LIKAT simplifies method that prevents premature degradation of drugs in the body. What people ingest is broken down biochemically by the organism in the metabolism: valuable substances are digested, less essential ones are discarded and excreted. In the case of drugs, this degradation sometimes begins before they can fully develop their healing effect. Chemists try to prevent this by replacing atoms of hydrogen (H) in the drug molecule with deuterium (D), an isotope of hydrogen. In her dissertation at the…
Jena cooperation project “INTACT” develops new innovative approach for therapy and diagnostics in premature babies with intestinal disorders. In Germany, doctors have to feed some 200 out of 800 very premature babies every year – mostly due to an infection – by diverting stool out of the body through an artificial intestinal stoma and returning the intestinal contents (chyme) at another stoma, in order to relieve the intestine. Currently, this can only be done manually, which does not guarantee a…
Harvard and 1955 Capital collaborate to launch surgical robotics startup. When a tiny mechanical insect achieved flight in the summer of 2012, its wafer-thin wings flapping almost invisibly at a rate of 120 times per second, it was the culmination of an ambitious engineering effort. The first controlled flight of the RoboBee in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab of Prof. Robert Wood, relied on hard-won breakthroughs in design, materials, and manufacturing. In the early days of the National Science Foundation-sponsored project,…
Researchers aim to explore how matter gets its mass by confining quarks. A new way to study quarks, one of the building blocks of the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei, is proposed. This has never been done before and doing so would help answer many fundamental questions in physics. In particular, researchers could use the new approach to determine how matter gets its mass. The study of matter can seem a bit like opening a stack of…
… makes wireless communications more powerful. Since the concepts of digital coding metasurface and programmable metasurface were put forward in 2014, the physical world of electromagnetics has been closely connected to the digital world of information, thus producing unique advantages of metasurface-based wireless communications. In recent years, the proposal and development of time-domain coding metasurface (TDCM) and space-time-coding metasurface (STCM) have further enriched the electromagnetic modulation and digital process schemes and application scopes. However, most of metasurface-based wireless communication systems…
Laser makes water behave like a high-speed switch. All the operations of computers and smartphones are based on circuits. The speed at which a component can switch between the states zero and one ultimately determines how fast a computer can run. Modern computers use semiconductors that make electrical switching possible. “They are inherently limited in their speed,” explains Claudius Hoberg. Together with his colleagues, he has unveiled a possible novel approach to water-based circuits. The water in which the researchers…
The correlation between small RNA molecules and aging-related brain diseases has been described on EMBO Reports. The study lays the groundwork for future RNA diagnostic tests for neurodegenerative diseases. Researchers from the Neurobiology of miRNA team coordinated by Davide De Pietri Tonelli at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) has discovered the correlation between a class of small RNA molecules, piRNAs, and brain inflammation. The study lays the groundwork for the development of new diagnostic technologies able…
Creators envision ‘gelbots’ crawling through human bodies to deliver medicine. A new gelatinous robot that crawls, powered by nothing more than temperature change and clever design, brings “a kind of intelligence” to the field of soft robotics. The inchworm-inspired work is detailed today in Science Robotics. “It seems very simplistic but this is an object moving without batteries, without wiring, without an external power supply of any kind – just on the swelling and shrinking of gel,” said senior author…
After two years of development, the European Commission-funded project INNO4COV-19 (FKZ 101016203), which supported the commercialization of new products to combat COVID-19 in Europe, has come to an end. The Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology FEP developed, among other things, a prototype of a portable thermal camera system with integrated, low-power microdisplays for early and contactless detection of infected persons. This system will be presented at CES 2023 in Las Vegas, USA, January 5-8, 2023,…
A simple and cheap solution can save lives. Anti-inflammatory, therapeutic effects, but also risks – the radioactive noble gas radon contains both at the same time. Radon and especially its short-living progeny are considered to be responsible for about half of the annual radiation exposure from natural sources and are classified as carcinogenic. Researchers from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung now have proven in a paper published in the “International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health” that face masks…
Researchers establish mode of action of crucial signalling complexes. Pathogens are frequently usurping the host’s cytoskeleton for their own needs – new insights might lead the way towards development of novel anti-infectives. Bacterial pathogens like Salmonella, Shigella, Listeria and many others exploit the protein skeleton of the cells they infect in order to spread throughout the host. However, how is this so-called cytoskeleton of host cells assembled and remodelled? Answers to this question can provide new approaches for combatting the…
NIAID participated in international PREVAC consortium. WHAT: Two randomized, placebo-controlled trials evaluating three Ebola vaccine administration strategies in adults and children found that all the regimens were safe in both age groups, according to results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Antibodies were produced in response to the vaccine regimens beginning at 14 days after the first vaccination and continued to be detectable at varying levels—depending on the vaccine and regimen used—in both children and adults for…
Two seemingly different areas of physics are related in subtle ways: Quantum theory and thermodynamics. How chaos theory mediates between them has now been studied at TU Wien. A single particle has no temperature. It has a certain energy or a certain speed – but it is not possible to translate that into a temperature. Only when dealing with random velocity distributions of many particles, a well-defined temperature emerges. How can the laws of thermodynamics arise from the laws of…
Processing devices based on polarized light run one million times faster than current technology. Logic gates are the fundamental components of computer processors. Conventional logic gates are electronic – they work by shuffling around electrons – but scientists have been developing light-based optical logic gates to meet the data processing and transfer demands of next-generation computing. New optical chirality logic gates developed by researchers at Aalto University operate about a million times faster than existing technologies, offering ultrafast processing speeds….
By revealing how the structure of the PI3Kα protein changes in cancer cells, Scripps Research scientists point toward ways to target it with drugs. To design drugs that stall the growth of aggressive cancers, it helps to know the structures of the proteins that are revving the cancers’ engines. In a series of three papers published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scripps Research scientists have illuminated the three-dimensional structure of phosphoinositide 3-kinase alpha (PI3Kα), a protein often…
Interactions between a spinning object and soundwaves could help develop high-precision tools, such as tweezers that control the motion and position of submillimeter objects by manipulating acoustic waves, a KAUST-led international team suggests. Acoustic metamaterials, which can be tailored to transmit, trap and amplify sound waves at specific frequencies, are expected to enable innovative technologies in fields ranging from precision sensing to surgical tools. Extensive research has produced a range of metamaterials, such as ultrasonic lenses that focus 60 kilohertz…
Feedback
