Earth
In December 2019, the world learned of a new and deadly pathogen. News coming out of Wuhan, China confirmed public health experts' worst fears--a novel coronavirus appeared to have jumped from animals to humans. It was extremely contagious, and its penchant for hospitalising and killing vulnerable individuals has led to sweeping and indefinite changes to daily life around the globe.
Scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Skoltech, and the Russian Academy of Sciences Joint Institute for High Temperatures have conducted a theoretical study of the effects of defects in graphene on electron transfer at the graphene-solution interface. Their calculations show that defects can increase the charge transfer rate by an order of magnitude. Moreover, by varying the type of defect, it is possible to selectively catalyze the electron transfer to a certain class of reagents in solution.
University of Delaware data scientist Jing Gao is fascinated by the ways that cities and towns grow over time. This concept is known as urbanization.
Take Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. All of these are cities, but they each grow differently, in terms of how the city's land areas expand. The same is true globally, from New Delhi, India, to Paris, France.
With a discovery that could rewrite the immunology textbooks, an international group of scientists, including the teams of Bart Lambrecht, Martin Guilliams, Hamida Hammad, and Charlotte Scott (all from the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research) identified a new type of antigen-presenting immune cell. These cells, that are part of an expanding family of dendritic cells, play a crucial role presenting antigens to other immune cells during respiratory virus infections, and could explain how convalescent plasma helps to boost immune responses in virus-infected patients.
It works like a very fine "molecular knob" able to modulate the electrical activity of the neurons of our cerebral cortex, crucial to the functioning of our brain. Its name is Foxg1, it is a gene, and its unprecedented role is the protagonist of the discovery just published on the journal Cerebral Cortex. Foxg1 was already known for being a "master gene" able to coordinate the action of hundreds of other genes necessary for the development of our anterior central nervous system.
Tsukuba, Japan - The advances in optical devices that we expect as consumers must be supported by the development of new materials. Microcrystallites of luminescent organic compounds can act as tiny laser sources for such devices, for example for use in displays and other components. Dendrimers offer numerous advantages as luminescent materials, however so far they have not been used as microcrystallites owing to their fragility and poor crystallinity. Now a team of researchers has produced dendrimers that form robust crystals with lasing properties.
Similar to how a smoke detector sounds off an alarm, certain genes sense when a virus enters the body, alerting of an intruder and triggering an immune response in most mammals. But, according to a recent study published in Frontiers in Immunology, pangolins - mammals which resemble an anteater with scales, lack two of those virus-sensing genes.
A manually constructed 3D atlas offers a cellular-level view of the entire mouse brain. Presented May 7 in the journal Cell, this reference brain, called the Allen Mouse Brain Common Coordinate Framework (CCFv3, https://portal.brain-map.org/), is derived from serial two-photon tomography images of 1,675 mice.
Restoration ecologist Karen Holl has a simple message for anyone who thinks planting 1 trillion trees will reverse the damage of climate change.
"We can't plant our way out of climate change," says Holl, professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz and a leading expert in forest restoration. "It is only one piece of the puzzle."
Combining microfluidics and the natural photosynthetic membranes from spinach plants, researchers have developed "synthetic chloroplasts," which are capable of mimicking complex and life-like photosynthetic processes, a new study reports. "[The authors] demonstrate a major advancement in synthetic biology and a crucial milestone toward the construction of a self-sustaining synthetic cell," write Nathaniel Gaut and Katarzyna Adamala in a related Perspective.
What The Study Did: Death certificate data were used to compare the rate of opioid-related deaths in the U.S. among cancer survivors with that of the general population from 2006 through 2016. Whether opioid-associated deaths in cancer survivors, who are often prescribed opioids for cancer-related pain, are rising at the same rate as in the general population is unknown.
Authors: Fumiko Chino, M.D., of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is the corresponding author.
What Viewpoint Says: This Viewpoint discusses the exclusion of children from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) clinical trials and why that could harm treatment options for children.
Authors: Florence T. Bourgeois, M.D., M.P.H., of Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School is Boston, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.1888)
A research group led by Associate Professor TACHIKAWA Takashi of Kobe University's Molecular Photoscience Research Center has succeeded in developing a strategy that greatly increases the amount of hydrogen produced from sunlight and water using hematite photocatalysts (*1).
Tsukuba, Japan - In a new genetic study of rice, Professor Hiroaki Iwai and his team from the University of Tsukuba have revealed that pectin plays a vital role in plant reproductive development, which could have major implications in the development of new crop varieties.
Recently, Prof. YANG Xueming from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. YANG Tiangang from the Southern University of Science and Technology discussed significant advances in the study of quantum resonances in atomic and molecular collisions at near absolute zero temperature. Their article was published in Science on May 7.