A recent study using fruit flies in a Virtual Reality setting shows that the connection between vision, the brain and the spinal cord may have a crucial role in facilitating locomotion. Eugenia Chiappe, Principal Investigator of the Sensorimotor Integration Research Group at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, Lisbon, Portugal is standing in her office. There is a door, maybe three metres away, and the floor is flat and clear. Eugenia, who intends to walk in a straight line to…
Natural killer cells do not just kill cancer cells or cells infected with viruses, they also mediate a trade-off between wound healing and bacterial defense in skin wounds. If the healing process is accelerated, the immune defense is weakened, researchers at the University of Zurich have now shown. This has relevance in treating skin injuries and in tackling antibiotic-resistant germs. Natural killer cells are a specific type of immune cell. They recognize abnormal body cells such as cancer cells or…
Migrating birds choose routes with the best wind and uplift conditions, helping them to fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the sea. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz in Germany have identified how large land birds fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the open ocean—without taking a break for food or rest. Using GPS tracking technology, the team monitored the global migration of five species of large land birds that complete…
…homogeneously containing 14 elements. Realization of omnipotent catalysts expected A research group in Japan has successfully developed a “nanoporous super multi-element catalyst” (1) that contains 14 elements (2) which are mixed uniformly at the atomic level and used as a catalyst. A high-entropy alloy composed of 10 or more elements may act as a catalyst to exhibit” omnipotency and versatility” being able to freely modify its morphology and become active according to the reaction field. However, so far, it has…
… important for developing future treatments. A previously undiscovered pathway for the transport of cell waste can be important for future treatments of cancer and dementia. The researchers behind the study have discovered a new pathway used by cells to remove cellular waste that otherwise would damage the cell’s genes. The new transport pathway passes through the cell nucleus’s membrane, which normally protects our DNA. In the study, the researchers stressed the cells to increase the traffic of small envelopes…
With the increasingly serious global energy crisis caused by the excessive consumption of fossil fuels, developing clean, efficient, and sustainable energy conversion technologies is highly desirable. Electrocatalysis is one of the most promising methods to produce clean energy. However, the wide commercial applications of electrocatalysis have been severely hindered by the sluggish kinetics in electrochemical reactions, as well as the high cost and low stability of electrocatalysts. Therefore, rational design and preparation of the highly efficient and stable electrocatalysts have…
A scientific study published in Nature Communications Biology shows that geckos are capable of gliding. In the publication titled Tails stabilize landing of gliding geckos crashing head-first into tree trunks, the authors present footage showing that geckos with no major specializations for flight are in fact capable gliders. Experiments with a gecko-inspired robot confirm the reptile’s locomotion abilities are not entirely down to its feet. The tail plays just as much a pivotal role, the team from the Max Planck…
A polysaccharide from flax seeds attracts crop-infecting nematodes. A research collaboration based in Kumamoto University, Japan has become the first to successfully purify and identify an attractant for crop-infecting root-knot nematodes from flaxseeds. Their experiments revealed that rhamnogalacturonan-I (RG-I), a flaxseed cell wall component, can attract root-knot nematodes. The linkages between rhamnose and L-galactose are essential for the attraction. Plant-parasitic nematodes are one of many known agricultural pests. They are parasites that infect plant roots and form feeding sites known…
Scientists from the MPI for Medical Research and colleagues have engineered synthetic exosomes that regulate cellular signaling during wound closure. The synthetic structures resemble naturally occurring extracellular vesicles (EV) that play a fundamental role in communication between cells. The scientist uncovered key mechanisms to regulate and aid wound healing and the formation of new blood vessels. Inspired by the function of their natural blue prints, the scientists successfully demonstrate for the first time that fully-synthetic exosomes with therapeutic functionality can…
Meeting society’s growing energy needs has become a daunting challenge for humanity. Demands for energy are expected to nearly double by the year 2050, while the effects of climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, are already wreaking havoc in the form of droughts, wildfires, floods and other disasters. Gary Moore, a researcher at the Biodesign Center for Applied Structural Discovery, thinks chemistry will play a vital role in the development of clean solutions to the world’s mounting energy…
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces have developed a sustainable and “smart photocatalyst”. The special feature: as a so-called smart material, it can distinguish between the colors of light (blue, red and green) and, in response, enables a specific chemical reaction programmed into it. “Our smart photocatalyst functions as a traffic guide who opens one specific pathway in response to light of specific color,” says Dr. Yevheniia Markushyna, first author of the paper. Photocatalysts are special…
Nanocontainers transport active ingredients directly to their target. Using nanoparticles, a Jena research team implemented the targeted transport of an active ingredient into liver tissue. The particles were functionalized with a dye that is specifically absorbed by liver cells, and they carried an inhibitor of the signal protein PI3Kinase γ, which contributes to the development of liver failure in sepsis. However, outside liver cells, the signal protein is involved in pathogen reduction; this desired immune activity remained unhindered. This novel…
The cichlids of Lake Tanganyika in Africa are highly diverse – including with regard to sex chromosomes. These have changed extremely frequently in the course of the evolution of these fish and, depending on the species, can be of the type XY or ZW. This has been reported by a research team from the University of Basel and the Research Museum Koenig in Bonn in the scientific journal Science Advances. Based on the biology lessons back in our schooldays, we…
Scientists from the Department of Genetics at the Institute of Biology at Leipzig University’s Faculty of Life Sciences, together with colleagues from Harvard University, Brandeis University and the University of Cambridge, have published a study on how the brain senses temperature. Using Drosophila larvae, the international team of scientists discovered for the first time the mechanism of how information about temperature changes is received and how this affects behaviour. “Most animals have a preferred temperature – what’s called an optimum….
Anchoring individual iridium atoms on the surface of a catalytic particle boosted its performance in carrying out a reaction that’s been a bottleneck for sustainable energy production. A new way of anchoring individual iridium atoms to the surface of a catalyst increased its efficiency in splitting water molecules to record levels, scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University reported today. It was the first time this approach had been applied to the oxygen evolution…
A hair-like protein hidden inside bacteria serves as a sort of on-off switch for nature’s “electric grid,” a global web of bacteria-generated nanowires that permeates all oxygen-less soil and deep ocean beds, Yale researchers report in the journal Nature. “The ground beneath our feet, the entire globe, is electrically wired,” said Nikhil Malvankar, assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at the Microbial Sciences Institute at Yale’s West Campus and senior author of the paper. “These previously hidden bacterial hairs are the…
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