New research from the University of Sheffield gives scientists a better understanding of how meningitis spreads, paving the way for new treatments. New research from the University of Sheffield gives scientists a better understanding of how meningitis spreads, paving the way for new treatments Groundbreaking study shows Cryptococcus neoformans helps the life threatening infection spread from the blood by blocking and bursting blood vessels An estimated 2.5 million cases of meningitis occur globally each year The findings will also help…
Researchers at ISTA discover a crucial process that enables immune cells to get to where they are needed. Study published in Science. Imagine a stone wall in the countryside. Tightly packed, one stone sits on top of the other filling the tiniest gaps. A seemingly unbreachable obstacle. On their way throughout the body to fight infections, immune cells face such barriers in the form of cell-dense tissues. To do their job as the body’s rescue service, they need to find…
A new study shows that it is possible to use the genetic sequences of a person’s antibodies to predict what pathogens those antibodies will target. Reported in the journal Immunity, the new approach successfully differentiates between antibodies against influenza and those attacking SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. “Our research is in a very early stage, but this proof-of-concept study shows that we can use machine learning to connect the sequence of an antibody to its function,” said Nicholas Wu,…
… solve the enigma of ultrashort soliton molecules. Stable packets of light waves – called optical solitons – are emitted in ultrashort-pulse lasers as a chain of light flashes. These solitons often combine into pairs with very short temporal separation. Introducing atomic vibrations in the terahertz range, researchers at the Universities of Bayreuth and Wrocław have now solved the puzzle of how these temporal links are formed. They report on their discovery in Nature Communications. The dynamics of the coupled…
A hand-held laser pointer produces no noticeable recoil forces when it is “fired” – even though it emits a directed stream of light particles. The reason for this is its very large mass compared to the very small recoil impulses that the light particles cause when leaving the laser pointer. However, it has long been clear that optical recoil forces can indeed have a very large effect on correspondingly small particles. For example, the tails of comets point away from…
While 3D printing techniques have advanced significantly in the last decade, the technology continues to face a fundamental limitation: objects must be built up layer by layer. But what if they didn’t have to be? Dan Congreve, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and former Rowland Fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University, and his colleagues have developed a way to print 3D objects within a stationary volume of resin. The printed object is fully supported by…
Advance has implications for drug development and biological research. For nearly 40 years, drugmakers have used genetically engineered cells as tiny drug factories. Such cells can be programmed to secrete compounds that yield drugs used to treat cancer and autoimmune conditions such as arthritis. Efforts to develop and manufacture new biologic treatments may gain from a new technology for quickly sorting single, live cells in a standard laboratory setup. With microscopic, bowl-shaped hydrogel containers called “nanovials,” a UCLA-led research team…
A tiny stroke for each microbe, a giant impact on the ocean. Although invisible to us, every teaspoon of seawater contains more than a million marine bacteria. These tiny microbes play pivotal roles in governing the chemical cycles that control our climate and shape the health of the global ocean, but are they passive drifters or purposeful hunters? New research demonstrates that bacteria in the ocean use similar behaviours to many foraging animals, swimming through their environment while hunting and…
Astronomers have discovered a new kind of stellar explosion that could be commonplace in the universe and may change our understanding of how eruptions in stars occur. A micronova is a thermonuclear blast that lasts for just a few hours making them extremely difficult to observe. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars and can each rapidly burn through a huge amount of stellar material equivalent to around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza. An international team of…
New evidence from a zebrafish model of epilepsy may help resolve a debate into how seizures originate, according to Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators. The findings may also be useful in the discovery and development of future epilepsy drugs. In the study, published Feb. 23 in Brain, the researchers were able to track the activities of neurons throughout the entire brains of larval zebrafish during seizures. They showed that the seizures originated from an excess of “excitatory” over “inhibitory” brain…
Untangling genomic architecture of acute promyelocytic leukaemia reveals gene that can suppress tumour. A new study published today in the journal Genes & Development reveals a gene that normally suppresses the formation of tumours but is reprogrammed at the onset of acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL), an aggressive type of blood cancer that is responsible for 5-15% of all types of leukaemia. The findings pave the way for the development of drugs that boost the expression of the gene at the…
A major challenge for producers of electricity from solar panels and wind turbines is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle. Both solar and wind increasingly generate electricity amid little demand, when market prices are too low to cover costs. At noon on sunny days, for example, wholesale power prices in areas with high quantities of solar and wind occasionally fall below zero. Some renewable energy producers store their excess electricity as green hydrogen, using the electricity to produce hydrogen…
Researchers have discovered that light — in the form of a laser — can trigger a form of magnetism in a normally nonmagnetic material. This magnetism centers on the behavior of electrons. These subatomic particles have an electronic property called “spin,” which has a potential application in quantum computing. The researchers found that electrons within the material became oriented in the same direction when illuminated by photons from a laser. The experiment, led by scientists at the University of Washington and the…
Using nanotechnology, scientists have created a newly designed neuromorphic electronic device that endows microrobotics with colorful vision. Georgia State University researchers have successfully designed a new type of artificial vision device that incorporates a novel vertical stacking architecture and allows for greater depth of color recognition and scalability on a micro-level. The new research is published in the top journal ACS Nano. “This work is the first step toward our final destination–to develop a micro-scale camera for microrobots,” says assistant professor of Physics…
International study led by the University of Bonn records 1.5 million years of climate in the drill core. Changes in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) are considered to be the main cause of past and future climate change. A long-standing debate centers on whether the roughly 30 percent lower CO2 content of the ice-age atmosphere was caused by iron fertilization. It is argued that iron-rich dust is carried into the ocean by wind and water, where it stimulates…
The red smoke of a flare on a roadway warns motorists to be cautious, but the anthraquinone dyes currently used to produce this smoke are thought to be harmful to human health. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering have identified a less toxic, “greener” alternative — an organic dye called pigment red 254 (PR254). It also forms a red-colored smoke cloud more effectively than current dyes, the researchers say. Commercialized in 1986, diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) dyes are used…
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