Culture
Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have created a drug that can lure stem cells to damaged tissue and improve treatment efficacy--a scientific first and a major advance for the field of regenerative medicine.
What if we didn't have skin? We would have no sense of touch, no detection of coldness or pain, leaving us inept to respond to any situation. The skin is not just a protective shell for organs, but rather a signaling system for survival that provides information on the external stimuli or temperature, or a meteorological observatory that reports the weather. Tactile receptors, tightly packed throughout the skin, feel the temperature or mechanical stimuli - such as touching or pinching - and convert them into electrical signals to the brain.
Understanding how particles travel through a device is vital for improving the efficiency of solar cells. Researchers from KAUST, working with an international team of scientists, have now developed a set of design guidelines for enhancing the performance of molecular materials.
Tsukuba, Japan - Researchers from the Faculty of Health and Sport Sciences at the University of Tsukuba studied the way blind players and sighted non-athletes tracked an incoming noise-making ball. They found that blind players employed a larger downward head rotation when trapping the rolling ball, compared with blindfolded sighted volunteers. This work may help explain the methods visually impaired people utilize to complete daily tasks, as well as assist in the creation of new smart-assistant devices.
CINCINNATI - Physicians and scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center used new stem cell technology to regenerate and study living patient-specific skin in the lab, giving them a precise close up view of how inherited DNA defects cause skin damage and deadly squamous cell carcinoma in children and young adults with Fanconi anemia (FA).
Special activity trackers can be used to fairly accurately determine the respiratory rate of people while they sleep. This is the result of a new study conducted by researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) together with Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and published in the journal Scientific Reports. In the future, activity trackers could be used to detect the early stages of a disease, as a person's respiratory rate can indicate signs of an undetected medical problem.
Researchers from King's College London have identified the brain activity for the first time in a newborn baby when they are learning an association between different types of sensory experiences. Using advanced MRI scanning techniques and robotics, the researchers found that a baby's brain activity can be changed through these associations, shedding new light on the possibility of rehabilitating babies with injured brains and promoting the development of life-long skills such as speech, language and movement.
Two teams of scientists have resolved a longstanding controversy surrounding the origins of complex life on Earth.
The joint studies found molecular fossils extracted from 635-million-year-old rocks aren't the earliest evidence of animals, but instead common algae.
The researchers from The Australian National University (ANU), Max Planck Institute and Caltech say the finding has big implications for our understanding of evolution.
Researchers have developed a new theory for observing a quantum vacuum that could lead to new insights into the behaviour of black holes.
The Unruh effect combines quantum physics and the theory of relativity. So far it has not been possible to measure or observe it, but now new research from a team led by the University of Nottingham has shed light on how this could be achieved using sound particles. The team's research has been published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The condition trimethylaminuria, is more commonly known as fish odour syndrome, it currently has no cure.
The syndrome occurs when an unpleasant smelling chemical trimethylamine (TMA) can't be broken down by the liver into a different chemical that doesn't smell.
Researchers at the University of Warwick have been able to stabilise and inhibit the enzyme that produces TMA, which means once a drug has been discovered they can test how it to stop TMA production.
Using modern nanotechnology, it is possible nowadays to produce structures which have a feature sizes of just a few nanometres. This world of the most minute particles - also known as quantum systems - makes possible a wide range of technological applications, in fields which include magnetic field sensing, information processing, secure communication or ultra-precise time keeping. The production of these microscopically small structures has progressed so far that they reach dimensions below the wavelength of light.
(Jena, Germany) Everything that lives has metabolites, produces metabolites and consumes metabolites. These molecules arise as intermediate and end products from chemical processes in an organism's metabolism. Therefore, they not only have huge significance for our lives, but they also provide valuable information about the condition of a living being or an environment. For example, metabolites can be used to detect diseases or, in the field of environmental technology, to examine drinking water samples.
Ordinary solid-state lasers, as used in laser pointers, generate light in the visible range. For many applications, however, such as the detection of molecules, radiation in the mid-infrared range is needed. Such infrared lasers are much more difficult to manufacture, especially if the laser radiation is required in the form of extremely short, intense pulses.
Resistive switching memory devices offer several advantages over the currently used computer memory technology. Researchers from the MIPT Atomic Layer Deposition Lab have joined forces with colleagues from Korea to study the impact of electrode surface morphology on the properties of a resistive switching memory cell. It turned out that thicker electrodes have greater surface roughness and are associated with markedly better memory cell characteristics. The research findings were published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
FRANKFURT. The surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is studded with spike proteins. The virus needs these in order to dock onto proteins (ACE2 receptors) on the surface of the host cell. Before this docking is possible, parts of the spike protein have to be cleaved by the host cell's enzymes - proteases.