Culture
By making use of enzymes found in the digestive tract, MIT engineers have devised a way to apply a temporary synthetic coating to the lining of the small intestine. This coating could be adapted to deliver drugs, aid in digestion, or prevent nutrients such as glucose from being absorbed.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Mount Sinai researchers were among the first to show that anticoagulation therapy was associated with improved survival among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. But many questions remained--about the size of the potential benefit, and about what dosage of this therapy might be more effective. Now, the research team has suggested some possible answers, in a paper published in the August 26 online issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Philadelphia, August 26, 2020 - A team of researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) affiliated with the CHOP Epilepsy Neurogenetics Initiative (ENGIN) have combined clinical information with large-scale genomic data to successfully link characteristic presentations of childhood epilepsies with specific genetic variants. The findings were published today in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Effective solutions to the climate challenge threatening the world's coral reefs require complex decisions about risk and uncertainty, timing, quality versus quantity as well as which species to support for the most robust and productive future, according to a science paper released today.
Interventions to help coral reefs under global change - a complex decision challenge, by a group of key scientists from Australia's Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP), was today published in PLOS ONE.
Plants have a unique ability to safeguard themselves against pathogens by closing their pores--but until now, no one knew quite how they did it. Scientists have known that a flood of calcium into the cells surrounding the pores triggers them to close, but how the calcium entered the cells was unclear.
A new study by an international team including University of Maryland scientists reveals that a protein called OSCA1.3 forms a channel that leaks calcium into the cells surrounding a plant's pores, and they determined that a known immune system protein triggers the process.
Researchers from Linköping University suggest a process by which the timid junglefowl from the rain forest could have become today's domesticated chicken. When the scientists selectively bred the junglefowl with least fear of humans for 10 generations, the offspring acquired smaller brains and found it easier to become accustomed to frightening but non-hazardous events. The results shed new light over how domestication may have changed animals so much in a relatively short time.
More than half of patients hospitalized with suspected COVID-19 in Michigan during the state's peak months received antibiotics soon after they arrive, just in case they had a bacterial infection in addition to the virus, a new study shows. But testing soon showed that 96.5% of them only had the coronavirus, which antibiotics don't affect.
Like humans, plants protect themselves against pathogens. An international consortium under the lead of UZH professor Cyril Zipfel has now identified a long sought-after factor of this plant immune system: The calcium channel triggers the closure of stomata upon contact with microbes such as bacteria. This innate defense mechanism could help to engineer crop plants that are resistant to pathogens.
How can the course of the corona pandemic and its effects be illustrated? In recent months, dashboards - interactive, graphically depicted online summaries - have become the new norm of displaying infection rates, deaths and patterns of spread. This is problematic, as geographer Professor Jonathan Everts at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) writes in a commentary for the journal Dialogues in Human Geography. He criticises the way the programmes are handled and explains which aspects of the pandemic they are not taking into account.
With an increase in the elderly and aging population and also in the number of invasive surgeries, wound healing has become a critical focus area in medicine. The complex bodily processes involved in wound healing make it challenging as well as rewarding to identify newer methods and materials for effective wound healing.
Proteins make life and are made by ribosomes. In mitochondria, the repertoire of the mitoribosomal architectures turns out to be much more diverse than previously thought.
A paper published in eLife by Alexey Amunts lab reports extraction of the mitoribosome from a ciliated protozoan and its reconstruction using cryo-EM. The ciliate mitoribosome substantially differs with regard to its structure that reveals a 4.0-MDa complex of 94 proteins. The high resolution of the reconstruction allowed to identify nine novel proteins encoded in the mitochondrial genome.
Infection has been reduced up to 70% as of May 1st. Thanks to developed model, scenarios can be drawn regarding future containment measures.
An international team of researchers has discovered a new group of Chlamydiae - Anoxychlamydiales - living under the ocean floor without oxygen. These Chlamydiae have genes that allow them to survive without oxygen while making hydrogen gas. The researchers found that our single-cell ancestors 'caught' these hydrogen-producing genes from ancient Chlamydiae up to two-billion years ago - an event that was critical for the evolution of all complex life alive today. The results are published in Science Advances.
Cathode materials based on sodium and d-metals fluorophosphates are in great demand in the production of metal-ion batteries, because they have a rich chemical composition that allows to regulate their electrochemical properties. The research team of the scientists of Samara Center for Theoretical Materials Science of Samara Polytech, Institute of Solid State Chemistry and Mechanochemistry of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Research Center Boreskov Institute of Catalysis and P.N.
BEER-SHEVA, Israel...August 26, 2020 - People who consume frozen microbiome capsules derived from their own feces when dieting may limit their weight regain, according to a new study published in Gastroenterology, conducted by a team of researchers led by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).