A collaborative effort from teams across Penn culminates in new techniques to repair lung tissue after damage from flu and COVID-19. In the human body, the lungs and their vasculature can be likened to a building with an intricate plumbing system. The lungs’ blood vessels are the pipes essential for transporting blood and nutrients for oxygen delivery and carbon dioxide removal. Much like how pipes can get rusty or clogged, disrupting normal water flow, damage from respiratory viruses, like SARS-CoV-2…

Insect pollination is vital for many plants. Air pollution caused by humans can disrupt this sensitive process. This is shown in a review article written at the University of Würzburg. Pollination, i.e. the transfer of pollen grains from the male to the female organs, is an essential part of reproduction for the majority of plants. For many of these plants, this transfer is carried out by insects in search of food – this is known as insect pollination. The impact…

Working with an international consortium, scientists at Leipzig University have identified new genes that may play a role in chronic kidney disease. They analysed data from more than 900,000 people and found effects that in some cases differed between men and women. These new findings may help scientists better understand sex-specific differences in the risk and progression of chronic kidney disease, and provide a starting point for appropriate treatments. The findings have recently been published in the prestigious journal “Nature…

Researchers at EPFL and the University of Jena Develop Fast and User-Friendly GPT-3 Model for Chemical Tasks. GPT-3, the language model behind the well-known AI system ChatGPT, can also be utilised in chemistry to solve various scientific tasks. This was demonstrated by a team of researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and the Helmholtz Institute for Polymers in Energy Applications (HIPOLE) Jena. As reported in the journal “Nature Machine Intelligence”, they circumvented the…

In autumn 2021, geologists discovered an unusual row of stones, almost 1 km long, at the bottom of Mecklenburg Bight. The site is located around 10 kilometres off Rerik in 21 metres water depth. The approximately 1,500 stones are aligned so regularly that a natural origin seems unlikely. A team of researchers from different disciplines now concluded, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers likely built this structure around 11,000 years ago to hunt reindeer. The finding represents the first discovery of a…

BMBF awards funding for junior research group at Friedrich Schiller University Jena to research photocatalytic production of green hydrogen. Hydrogen holds vast potential as a fuel, provided that it is produced using renewable energy. But just how efficiently can we produce green hydrogen in sufficient quantities? This issue is the focus of a research group headed up by Dr Jacob Schneidewind at the Center for Energy and Environmental Chemistry at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. Their SINATRA: SolSTEP project, which…

Researchers from Jena uncover new mechanism for regulating cell division in the bacterial pathogen Klebsiella. Klebsiella pneumoniae is one of the most common and most dangerous bacterial pathogens impacting humans, causing infections of the gastrointestinal tract, pneumonia, wound infections and even blood poisoning. With the aim of discovering therapeutically exploitable weaknesses in Klebsiella, a research team from the Balance of the Microverse Cluster of Excellence at the University of Jena, Germany has taken a close look at the molecular biology…

There is no doubt that water is significant. Without it, life would never have begun, let alone continue today – not to mention its role in the environment itself, with oceans covering over 70% of Earth. But despite its ubiquity, liquid water features some electronic intricacies that have long puzzled scientists in chemistry, physics, and technology. For example, the electron affinity, i.e. the energy stabilization undergone by a free electron when captured by water, has remained poorly characterized from an…

A research team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Salerno in Italy has discovered that thin films of elemental bismuth exhibit the so-called non-linear Hall effect, which could be applied in technologies for the controlled use of terahertz high-frequency signals on electronic chips. Bismuth combines several advantageous properties not found in other systems to date, as the team reports in Nature Electronics (DOI: 10.1038/s41928-024-01118-y). Particularly: the quantum effect is observed at room temperature. The thin-layer films can…

