Should I or shouldn’t I? The activity of individual nerve cells in the brain tells us how confident we are in our decisions. This is shown by a recent study by researchers at the University of Bonn. The result is unexpected – the researchers were actually on the trail of a completely different evaluation mechanism. The results are published in the journal Current Biology. You are sitting in a café and want to enjoy a piece of cake with your…

Banyan trees are fig trees that begin their life as an epiphyte. The most noticeable feature of banyan Ficus species is their extraordinary aerial roots, which enable them to live as hemi-epiphytes, as do the strangler figs often seen in tropical forests. Being special for their enclosed urn-shaped inflorescence, fig plants rely on specific insect pollinators (fig wasps) for pollination and, in turn, provide nourishment and shelter for pollinators to reproduce. Morphological matching and signaling communication for host location between…

Switching voltage of an electrode alone can fine-tune the reactivity of a molecule. As we learned in chemistry class, chemical reaction occurs with the formation or cleavage of bonds between atoms. These chemical bonds form when atoms share or exchange electrons. The chemical reactivity can be controlled in several ways. Among them, the control of electronic property at the reaction site is generally employed. For example, electron-rich molecule prefers to react with a molecule that can readily accept electrons. Many…

University of Delaware researchers advance drug delivery systems to treat connective tissue disorders. University of Delaware Professor Kristi Kiick is leading collaborative research to create new drug delivery systems with the potential to improve treatment for diseases that affect connective tissues, such as osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease. The UD researchers have devised tiny cargo-carrying systems many times smaller than a human hair. These systems, or carriers, are made from molecules called peptides that help provide…

Duplications and inversions of DNA segments lead to the masculinization of female moles. Female moles not only have ovarian, but also testicular tissue that produces male sex hormones – which lets them diverge from the categorization into two sexes. A team led by Berlin researchers Stefan Mundlos and Darío Lupiáñez describes in “Science” which genetic modifications contribute to this singular development. Moles are special creatures that roam in an extreme habitat. As mammals that burrow deep into the earth, they…

Heidelberg University neurobiologists have uncovered how a special receptor can lead to cell death. Their fundamental findings on neurodegenerative processes simultaneously led the researchers to a completely new principle for therapeutic agents. In their experiments on mouse models, they discovered a new class of highly effective inhibitors for protecting nerve cells. This novel class of drugs opens up perspectives to combat currently untreatable diseases of the nervous system. New Class of Highly Effective Inhibitors Protects against Neurodegeneration Heidelberg neurobiologists decode…

Samples from the lungs of patients show a runaway immune system reaction could be one mechanism behind severe COVID-19 cases. When infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, many people experience mild and moderate symptoms, but for some people infection can be severe or fatal. Scientists are urgently seeking to understand how COVID-19 can become severe. Now, a study led by Imperial College London researchers has revealed how an overreaction of part of the immune system could be linked to severe cases…

A team of researchers at the Institute for the Genetics of Heart Diseases at Münster University created a viral expression model that can be used to simulate and analyse a large number of viral infections – including the one with SARS-CoV-2. The results are published in the journal “Scientific Reports”. It is only 120 millionths of a millimetre in size but can bring entire countries to a standstill: the Corona virus. Even if it were to disappear one day, viral…

Measurements in thorium-229 take a step towards the direct laser excitation of an atomic nucleus in this unique isotope Nuclear clocks could make our time measurement even more accurate than atomic clocks. The key to this lies in thorium-229, an atomic nucleus whose lowest excited state has very low energy. A research team from the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at the University of Heidelberg, TU Wien, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM), and GSI Helmholtzzentrum in…

New study by a team of Harvard-led researchers rebuts 75-year-old belief in reptile evolution. Challenging a 75-year-old notion about how and when reptiles evolved during the past 300 million-plus years involves a lot of camerawork, loads of CT scanning, and, most of all, thousands of miles of travel. Just check the stamps in Tiago R. Simões ‘ passport. Simões is the Alexander Agassiz Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Harvard paleontologist Stephanie Pierce. From 2013 to 2018, he traveled to…

In response to climate change, the spring migration of many migratory birds is shifting ever further forward. However, according to a study presented by an international research team led by Vetmeduni Vienna, this change does not follow a uniform pattern. On the contrary, closer inspection reveals a complex picture: Essential for the start of the migration is the region of wintering. It is known from previous studies that migratory birds bring forward their spring arrival in European breeding areas due…

Findings could lead to ways to maximize our existing antimalarial arsenal. Even when a person suffering from malaria is burning up with fever and too sick to function, the tiny blood-eating parasites lurking inside them continue to flourish, relentlessly growing and multiplying as they gobble up the host’s red blood cells. The single-celled Plasmodium parasites that cause 200 million cases of malaria each year can withstand feverish temperatures that make their human hosts miserable. And now, a Duke University-led team…

Since 2004, Claude Knauf (INSERM) and Patrice Cani (UCLouvain) have been collaborating on molecular and cellular mechanisms in order to understand the causes of the development of type 2 diabetes and above all to identify new therapeutic targets. In 2013, they created an international laboratory, ‘NeuroMicrobiota Lab’ (INSERM-UCLouvain), to identify links between the brain and intestinal bacteria. Very quickly, they understood that the gut-brain axis plays a preponderant role in the regulation of sugar in the blood. When we eat,…

A Purdue University team has developed a novel testing platform to evaluate how breast cancer cells respond to the recurrent stretching that occurs in the lungs during breathing. The technology is designed to better understand the effects that the local tissue has on metastatic breast cancer to study how metastases grow in a new tissue. “One of the key features of breast cancer is that most patients survive if the disease stays local, but there is a greater than 70%…

Evolution in Action A new plant species named “Cardamine insueta” appeared in the region of Urnerboden in the Swiss alps, after the land has changed from forest to grassland over the last 150 years. The inheritance of two key traits from its parent plants enabled the newly emerged species to grow in a distinct environmental niche, as researches from the University of Zurich now show. The emergence of a new species is generally thought to occur over long periods of…

Real-time observation of signal transmission in proteins provides new insights for drug research. Proteins transduce information and signals within the human body by changes in their structures. For example, hormones binding to their target proteins cause a structural change which in turn opens new binding sites for other proteins elsewhere on the surface of the protein. Researchers refer to this coupling of different, distant binding sites as allostery. An interruption of this coupling leads to signals not being passed on….