Culture

Scientists have uncovered a way to control many genes in engineered yeast cells, opening the door to more efficient and sustainable production of bio-based products.

The study, published in Nucleic Acids Research by researchers from DSM's Rosalind Franklin Biotechnology Center in Delft, the Netherlands, and the University of Bristol, has shown how to unlock CRISPR's potential for regulating many genes simultaneously.

According to the World Health Organization, a third wave of COVID infections is now all but inevitable in Europe. A COVID tracker developed by IIASA researcher Asjad Naqvi, aims to identify, collect, and collate various official regional datasets for European countries, while also combining and homogenizing the data to help researchers and policymakers explore how the virus spreads.

The Institut Pasteur, in partnership with the French National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM), Santé publique France and the Ipsos Social Research Institute, recently presented the results of the ComCor epidemiological study on circumstances and places of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The aim of the study was to identify the socio-demographic factors, places visited and behaviors associated with a higher risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2. The study contains two parts:

A multidisciplinary team of researchers is the first to show combining yeast-expression technology and a novel adjuvant formulation to produce a COVID-19 vaccine candidate is effective against SARS-COV-2 and promises to be easy to produce at large scale and cost-effective, important aspects for vaccinating people worldwide, especially in low- to middle-income countries. Results from the study, which applied lessons learned from the hepatitis b vaccine platform technology, are published online today in Science Immunology.

PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs), a class of conserved non-coding small RNAs, are essential for sex determination, defense against viruses, maintaining genome integrity of diverse animal species. The missing of PIWI protein would leads to male-production of sperm. However, many piRNA clusters reside within or close to the heterochromatin, a transcriptional silencing loci. How piRNAs are transcribed remains unknown.

Data privacy is an important topic in the digitalised economy. Recent policy changes have aimed to strengthen users' control over their own data. Yet new research from Copenhagen Business School finds designers of cookie banners can affect users' privacy choices by manipulating the choice architecture and with simple changes can increase absolute consent by 17%.

A website cookie banner is the consent management tool that allows users to give their consent to process their personal data. Given the current legal framework, users need to actively provide consent.

Early-life inflammation, such as trauma and viral infections, strongly increases the risk of individual for depression in adulthood, however, the mechanisms are not clear yet.

A team led by Prof. ZHANG Zhi from Division of Life Sciences and Medicine of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), collaborating with Prof. XU Lin from CAS, revealed the mechanism by which early-life inflammation induces adolescent depression symptoms. This work has been published in Neuron on July 6th.

If you're regularly out in the fresh air, you're doing something good for both your brain and your well-being. This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE). The longitudinal study recently appeared in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

BOSTON - New research led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Massachusetts Eye and Ear indicates that the blood pressure drug losartan may benefit patients with neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2), a hereditary condition associated with vestibular schwannomas, or noncancerous tumors along the nerves in the brain that are involved with hearing and balance.

We sleep on average one third of our time. But what does the brain do during these long hours? Using an artificial intelligence approach capable of decoding brain activity during sleep, scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, were able to glimpse what we think about when we are asleep. By combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), the Geneva team provides unprecedented evidence that the work of sorting out the thousands of pieces of information processed during the day takes place during deep sleep.

The COVID-19 pandemic halted the in-person wintertime survey of wolves and moose on the island for the first time in 63 years. Consequently, there are no estimates of wolf or moose abundance for 2021, and the next estimates are scheduled in February 2022. But though the Isle Royale Winter Study didn't happen quite as planned, researchers were still able to visit the remote national park in the spring.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Two fossil teeth from a distant relative of North American gophers have scientists rethinking how some mammals reached the Caribbean Islands.

The teeth, excavated in northwest Puerto Rico, belong to a previously unknown rodent genus and species, now named Caribeomys merzeraudi. About the size of a mouse, C. merzeraudi is the Caribbean's smallest known rodent and one of the region's oldest, dating back about 29 million years.

New Rochelle, NY, July 14, 2021-Firsthand reports from nurses in correctional facilities detail the challenges they faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. These firsthand accounts are reported in a special issue on correctional nursing in the Journal of Correctional Health Care. Click here (https://www.liebertpub.com/toc/jchc/27/2) to read the issue now.

Indiana Jones hates snakes. And he's certainly not alone. The fear of snakes is so common it even has its own name: ophidiophobia.

Kibret Mequanint doesn't particularly like the slithery reptiles either (he actually hates them too) but the Western University bioengineer and his international collaborators have found a novel use for snake venom: a body tissue 'super glue' that can stop life-threatening bleeding in seconds.

Penn State College of Engineering researchers set out to develop technology capable of localizing and imaging blood clots in deep veins. Turns out their work may not only identify blood clots, but it may also be able to treat them.

The team, led by Scott Medina, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, published its results in Advance Healthcare Materials.