How novel therapeutics provide insight into bacteria membranes. Whether bacteria are resistant to antibiotics is often decided at the cell membrane. This is where antibiotics can be blocked on their way into the cell interior or catapulted from the inside to the outside. Macrocyclic peptides, a novel class of antibiotics, bioactive cytotoxins and inhibitors, shed light on how this transport process occurs at the membrane, how it is influenced and how it can be used to circumvent the resistance of…
A new technology developed by UZH researchers enables the body to produce therapeutic agents on demand at the exact location where they are needed. The innovation could re-duce the side effects of cancer therapy and may hold the solution to better delivery of Covid-related therapies directly to the lungs. Scientists at the University of Zurich have modified a common respiratory virus, called adenovirus, to act like a Trojan horse to deliver genes for cancer therapeutics directly into tumor cells. Unlike…
New model reveals that a network of cellulose is key to this unique combination. A plant cell wall’s unique ability to expand without weakening or breaking–a quality required for plant growth–is due to the movement of its cellulose skeleton, according to new research that models the cell wall. The new model, created by Penn State researchers, reveals that chains of cellulose bundle together within the cell wall, providing strength, and slide against each other when the cell is stretched, providing…
A chip-compatible 3D nanoscopy answers. Compared with the superresolution microscopy that bases on squeezing the point spread function in the spatial domain, the superresolution microscopy that broadens the detection range in the spatial frequency domain through the spatial-frequency-shift (SFS) effect shows intriguing advantages including large field of view, high speed, and good modularity, owing to its wide-field picture acquisition process and universal implementation without using special fluorophores labeling. To enable spatial-frequency-shift microscopy with a superresolution at the subwavelength scale, it…
Japanese team forges path to new uses for terahertz waves … Japanese researchers successfully tested reflectionless, highly refractive index metasurface that may eventually be used in practical applications to send, receive, and manipulate light and radio waves in the terahertz waveband (THz). THz is measured in millionths of a meter, known as micrometers. The metasurface, an artificial two-dimensional flat material, was made of micro-sized cut metal wires of silver paste ink placed on both the front and back of a…
New case study shows potential for reducing CO₂ emissions. Geothermal energy as a sustainable energy source can make its own significant contribution to reducing CO₂ emissions in Germany. This is shown by a case study of the Kirchstockach power plant published by scientists at the Center for Energy Technology (ZET) at the University of Bayreuth in the journal “Renewable Energy”. Geothermal research at ZET is integrated into the Geothermal-Alliance Bavaria, which has been funded by the Bavarian Ministry of Science…
– a lightweight solution for battery electric vehicles. A cost-efficient lightweight battery housing for battery electric vehicles has been developed at Fraunhofer LBF. Using this, it is possible to achieve a 40 percent reduction in weight compared to an aluminum housing. Despite the application of fiber-reinforced plastic composites, component cost is low due to a specially developed, highly-efficient manufacturing process and a stress equivalent structural design. The mechanical properties were validated in the GHOST project funded by the European Commission…
On an expedition to Peru in November 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, a group of researchers including Jörn Köhler, zoologist at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, discovered a new species of ‘beaked toad’. The new species from the Cordillera Azul is characterised, as the name implies, by a particularly long ‘nose’. Although most toads are brown, these animals are predominantly green in colour, but it were mainly genetic studies that aided in their identification, Köhler reports. The…
Rice University bioengineers adapt extracellular matrix for electrospinning. Rice University bioengineers are fabricating and testing tunable electrospun scaffolds completely derived from decellularized skeletal muscle to promote the regeneration of injured skeletal muscle. Their paper in Science Advances shows how natural extracellular matrix can be made to mimic native skeletal muscle and direct the alignment, growth and differentiation of myotubes, one of the building blocks of skeletal muscle. The bioactive scaffolds are made in the lab via electrospinning, a high-throughput process…
UNSW medical researchers have found a way to starve pancreatic cancer cells and ‘disable’ the cells that block treatment from working effectively. Their findings in mice and human lab models – which have been 10 years in the making and are about to be put to the test in a human clinical trial – are published today in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. “Pancreatic cancer has seen minimal improvement in survival for the last…
World-first nanotechnology developed by the University of South Australia could change the lives of thousands of people living with cystic fibrosis (CF) as groundbreaking research shows it can improve the effectiveness of the CF antibiotic Tobramycin, increasing its efficacy by up to 100,000-fold. The new technology uses a biomimetic nanostructured material to augment Tobramycin – the antibiotic prescribed to treat chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa lung infections in severe cases of CF – eradicating the infection in as little as two doses….
Results from a Princeton-led experiment support a controversial theory that the electron is composed of two particles. A new discovery led by Princeton University could upend our understanding of how electrons behave under extreme conditions in quantum materials. The finding provides experimental evidence that this familiar building block of matter behaves as if it is made of two particles: one particle that gives the electron its negative charge and another that supplies its magnet-like property, known as spin. “We think…
Hydrogels merge two physical forms of the same seaweed material for strength, flexibility. 3D-printable gels with improved and highly controlled properties can be created by merging micro- and nano-sized networks of the same materials harnessed from seaweed, according to new research from North Carolina State University. The findings could have applications in biomedical materials – think of biological scaffolds for growing cells – and soft robotics. Described in the journal Nature Communications, the findings show that these water-based gels –…
Researchers at Osaka University use deep learning to reduce noise in the electrical current data collected from nanopores, which may lead to higher precision measurements when working with very tiny experiments or medical diagnostics. Scientists from the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University used machine learning methods to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in data collected when tiny spheres are passed through microscopic nanopores cut into silicon substrates. This work may lead to much more sensitive data collection…
Physicists at ETH Zurich demonstrate that a tiny cloud of atoms can be turned from a heat engine into a cooler by cranking up the interactions between the particles. When a piece of conducting material is heated up at one of its ends, a voltage difference can build up across the sample, which in turn can be converted into a current. This is the so-called Seebeck effect, the cornerstone of thermoelectric effects. In particular, the effect provides a route to…
The human brain is a vast network of billions of biological cells called Neurons which fires electrical signals that process information, resulting in our sense and thoughts. The ion channels of atomic scale in each neuron cell membrane plays a key role in such firings that opens and closes the ion flow in an individual cell by the electrical voltage applied across the cell membrane, acting as a “biological transistor” similar to electronic transistors in computers. For decades, scientists have…
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