Feed aggregator

In the perpetual arms races between bacteria and human-made antibiotics, there is a new tool to give human medicine the edge, in part by revealing bacterial weaknesses and potentially by leading to more targeted or new treatments for bacterial infections.

Fear that you are at particularly lethal risk of COVID-19 infection might not be quite as strong of motivation to support strict government regulations and drastically change your lifestyle as your perception of whether others are doing enough to fight COVID-19, concludes a new study looking into data from the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The research paper is published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychological Bulletin.

Climate skeptics who aren't persuaded by the existing evidence from climate change are unlikely to change their minds for many years, according to a newly published quantitative study by a University of Oregon environmental economist, The central question posed by the study published in the journal Climate Change was "How much evidence would it take to convince skeptics that they are wrong?"

Immunoassays have emerged as an immensely reliable means of detection in fields ranging from biological research to food safety management. In a recent study, scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) developed a new type of immunosensor for these purposes. Termed "BRET Q-body", the sensor works on the principle of bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) and can be used to detect antigens without the need for an external light source, greatly simplifying immunoassays.

A new, extremely precise technique, developed by the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, allows the identification of the metabolic function and genome of soil bacteria one bacterial cell at a time instead of having to analyze millions all at once.

Long interested in interactions between robots and humans, Columbia Engineering researchers have created EVA, a new autonomous robot with a soft and expressive face that responds to match the expressions of nearby humans. "The idea for EVA took shape a few years ago, when my students and I began to notice that the robots in our lab were staring back at us through plastic, googly eyes," said Prof Hod Lipson, who led the team.

Nicola Marzari, head of EPFL's THEOS lab and director of NCCR MARVEL, has published with Andrea Ferretti and Chris Wolverton a review of electronic-structure methods as part of a special edition Insight from Nature Materials. It gives an overview of the methods, application to the prediction of materials properties, and examines strategies targeting broader goals of materials design and discovery. The authors consider emerging challenges in predictive accuracy and addressing real-life complexity.

As the owner of a human body, you're carrying trillions of microbes with you everywhere you go. These microscopic organisms aren't just hitching a ride; many of them perform essential chemical reactions that regulate everything from our digestion to our immune system to our moods.

In the largest genetic analysis of depression to date, Veterans Affairs researchers identified many new gene variants that increase the risk for depression. The groundbreaking study helps researchers better understand the biological basis of depression and could lead to better drug treatments. The study involved genetic data on more than 300,000 participants of VA's Million Veteran Program (MVP), along with more than a million subjects from other biobanks, including 23andMe.

In the longest follow-up results from a clinical trial of combination immunotherapy for metastatic melanoma, investigators report that nearly half the patients who received the drugs nivolumab and ipilimumab were alive a median of six and a half years after treatment. The results, stemming from the CheckMate 067 clinical trial, represent a new landmark in survival rates for patients with melanoma treated with immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs.

The paper "Antidepressants produce persistent Gαs associated signaling changes in lipid rafts following drug withdrawal," published in the journal Molecular Pharmacology, addresses the molecular and cellular mechanisms that cause antidepressant withdrawal syndrome.

University of Guelph researchers have found a pathway by which a misfolded protein called alpha-synuclein is secreted and released from neurons instead of being degraded.

According to the results of a multi-year scientific study, ants of the species Temnothorax nylanderi show exceptionally high survival rates when infected with a tapeworm.

Signals can be amplified by an optimum amount of noise, but this so-called stochastic resonance is a fragile phenomenon. Experimental AMOLF research shows that stochastic resonance becomes robust to variations in the signal frequency when systems have memory. This has implications in many fields of physics and energy technology. In particular, the scientists numerically show that introducing slow non-linearity in a mechanical oscillator harvesting energy from noise can increase its efficiency by tenfold.

Crohn's disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that causes inflammation (pain and swelling) in the gastrointestinal tract, can cause daily health problems, frequent hospitalizations and surgery when not adequately controlled. While there is no cure for Crohn's disease, there are treatments that can help patients live a symptom-free life.

Researchers from ETH Zurich and University of Zurich led by Daniel Razansky have developed a new microscopy technique that lights up the brain with high resolution imagery. This allows neuroscientists to study brain functions and ailments more closely and non-invasively.

A Penn State scientist studying crystal structures has developed a new mathematical formula that may solve a decades-old problem in understanding spacetime, the fabric of the universe proposed in Einstein's theories of relativity.

A total investment in nature of USD 8.1 trillion is required between now and 2050 - while annual investment should reach USD 536 billion annually by 2050 - in order to successfully tackle the interlinked climate, biodiversity, and land degradation crises, according to the State of Finance for Nature report released today.

A new study published led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) provides insights related to mechanistic links between physical fitness and overall health and the reasons why the same exercise can have different effects in different people.

A study led by research groups of Prof. FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. ZHANG Hucai from Yunnan University covers the largest temporal transect of population dynamics in East Asia so far and offers a clearer picture of the deep population history of northern East Asia.