…sets the stage for regenerative therapy. The study marks a stepping stone towards the long-term goal of regenerating human limbs after amputation—and could one day even give snakes back their legs. In a collaborative study, researchers from Kyushu University and Harvard Medical School have identified proteins that can turn or “reprogram” fibroblasts — the most commonly found cells in skin and connective tissue — into cells with similar properties to limb progenitor cells. Publishing in Developmental Cell, the researchers’ findings have enhanced our understanding…

First-of-its-kind device ‘tags’ an organ to monitor abnormal, life-threatening fluid leaks. Researchers led by Northwestern University and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a new, first-of-its-kind sticker that enables clinicians to monitor the health of patients’ organs and deep tissues with a simple ultrasound device. When attached to an organ, the soft, tiny sticker changes in shape in response to the body’s changing pH levels, which can serve as an early warning sign for post-surgery complications…

Research team at the TWINCORE and the HZI shows how an enzyme regulates the pathogenicity of a clinically relevant pathogen. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an important opportunistic pathogen responsible for life-threatening infections that are associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality. Researchers from TWINCORE, the Centre for Experimental and Clinical Infection Research in Hannover, and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig have now been able to show that an enzyme controls virulence through modification of tRNAs. They…

Particles colliding in accelerators produce numerous cascades of secondary particles. The electronics processing the signals avalanching in from the detectors then have a fraction of a second in which to assess whether an event is of sufficient interest to save it for later analysis. In the near future, this demanding task may be carried out using algorithms based on AI, the development of which involves scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the PAS. Electronics has never had an…

The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Freie Universität Berlin shows that individual ice grains ejected from these planetary bodies may contain enough material for instruments headed there in the fall to detect signs of life, if such life exists. “For the first time we have shown that even a tiny fraction…

Entropy, the amount of molecular disorder, is produced in several systems but cannot be measured directly. An equation developed by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, now sheds new light on how entropy is produced on a very short time scale in laser excited materials. “New computational models give us new research opportunities. Extending thermodynamics for ultrashort excitations will provide novel insights into how materials function on the nanoscale,” says Matthias Geilhufe, Assistant Professor at…

What makes us human? According to neurobiologists it is our neocortex. This outer layer of the brain is rich in neurons and lets us do abstract thinking, create art, and speak complex languages. An international team led by Dr. Mareike Albert at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) of TUD Dresden University of Technology has identified a new factor that might have contributed to neocortex expansion in humans. The results were published in the EMBO Journal. What makes us…

Conditions affecting the arterial vasculature present pressing challenges in global health. Yet, the complex mechanisms underlying artery formation remain elusive, impeding the development of novel treatments. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, led by Mara Pitulescu and Ralf Adams, have uncovered new insights into how arteries form. Building on their earlier discovery how Notch-signaling directs “tip” cells to become arteries, their latest study published in Nature Communications reveals the crucial role of EphB4 and…

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) have helped to detect a remarkable gravitational-wave signal, which could hold the key to solving a cosmic mystery. The discovery is from the latest set of results announced today (5 April) by the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration, which comprises more than 1,600 scientists from around the world, including members of the ICG, that seeks to detect gravitational waves and use them for exploration of fundamentals of science. In May 2023,…

Study in Nature unlocks how cortisone inhibits inflammation. Cortisone and other related glucocorticoids are extremely effective at curbing excessive immune reactions. But previously, astonishingly little was known about how they exactly do that. A team of researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Uniklinikum Erlangen and Ulm University have now explored the molecular mechanism of action in greater detail. As the researchers report in the journal Nature,* glucocorticoids reprogram the metabolism of immune cells, activating the body’s natural “brakes” on inflammation….

A team of researchers at Nagoya University in Japan has discovered that aldehydes are metabolic byproducts associated with premature aging. Published in Nature Cell Biology, their findings reveal insights into premature aging diseases and potential strategies to combat aging in healthy individuals such as controlling exposure to aldehyde-inducing substances including alcohol, pollution, and smoke. A person’s health can be harmed by aldehydes. However, the group’s findings suggest these detrimental effects also include aging. The team who made this discovery included…