Membrane proteins and large protein complexes are notoriously difficult to study with X-ray crystallography, not least because they are often very difficult, if not impossible, to crystallize, but also because their very nature means they are highly flexible. The result is that when a structure can be obtained it is often of low resolution, ambiguous and reveals a mosaic-like spread of protein domains that sometimes create more puzzles than they solve. [Schröder, Levitt & Brunger. (2014), Acta Cryst. D70, 2241-2255; doi: 10.1107/S1399004714016496 ] Now, Gunnar Schröder ...

With almost all of the U.S. population armed with cellphones – and close to 80 percent carrying a smartphone – mobile phones have become second-nature for most people. What's coming next, say University of Washington researchers, is the ability to interact with our devices not just with touchscreens, but through gestures in the space around the phone. Some smartphones are starting to incorporate 3-D gesture sensing based on cameras, for example, but cameras consume significant battery power and require a clear view of the user's hands. UW engineers have developed a ...

Many patients with advanced, incurable cancer do not receive any palliative care, reveals new research to be presented later this month at the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid, Spain, 26-30 September. The findings are astonishing as they come at the same time as 15 new oncology centres in Europe, Canada, South America and Africa are being awarded the prestigious title of 'ESMO Designated Centre of Integrated Oncology and Palliative Care.' SR I Dr Alexandru Grigorescu, medical oncology consultant at the Institute of Oncology Bucharest, Romania, member of the ESMO Palliative ...

An ultrasensitive biosensor made from the wonder material graphene has been used to detect molecules that indicate an increased risk of developing cancer. The biosensor has been shown to be more than five times more sensitive than bioassay tests currently in use, and was able to provide results in a matter of minutes, opening up the possibility of a rapid, point-of-care diagnostic tool for patients. The biosensor has been presented today, 19 September, in IOP Publishing's journal 2D Materials. To develop a viable bionsensor, the researchers, from the University of ...

TORONTO, Sept. 19, 2014 — York University researchers say a simple test that combines thinking and movement can help to detect heightened risk for developing Alzheimer's disease in a person, even before there are any telltale behavioural signs of dementia. Faculty of Health Professor Lauren Sergio and PhD candidate Kara Hawkins who led the study asked the participants to complete four increasingly demanding visual-spatial and cognitive-motor tasks, on dual screen laptop computers. The test aimed at detecting the tendency for Alzheimer's in those who were having cognitive ...

For future astronauts, the process of suiting up may go something like this: Instead of climbing into a conventional, bulky, gas-pressurized suit, an astronaut may don a lightweight, stretchy garment, lined with tiny, musclelike coils. She would then plug in to a spacecraft's power supply, triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrink-wrap the garment around her body. The skintight, pressurized suit would not only support the astronaut, but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration. To take the suit off, she would only have to apply ...

Call it the Jimmy Durante of dinosaurs – a newly discovered hadrosaur with a truly distinctive nasal profile. The new dinosaur, named Rhinorex condrupus by paleontologists from North Carolina State University and Brigham Young University, lived in what is now Utah approximately 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period. Rhinorex, which translates roughly into "King Nose," was a plant-eater and a close relative of other Cretaceous hadrosaurs like Parasaurolophus and Edmontosaurus. Hadrosaurs are usually identified by bony crests that extended from the skull, ...

A collaborative research team led by Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) scientists has identified a new gene associated with fasting glucose and insulin levels in rats, mice and in humans. The findings are published in the September issue of Genetics. Leah Solberg Woods, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics at MCW and a researcher in the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin Research Institute, led the study and is the corresponding author of the paper. The authors of the paper identified a gene called Tpcn2 in which a variant was associated with fasting glucose levels ...

The results of the QUT Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q) study have been presented at the Occupational Safety in Transport Conference (OSIT) which is being held on the Gold Coast and finishes today. Dr Ross Blackman, a CARRS-Q road safety researcher, said speed limit credibility was being put at risk when reduced speed limits and related traffic controls remained in place at inactive roadwork sites. "It's seen as crying wolf. If people are asked to slow down at roadwork sites but find there is no roadwork being undertaken they become ...

Leguminous plants are able to grow well in infertile land, and bear many beans that are important to humans. The reason for this is because most legumes have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, called rhizobia, that can fix nitrogen in the air and then supply the host plant with ammonia as a nutrient. The plants create symbiotic organs called nodules in their roots. However, if too many root nodules are made it will adversely affect the growth of the plants, because the energy cost of maintaining excessive nodules is too large. Therefore legumes must have a mechanism ...

Paratuberculosis, also known as Johne's disease, is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP). In Austria, there is a legal obligation to report the disease. Paratuberculosis mainly affects ruminants and causes treatment-resistant diarrhoea and wasting among affected animals. The disease can cause considerable economic losses for commercial farms. The animals produce less milk, exhibit fertility problems and are more susceptible to other conditions such as udder inflammation. To date there has been no treatment for paratuberculosis. ...

Japanese researchers showed monkeys a number of images representing various glosses and then they measured the responses of 39 neurons by using microelectrodes. They found that a specific population of neurons changed the intensities of the responses linearly according to either the contrast-of-highlight, sharpness-of-highlight, or brightness of the object. This shows that these 3 perceptual parameters are used as parameters when the brain recognizes a variety of glosses. They also found that different parameters are represented by different populations of neurons. This ...

