a history of COVID-19. The Vanderbilt study, COVID-19 Myocardial Pathology Evaluation in AthleTEs with Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (COMPETE CMR), found a much lower degree of myocarditis in athletes than what was previously reported in other studies. "The differences in the findings are extremely important. The whole world paused after seeing the alarmingly high rates of myocardial inflammation and edema initially published," said ...

Across the world, health care workers and high-risk groups are beginning to receive COVID-19 vaccines, offering hope for a return to normalcy amidst the pandemic. However, the vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S. require two doses to be effective, which can create problems with logistics and compliance. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a nanoparticle vaccine that elicits a virus-neutralizing antibody response in mice after only a single dose. The primary target for COVID-19 vaccines is the spike protein, which is necessary for SARS-CoV-2's entry into ...

In 2020, astronomers added a new member to an exclusive family of exotic objects with the discovery of a magnetar. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory help support the idea that it is also a pulsar, meaning it emits regular pulses of light. Magnetars are a type of neutron star, an incredibly dense object mainly made up of tightly packed neutron, which forms from the collapsed core of a massive star during a supernova. What sets magnetars apart from other neutron stars is that they also have the most powerful known magnetic fields in the universe. For context, the strength of our planet's magnetic field has a value of about one Gauss, while a refrigerator magnet measures about ...

UC San Francisco scientists have discovered a new way to control the immune system's "natural killer" (NK) cells, a finding with implications for novel cell therapies and tissue implants that can evade immune rejection. The findings could also be used to enhance the ability of cancer immunotherapies to detect and destroy lurking tumors. The study, published January 8, 2021 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, addresses a major challenge for the field of regenerative medicine, said lead author Tobias Deuse, MD, the Julien I.E. Hoffman, MD, Endowed Chair in Cardiac Surgery in the UCSF Department of Surgery. "As a cardiac surgeon, I would love to put myself out of business by being able to implant healthy cardiac ...

The SARS-CoV-2 virus was introduced to the United Kingdom well over 1,000 times in early 2020, according to researchers who analyzed more than 50,000 viral sequences from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The virus lineages introduced before the UK's national lockdown in March tended to be larger and more geographically dispersed. Infectious disease epidemics are composed of chains of transmission, yet little is known about how co-circulating transmission lineages vary in size, spatial distribution and persistence. Understanding these features could help target interventions, track variants with different impacts on their human hosts, and more. The UK's COVID-19 epidemic during early 2020 was one of the world's largest. It was also well represented by virus genomic sampling, ...

The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, or nerve cells, woven together by an estimated 100 trillion connections, or synapses. Each cell has a role that helps us to move muscles, process our environment, form memories, and much more. Given the huge number of neurons and connections, there is still much we don't know about how neurons work together to give rise to thought or behavior. Now Columbia scientists have engineered a coloring technique, known as NeuroPAL (a Neuronal Polychromatic Atlas of Landmarks), which makes it possible--at least in experiments with Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a worm species commonly used in biological ...

Micro-CT scanning and digital reconstructions have been used to compare the skulls of the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) and wolf across their early development and into adulthood, establishing that not only did the thylacine resemble the wolf as adults, but also as newborns and juveniles. "Remarkably, the Tasmanian tiger pups were more similar to wolf pups than to other closely related marsupials," Professor Andrew Pask from the University of Melbourne said. The collaborative study with Flinders University and Museums Victoria complement earlier findings that thylacine and wolf have evolved similar instructions in their genome, which influence cranial stem cells during development. While ...

The COVID-19 pandemic is raising fears of new pathogens such as new viruses or drug-resistant bacteria. To this, a Korean research team has recently drawn attention for developing the technology for removing antibiotic-resistant bacteria by controlling the surface texture of nanomaterials. A joint research team from POSTECH and UNIST has introduced mixed-FeCo-oxide-based surface-textured nanostructures (MTex) as highly efficient magneto-catalytic platform in the international journal Nano Letters. The team consisted of professors In Su Lee and ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Scientists have figured out a cheaper, more efficient way to conduct a chemical reaction at the heart of many biological processes, which may lead to better ways to create biofuels from plants. Scientists around the world have been trying for years to create biofuels and other bioproducts more cheaply; this study, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that it is possible to do so. "The process of converting sugar to alcohol has to be very efficient if you want to have the end product be competitive with fossil fuels," said Venkat Gopalan, a senior author on the paper and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University. ...

The mitochondrial ATP synthase is energy-converting macromolecular machine that uses the electrochemical potential across the bioenergetic membrane called cristae. This potential is maintained via a membrane curvature that is induced by ATP synthase assembled in dimers. The dimers shaping the bioenergetic membrane were thought to be universal across the eukaryotic organisms. Two newly published cryo-EM studies by Kock-Flygaard et al and Mühleip et al from Alexey Amunts lab, identify different types of ATP synthase organization. The structure of the ATP synthase from ciliates revealed a dimer, which unlike in all the previously investigated complexes, the two ...

