Culture
TROY, N.Y. -- Outsourcing routine tasks, like payroll, customer service, and accounting, offers well-known benefits to businesses and contributes to an economy in which entrepreneurial vendors can support industry and expand employment. However, new research from the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute discovered that not all client-vendor relationships are beneficial for the vendors.
Researchers have developed experimental flu shots that protect animals from a wide variety of seasonal and pandemic influenza strains. The vaccine product is currently being advanced toward clinical testing. If proven safe and effective, these next-generation influenza vaccines may replace current seasonal options by providing protection against many more strains that current vaccines do not adequately cover.
Female adult sockeye from the Fraser River are dying at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts on the journey back to their spawning grounds, finds new UBC research. For every male salmon that doesn't make it to their natal stream, at least two, sometimes three female salmon die.
Three-dimensional or "volumetric" images are widely used in medical imaging. These images faithfully represent the 3D spatial relationships present in the body. Yet 3D images are typically displayed on a two-dimensional monitor, which creates a dimensionality mismatch that must be resolved in a clinical setting where practitioners must search a 2D or a 3D image to find a particular trait or target of interest.
The more nitrate there is in mothers' drinking water, the smaller the babies they give birth to. But alarmingly, the declining birth weight can also be registered when the women are exposed to nitrate levels below the EU's threshold of 50 milligrams of nitrate per litre.
Sickle cell disease is the most prevalent inherited blood disorder in the world, affecting 70,000 to 100,000 Americans. However, it is considered an orphan disease, meaning it impacts less than 200,000 people nationally, and is therefore underrepresented in therapeutic research.
A team led by Abhishek Jain from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University is working to address this disease.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, arrived one year ago and turned our lives upside-down.
While worldwide vaccination programs are currently ongoing, we do not yet know for how long the vaccine will provide immune protection against infection, and if the currently approved vaccines can provide protection against the emerging virus variants.
In addition, it appears that vaccines cannot prevent illness for people who have already been infected. In contrast to vaccines, there are currently no effective drugs that act against the virus SARS-CoV-2.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, a multinational team of over 300 scientists including two astrophysicists from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), has revealed today a new view of the massive object at the centre of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarised light.
AMHERST, Mass. - An international team of astronomers, including University of Massachusetts Amherst professors Gopal Narayanan and Peter Schloerb, has just revealed a new view of the massive black hole at the center of a galaxy located 55 million light-years away, known as the M87 galaxy. This new image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, shows how M87 looks in polarized light, and is published today in two papers appearing in The Astrophysical Journal (links here and here).
Rich false memories of autobiographical events can be planted - and then reversed, a new paper has found.
The study highlights - for the first time - techniques that can correct false recollections without damaging true memories. It is published by researchers from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and the Universities of Hagen and Mainz, Germany.
Sight is by far the sense that we humans use the most when navigating an environment. When those who are blind or visually impaired walk alone, they put themselves at great risk of falling or colliding with obstacles, especially when traversing new places. Unfortunately, the number of visually impaired people throughout the world is likely to increase in the near future because of the rapidly aging population. Thus, there is an urgent need for innovative and cost-effective solutions to help visually impaired people navigate safely.
When invaded by a virus, our body cells launch an alert to neighboring cells to increase their antiviral defenses to prevent the infection from spreading. Some viruses, however, manage to bypass this system by mimicking the host's RNA, preventing them from being detected by the infected cell and avoiding this alert. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, this mimicking uses a protein known as nsp14. This protein is also very important for virus multiplication, a task which is facilitated by its binding to the nsp10 protein, resulting in a protein complex.
A study of 49 patients reveals that toxins from the bacterial pathogen Staphylococcus aureus can destroy the body's blood-clotting platelets, raising the risk of death during bacterial blood infections. Further experiments in mice also showed that the approved drugs ticagrelor and oseltamivir protected platelets and helped treat infections, suggesting these compounds could be repurposed into badly needed therapies for blood infections. Bacterial blood infections have mortality rates as high as 20% to 30% even with supportive care, and these rates have remained high for decades.
Immunotherapy, which recruits the body's own immune system to attack cancer, has given many cancer patients a new avenue to treat the disease.
But many cancer immunotherapy treatments can be expensive, have devastating side effects, and only work in a fraction of patients.
Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago have developed a new therapeutic vaccine that uses a patient's own tumor cells to train their immune system to find and kill cancer.
News coverage of expert scientific evidence on vaccine safety is effective at increasing public acceptance of vaccines, but the positive effect is diminished when the expert message is juxtaposed with a personal narrative about real side effects, new research has found.