New factor influencing excess body weight discovered. What determines whether we become overweight? Aside from lifestyle, predisposition plays a role, but genes cannot fully explain the inherited propensity to accumulate excess weight. A new study by Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Science Translational Medicine* shows that a kind of formatting of the DNA code in one gene that is associated with satiety is implicated in a slightly elevated risk of excess body weight – at least in women. This “epigenetic…
“Don’t eat me!” That’s how one might translate the signal that the cancer cells in a glioblastoma send to the macrophages (white blood cells specialized in removing dead and dying cellular matter) in the brain. Immunotherapy attempts to enable these cells to eradicate the abnormal cells, but so far, it has met with little success when it comes to glioblastomas. Researchers led by Professor Gregor Hutter from the Department of Biomedicine at the University and University Hospital Basel have recently…
From energy research to metalworking: Everywhere, the laser offers opportunities to do more for a sustainable future. Today, lasers are already being used to weld battery cells for electromobility particularly efficiently. The laser can be used to measure pollutants in the atmosphere, and it is being used to build the quantum internet. The Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT presented these and other innovations at this year’s LASER World of PHOTONICS and World of QUANTUM in Munich. The LASER trade…
HZDR team takes a closer look at special kind of quasiparticle. Skyrmions are microscopic magnetic vortices that can form in certain materials. First detected in 2009, they are of interest to research because they could be harnessed for new forms of data storage. As theoreticians had predicted, there are also so called antiskyrmions, which were eventually discovered ten years after skyrmions. Researchers from HZDR, MPI CPfS, IFW Dresden, and the University of South Florida used an ion beam saw and…
… to explore airborne viruses and microorganisms. Researchers show millimeter-sized droplets can be levitated over a pool of silicone liquid for a long-term period — and it enables studying the activity of viruses and microorganisms within airborne aerosols. Self-sustained levitation of millimeter-sized droplets was recently discovered by researchers at Tyumen State University, in Russia, during an experiment to select combinations of immiscible liquids, which don’t form homogeneous mixtures. Researchers Natalia Ivanova and Denis Klyuev noticed something amazing happen: Droplets of…
… dry manufacturing process. The lithium-ion batteries used to power electric vehicles are key to a clean energy economy. But their electrodes are usually made using a wet slurry with toxic solvents, an expensive manufacturing approach that poses health and environmental risks. Early experiments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have revealed significant benefits to a dry battery manufacturing process. This eliminates the solvent while showing promise for delivering a battery that is durable, less weighed down…
Researchers turn to an everyday shop tool to study how materials behave. Testing how materials deform and fail under harsh conditions is key to manufacturing processes, crash testing and defense. Researchers at Texas A&M University are taking a traditional manufacturing tool — metal cutting — and developing a more accessible method for understanding the behavior of metals under extreme conditions. Metal cutting – scraping a thin layer of material from a metal’s surface using a sharp knife (not unlike how…
Conservation of arable soils through targeted erosion management. Arable soils are a valuable resource for our food and biodiversity – and are at risk from drought, storms and heavy rainfall. To help farmers better protect their fields from erosion, the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), in cooperation with the Bavarian State Research Centre for Agriculture (LfL), has produced erosion maps that identify areas particularly at risk of erosion and thus help to target protective measures where they will…
How can this be done? Rare-earth elements (REEs) are found in smartphones, plasma screens and even artificial joints. As components of wind turbines or electric motors, they play an important role in the production of clean energy. The battle for these valuable resources is already in full swing. In the scientific journal Nature, researchers from Germany, China and the USA show new ways to get a circular economy for REEs off the ground. Raimund Bleischwitz, an expert in circular economy…
There is news from the immune system: Dendritic cells migrate in a network along the outside of blood vessels. Local cytokines keep this dynamic network stable. The cells of the immune system circulate mainly in the blood and migrate into the body’s tissues after an inflammation. Some types of immune cells, however, are permanently located in the tissues, where they come together to form three-dimensional networks. How do these networks form and how are they maintained? For the long-lived macrophages…
Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – IIT and University of Milan-Bicocca have demonstrated the efficacy of a natural substance in protecting coral from the damage caused by climate change. Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology – IIT) and Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (University of Milan-Bicocca), in cooperation with Acquario di Genova (Genoa Aquarium) in Italy, have recently published a study in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, which demonstrates the efficacy of curcumin, a natural…
Specific nerves may be stimulated artificially, for example to treat pain. The finer the nerves, the more difficult it is to attach the required electrodes. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and NTT Research have now developed flexible electrodes produced with 4D printing technology. On contact with moisture, they automatically fold and wrap themselves around thin nerves. The nervous system controls our movements through electrical impulses. These pass from nerve cell to nerve cell until finally, for example,…
Automated production for different objects. New approach makes it possible to equip objects of arbitrary shapes with smart sensors. Innovative soft sensors are intended for use in robotics and especially in prosthetics. Researchers see major advantages in the seamless and customizable sensor technology versus existing approaches. Researchers from the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed an automatic process for making soft sensors. These universal measurement cells can be attached…
Omicron variants are responsible for most COVID-19 infections worldwide. Compared to earlier virus variants, Omicron causes severe diseases less frequently. However, an international team including scientists from the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research has now identified a mutation in the spike protein of the Omicron subvariant BA.5 that enables the virus to efficiently infect lung cells again. The study shows that in the future, Omicron subvariants may emerge that could again effectively infect lung cells and…
When raindrops fall from the sky, they can produce a small amount of energy that can be harvested and turned into electricity. It is a small-scale version of hydropower, which uses the kinetic energy of moving water to produce electricity. Researchers have proposed that the energy collected from raindrops could be a potential source of clean, renewable power. However, this technology has been difficult to develop on a large scale, which has limited its practical application. To collect raindrop energy,…
Waves produced by Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities transfer energy in the solar system. A team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has found that NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter frequently encounters giant swirling waves at the boundary between the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere. The waves are an important process for transferring energy and mass from the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun, to planetary space environments. Jake…
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