Imagine you are a species which over thousands of years has adapted to the arctic cold, and then you get exposed to a substance that makes the cold dangerous for you. This is happening to the small white worm Enchytraeus albidus, and the cold provoking substance, called nonylphenol, comes from the use of certain detergents, pesticides and cosmetics. Nonylphenol is suspected of being a endocrine disruptor, but when entering the worm it has another dangerous effect: It inhibits the worm's ability to protect the cells in its body from cold damage. Enchytraeus albidus ...

The present size and speed limitations of computer processors and memory could be overcome by replacing silicon with 'phase-change materials' (PCMs), which are capable of reversibly switching between two structural phases with different electrical states – one crystalline and conducting and the other glassy and insulating – in billionths of a second. Modelling and tests of PCM-based devices have shown that logic-processing operations can be performed in non-volatile memory cells using particular combinations of ultra-short voltage pulses, which is not possible with silicon-based ...

An international collaboration led by research groups from Mainz and Darmstadt, Germany, has achieved the synthesis of a new class of chemical compounds for superheavy elements at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Research (RNC) in Japan. For the first time, a chemical bond was established between a superheavy element – seaborgium (element 106) in the present study – and a carbon atom. Eighteen atoms of seaborgium were converted into seaborgium hexacarbonyl complexes, which include six carbon monoxide molecules bound to the seaborgium. Its gaseous properties ...

Vaccines against Salmonella that use a live, but weakened, form of the bacteria are more effective than those that use only dead fragments because of the particular way in which they stimulate the immune system, according to research from the University of Cambridge published today in the journal PLOS Pathogens. The BBSRC-funded researchers used a new technique that they have developed where several populations of bacteria, each of which has been individually tagged with a unique DNA sequence, are administered to the same host (in this case, a mouse). This allows the ...

Bacterial pneumonia in adults carries an elevated risk for adverse cardiac events (such as heart failure, arrhythmias, and heart attacks) that contribute substantially to mortality—but how the heart is compromised has been unclear. A study published on September 18th in PLOS Pathogens now demonstrates that Streptococcus pneumoniae, the bacterium responsible for most cases of bacterial pneumonia, can invade the heart and cause the death of heart muscle cells. Carlos Orihuela, from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, USA, and colleagues initially ...

VIDEO: This is a video describing the ultimatum game in chimpanzees. Click here for more information. ATLANTA—The human response to unfairness evolved in order to support long-term cooperation, according to a research team from Georgia State University and Emory University. Fairness is a social ideal that cannot be measured, so to understand the evolution of fairness in humans, Dr. Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State's departments of Psychology and Philosophy, the Neuroscience Institute ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 18, 2014 – University of Utah physicists read the subatomic "spins" in the centers or nuclei of hydrogen isotopes, and used the data to control current that powered light in a cheap, plastic LED – at room temperature and without strong magnetic fields. The study – published in Friday's issue of the journal Science – brings physics a step closer to practical machines that work "spintronically" as well as electronically: superfast quantum computers, more compact data storage devices and plastic or organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, more efficient ...

In findings of relevance to both conservationists and the fishing industry, new research links short-term reductions in growth and reproduction of marine animals off the California Coast to increasing variability in the strength of coastal upwelling currents — currents which historically supply nutrients to the region's diverse ecosystem. Along the west coast of North America, winds lift deep, nutrient-rich water into sunlit surface layers, fueling vast phytoplankton blooms that ultimately support fish, seabirds and marine mammals. The new study, led by Bryan Black ...

Using modern statistical tools, a new study led by the University of Washington and the United Nations finds that world population is likely to keep growing throughout the 21st century. The number of people on Earth is likely to reach 11 billion by 2100, the study concludes, about 2 billion higher than some previous estimates. The paper published online Sept. 18 in the journal Science includes the most up-to-date estimates for future world population, as well as a new method for creating such estimates. "The consensus over the past 20 years or so was that world population, ...

Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a control mechanism for an area of the brain that processes sensory and emotive information that humans experience as "disappointment." The discovery of what may effectively be a neurochemical antidote for feeling let-down is reported Sept. 18 in the online edition of Science. "The idea that some people see the world as a glass half empty has a chemical basis in the brain," said senior author Roberto Malinow, MD, PhD, professor in the Department of Neurosciences and neurobiology section ...

A growing body of evidence suggests that environmental stresses can cause changes in gene expression that are transmitted from parents to their offspring, making "epigenetics" a hot topic. Epigenetic modifications do not affect the DNA sequence of genes, but change how the DNA is packaged and how genes are expressed. Now, a study by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows how epigenetic memory can be passed across generations and from cell to cell during development. The study, published September 19 in Science, focused on one well studied epigenetic ...

This news release is available in German. How a system behaves is determined by its interaction properties. An important concept in condensed matter physics for describing the energy distribution of electrons in solids is the Fermi surface, named for Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. The existence of the Fermi surface is a direct consequence of the Pauli exclusion principle, which forbids two identical fermions from occupying the same quantum state simultaneously. Energetically, the Fermi surface divides filled energy levels from the empty ones. For electrons and other ...

AMHERST, Mass. – For decades, polymer scientists and synthetic chemists working to improve the power conversion efficiency of organic solar cells were hampered by the inherent drawbacks of commonly used metal electrodes, including their instability and susceptibility to oxidation. Now for the first time, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a more efficient, easily processable and lightweight solar cell that can use virtually any metal for the electrode, effectively breaking the "electrode barrier." This barrier has been a big problem ...