Stem cells in the bone marrow keep replenishing us with blood cells until the day we die. They do this by dividing into a daughter cell that becomes a blood cell, and a second cell that remains a stem cell. But every time a cell divides, mistakes can occur that change the cell’s genome and increase the risk of it becoming a cancer cell. A team of researchers from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité, the Max-Delbrück Center for…
HIV controllers are rare individuals able to control infection naturally without treatment. CD8+ T immune cells play a critical role for these individuals, suppressing viral load in the long term even without antiretroviral therapy. Scientists at the Institut Pasteur are examining key characteristics of these controllers’ CD8+ T cells, with a view to replicating them in other individuals who are incapable of controlling the virus without treatment. They have successfully reprogrammed CD8+ T cells from non-controllers and bestowed them with…
The discovery helps explain the puzzle of hydrogen loss pre-supernova, and supports the theory that most massive stars are paired. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a witness at the scene of a star’s explosive death: a companion star previously hidden in the glare of its partner’s supernova. The discovery is a first for a particular type of supernova – one in which the star was stripped of its entire outer gas envelope before exploding. The finding provides crucial insight…
A new software tool makes it easier to study relationships between a host, its microbiome and pathogens like HIV or SARS-CoV-2. Researchers at Texas Biomedical Research Institute and Tulane University have developed a new software tool that makes it easier, faster and more cost effective to analyze genetic information about a host and its microbiome at the same time. The software, called “meta-transcriptome detector” (MTD), can be used by a wide range of microbiologists and drug developers, including those researching…
Simple microstructures that bend, twist and perform stroke-like motions could be used for soft robotics, medical devices and more. For years, scientists have been attempting to engineer tiny, artificial cilia for miniature robotic systems that can perform complex motions, including bending, twisting, and reversing. Building these smaller-than-a-human-hair microstructures typically requires multi-step fabrication processes and varying stimuli to create the complex movements, limiting their wide-scale applications. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS)…
Study proves value of electromagnetic techniques in a new polar environment. Scientists have made the first detection of groundwater beneath an Antarctic ice stream. The discovery confirms what researchers had already suspected but had been unable to verify until now. Researchers need data from all parts of the Antarctic ice sheet to understand how the system works and how it changes over time in response to climate. The study provides a glimpse of a previously inaccessible and unexplored part of…
The manipulation of electromagnetic waves and information has become central to our daily lives. Intelligent metasurfaces have emerged as smart platforms for controlling the wave-information-matter interactions without manual intervention. They evolved from engineered composite materials, including metamaterials and metasurfaces. As a society, we have witnessed significant progress of metamaterials and metasurfaces with different forms and characteristics. In a paper published in eLight, Professor Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University and Professor Lianlin Li of Peking University led a research team…
… frequency conversion of single photons at arbitrary wavelengths. Quanta of light – photons – form the basis of quantum key distribution in modern cryptographic networks. Before the huge potential of quantum technology is fully realized, however, several challenges remain. A solution to one of these has now been found. In a paper published in the journal Science, teams led by David Novoa, Nicolas Joly and Philip Russell report a breakthrough in frequency up-conversion of single photons, based on a…
Research from the University of Warwick sheds new light on a key cause of cancer formation during cell division (or mitosis), and points towards potential solutions for preventing it from occurring. When a cell divides abnormally, it does not share the correct number of chromosomes with the two new cells, and this can lead to cancer New research from Warwick Medical School has discovered why and how this happens, using ‘cell surgery’ Understanding the origin of abnormal cell division and…
Researchers at North Carolina State University have demonstrated that neuron-like cells derived from human stem cells can serve as a model for studying changes in the nervous system associated with addiction. The work sheds light on the effect of dopamine on gene activity in neurons, and offers a blueprint for related research moving forward. “It is extremely difficult to study how addiction changes the brain at a cellular level in humans – nobody wants to experiment on somebody’s brain,” says…
Researchers uncover a new strategy to avoid cancer immunotherapy side effects. It’s not often that a failed clinical trial leads to a scientific breakthrough. When patients in the UK started showing adverse side effects during a cancer immunotherapy trial, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and University of Liverpool went back through the data and worked with patient samples to see what went wrong. Their findings, published recently in Nature, provide critical clues to…
Researchers at Osaka University use silicon nanoparticles to help visualize the coalescence of quantized vortices that occur in superfluid helium, which can help improve our understanding of quantum fluids and materials, including superconductors. Scientists from the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University have shown how silicon nanoparticles can become trapped inside the vortices that form inside superfluid helium. This work opens up new possibilities in optical research for other quantum properties of superfluid helium, such as the optical…
Regulatory “tethering elements” control the expression of genes involved in embryo formation. Organisms such as plants, mammals and insects undergo a carefully orchestrated developmental program as they transition from single-celled embryos to their multicellular adult forms. In a paper that appeared May 4, 2022 in the journal Nature, researchers at Princeton University demonstrate how specialized genetic sequences coordinate the exquisite choreography of gene expression required for normal development of the early fly embryo. During embryonic development, specific sets of genes must be…
Handheld device could painlessly identify skin cancers. Stevens Institute of Technology uses millimeter-wave imaging to slash rate of unnecessary biopsies. Skin biopsies are no fun: doctors carve away small lumps of tissue for laboratory testing, leaving patients with painful wounds that can take weeks to heal. That’s a price worth paying if it enables early cancer treatment. However, in recent years, aggressive diagnostic efforts have seen the number of biopsies grow around four times faster than the number of cancers…
Eight different herpes viruses are known to date in humans. They all settle down permanently in the body after acute infection. Under certain circumstances, they wake up from this dormant phase, multiply and attack other cells. This reactivation is often associated with symptoms, such as itchy cold sores or shingles. In the course of evolution, most herpesviruses have learned to use small RNA molecules, so-called microRNAs, to reprogram their host cells to their advantage. A research team led by Bhupesh…
A model with increased accuracy of calculations helped to explain the unusual shape. Researchers from Finland, Canada, and Russia have discovered an unusual, hourglass-shaped dust trail of the comet 17P/Holmes. The particles that formed the dust trail were released by the most powerful of the documented thus far outbursts by a comet. It happened in October 2007. Astronomers carried out observations of the cometary dust trail using telescopes in Australia, Finland, and the USA. The first stage of observations lasted…
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