New Curtin University research has found a dramatic increase in people's trust in government in Australia and New Zealand as a result of the COVID pandemic. Published in the Australian Journal of Public Administration, the team surveyed people in Australia and New Zealand in July 2020 and found confidence in public health scientists to also be high and for this trust to be manifested in higher usage of government COVID phone apps. Lead researcher Professor Shaun Goldfinch, ANZSOG WA Government Chair in Public Administration and Policy based at the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy at Curtin said the management of the pandemic by authorities led to a dramatic increase in trust in government. "Using an online panel, we surveyed a representative sample of 500 people each in Australia ...

An important and still unanswered question is how new genes that cause antibiotic resistance arise. In a new study, Swedish and American researchers have shown how new genes that produce resistance can arise from completely random DNA sequences. The results have been published in the journal PLOS Genetics. Antibiotic resistance is a major global problem and the spread of resistant bacteria causes disease and death, and constitutes a major cost to society. The most common way for bacteria to develop resistance is by taking up various types of resistance genes from other bacteria. These genes encode proteins (peptides) that can lead to resistance by: (i) deactivating the antibiotic, (ii) reducing its concentration, or (iii) altering ...

PITTSBURGH--Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University report findings on an advanced nanomaterial-based biosensing platform that detects, within seconds, antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to testing, the platform will help to quantify patient immunological response to the new vaccines with precision. The results were published this week in the journal Advanced Materials. Carnegie Mellon's collaborators included the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and the UPMC. The testing platform identifies the presence of two of the virus' antibodies, spike S1 protein and receptor binding domain (RBD), in a ...

Leg amputees are often not satisfied with their prosthesis, even though the sophisticated prostheses are becoming available. One important reason for this is that they perceive the weight of the prosthesis as too high, despite the fact that prosthetic legs are usually less than half the weight of a natural limb. Researchers led by Stanisa Raspopovic, a professor at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, have now been able to show that connecting the prostheses to the nervous system helps amputees to perceive the prosthesis weight as lower, which ...

Stay awake too long, and thinking straight can become extremely difficult. Thankfully, a few winks of sleep is often enough to get our brains functioning up to speed again. But just when and why did animals start to require sleep? And is having a brain even a prerequisite? In a study that could help to understand the evolutional origin of sleep in animals, an international team of researchers has shown that tiny, water-dwelling hydras not only show signs of a sleep-like state despite lacking central nervous systems but also respond to molecules associated ...

Since 2006, a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome has caused sharp declines in bat populations across the eastern United States. The fungus that causes the disease, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, thrives in subterranean habitats where bats hibernate over the winter months. Bats roosting in the warmest sites have been hit particularly hard, since more fungus grows on their skin, and they are more likely to die from white-nose syndrome, according to a new study by researchers at Virginia Tech. But instead of avoiding these warm and deadly sites, bats continue to use them year after year. The reason? Bats are mistakenly preferring sites where fungal growth is ...

An invisible flow of groundwater seeps into the ocean along coastlines all over the world. Scientists have tended to disregard its contributions to ocean chemistry, focusing on the far greater volumes of water and dissolved material entering the sea from rivers and streams, but a new study finds groundwater discharge plays a more significant role than had been thought. The new findings, published January 8 in Nature Communications, have implications for global models of biogeochemical cycles and for the interpretation of isotope records of Earth's climate history. "It's really hard to characterize groundwater discharge, so it has been a source of uncertainty in the modeling of global cycles," said first author Kimberley Mayfield, who led the study as ...

Pleiotropy analysis, which provides insight on how individual genes result in multiple characteristics, has become increasingly valuable as medicine continues to lean into mining genetics to inform disease treatments. Privacy stipulations, though, make it difficult to perform comprehensive pleiotropy analysis because individual patient data often can't be easily and regularly shared between sites. However, a statistical method called Sum-Share, developed at Penn Medicine, can pull summary information from many different sites to generate significant insights. In a test of the method, published in Nature Communications, Sum-Share's developers were able to detect more than 1,700 DNA-level variations that ...

A joint group of scientists from Finland, Russia, China and the USA have demonstrated that temperature difference can be used to entangle pairs of electrons in superconducting structures. The experimental discovery, published in Nature Communications, promises powerful applications in quantum devices, bringing us one step closer towards applications of the second quantum revolution. The team, led by Professor Pertti Hakonen from Aalto University, has shown that the thermoelectric effect provides a new method for producing entangled electrons in a new device. "Quantum entanglement is the cornerstone of the novel quantum technologies. This concept, however, has puzzled many physicists over the years, including Albert Einstein who worried a lot about the ...

Reactive molecules, such as free radicals, can be produced in the body after exposure to certain environments or substances and go on to cause cell damage. Antioxidants can minimize this damage by interacting with the radicals before they affect cells. Led by Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering, Penn State researchers have applied this concept to prevent imaging damage to conducting polymers that comprise soft electronic devices, such as organic solar cells, organic transistors, bioelectronic devices and flexible electronics. The researchers ...