The combination of phototherapy and chemotherapy could offer a more effective way to fight aggressive tumors. Patients with late-stage cancer often have to endure multiple rounds of different types of treatment, which can cause unwanted side effects and may not always help. In hopes of expanding the treatment options for those patients, MIT researchers have designed tiny particles that can be implanted at a tumor site, where they deliver two types of therapy: heat and chemotherapy. This approach could avoid…

University of Texas at Dallas mechanical engineers have designed a 3D-printed femur that could help doctors prepare for surgeries to repair bones and develop treatments for bone tumors. The engineers, who worked in collaboration with UT Southwestern Medical Center orthopedic surgeons, published their first study on the 3D-printed thigh bone online Aug. 5 in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research. The study, which focused on the middle section of the bone, establishes 3D-printing parameters for a femur for use in biomechanical…

Ultrasound, once used almost exclusively to take images of the body, is quickly developing into a targeted therapy that can have a potentially life-changing impact on our brains, according to the authors of a new article. For decades, health professionals across the world have used ultrasound as a means of monitoring the development of unborn babies and assessing the health of patients’ internal organs. But writing in the journal PLOS Biology, researchers from Stanford University, the University of Plymouth, and…

Researchers from Bonn uncover how tiny eye movements and the density of our photoreceptors aid in sharp vision Our ability to see starts with the light-sensitive photoreceptor cells in our eyes. A specific region of the retina, termed fovea, is responsible for sharp vision. Here, the color-sensitive cone photoreceptors allow us to detect even the smallest details. The density of these cells varies from person to person. Additionally, when we fixate on an object, our eyes make subtle, continuous movements,…

… revolutionizes the diagnosis of head and neck tumors. Head and neck cancers are among the ten most common cancers worldwide. Head and neck tumors account for about 3-5% of all cancers, with squamous cell carcinomas being the predominant form. They occur in areas such as the oral cavity, pharynx and larynx. An international team of researchers led by Sara Wickström has now developed a new technique that allows the properties of cancer cells and their surrounding tissue to be…

…offers new hope in the fight against bacterial infections. Researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California San Diego have made an exciting breakthrough in the battle against bacterial infections. The Bozhi Tian (UChicago) and Gürol Süel (UC San Diego) labs have developed a cutting-edge bioelectronic device that taps into the natural electrical activity of certain bacteria found on our skin, paving the way for a drug-free approach to managing infections. This groundbreaking study, published in DEVICE, reveals how programmable electrical…

Roughly one third of patients with depressive symptoms have elevated levels of inflammation. Inflammation is however often only measured using very broad and unspecific markers. To better understand the connection between depression and the immune system, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry measured a large amount of different biological factors and identified patterns in the data. In the newly published study, first author Jonas Hagenberg and scientists from the Project Group Medical Genomics, led by Janine Knauer-Arloth, measured…

A landmark study led by WEHI and La Trobe University has found a potential new diagnostic marker that could be used to better detect the level of tissue damage in our bodies. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are small ‘delivery trucks’ released by our cells that deliver important materials to other cells to aid cellular communication. This study revealed, for the first time, a link between levels of EVs in the blood and tissue damage caused by diseases such as leukaemia. Researchers hope to leverage the…

Mushrooms are existing in a breathtaking variety of shapes, colors and sizes. Especially in autumn, mushroom hunters are going into the forests to find the tastiest of them, prepare them in multiple ways and eat them with relish. However, it is well known that there are also poisonous mushrooms among them, and it is live saving to distinguish between them. But are these mushrooms really poisonous? Fiber cap mushroom. (c) Dirk Hoffmeister/Leibniz-HKI Researchers at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the…

Novel Framework to Study Polygenic Diseases. The human genetic code is fully mapped out, providing scientists with a blueprint of the DNA to identify genomic regions and their variations responsible for diseases. Traditional statistical tools effectively pinpoint these genetic “needles in the haystack,” yet they face challenges in understanding how many genes contribute to diseases, as seen in diabetes or schizophrenia. A new study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), published in PNAS, tackles this problem. Many…

New approach: Using the Pareto principle an international research team with Dr. Silvia Cattelan from the Leibniz Institute on Aging – Fritz Lipmann Institute analyzed the complex relationships between sperm length, body masse, sperm competition, and clutch size to capture evolutionary trade-offs among these traits. An international research team has developed an innovative method to study the evolution of sperm length in tetrapods. Using the Pareto principle, scientists from Germany and Italy analyzed the complex relationships between sperm length, body…

Scientists have found an alternative way to produce atoms of the superheavy element livermorium. The new method opens up the possibility of creating another element that could be the heaviest in the world so far: number 120. The search for new elements comes from the dream of finding a variant that is sufficiently stable to be long-lived and not prone to immediate decay. There is a theory in nuclear physics about an island of stability of superheavy elements. This is…

DNA method improves capacity and efficiency for digital archives, ASU researchers say. As the digital world expands, scientists are exploring DNA’s remarkable capacity to store data, converting this ancient molecule into a next-gen information archive. Since the 1980s, DNA has been considered an ideal medium for data storage due to its extraordinary density and stability. DNA can store up to a billion times more information in the same volume compared with traditional silicon-based storage, and encoded sequences can last for…

Researchers at Constructor University make crucial breakthrough in cell research. It is a breakthrough in cell research that’s poised to open up new possibilities in the fight against diseases. In cooperation with researchers from the China University of Petroleum, the working group of Dr. Werner Nau, Professor of Chemistry at Constructor University, has demonstrated the effectiveness of a new method of intracellular protein transport. The results of their research can now be read in Proceedings of the National Academy of…

A large multicenter study led by the Department of Neurology at MHH confirms deficits in word fluency and visual information processing. MOGAD is a rare autoimmune disease of the central nervous system. According to estimates, one to three in 100,000 people are affected. They may suffer from visual disturbances, paralysis, incontinence and pain. But do they also have cognitive impairments? Smaller scientific studies have so far provided contradictory findings. A team of researchers led by the Department of Neurology with…

How does the embryo in the rapeseed react to mechanical constraints? In 2021, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for elucidating the biology of mechanosensors. These discoveries revealed how mechanical forces generated by touch influence tissue differentiation and morphogenesis in animals and humans. Plants use similar means to sense mechanical forces, but the role of biomechanics and mechanosensory proteins is less understood. This particularly applies to embryogenesis. In a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG),…