Earth

June 17, 2021 - Nutley, NJ - Tiny genetic markers, circulating in the blood, have shown great promise in diagnosing and treating disease. Yet identifying and harvesting these extracellular vesicles (EVs) have been a major challenge for science.

Now a laboratory at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) has discovered a highly sensitive methodology that can efficiently find and harness EVs - particularly exosomes and the micro RNAs they carry. These could be crucial clues to identifying diseases such as cancer early on in its development.

A new article, published as a Perspective in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, introduces a rapid assessment framework that can be used as a guide to make conservation and nature-based solutions more robust to future climate.

With sorghum poised to become an important crop grown by Pennsylvania farmers, Penn State researchers, in a new study, tested more than 150 germplasm lines of the plant for resistance to a fungus likely to hamper its production.

If the genome is the recipe of life, base pairs are the individual ingredients listed. These chemical structures form DNA, and every living organism on Earth has just four. The specific arrangements of these four base pairs -- A, T, C, G -- make us who and what we are.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Surgeons may soon be able to localize critical regions in tissues and organs during a surgical operation thanks to a new, patent-pending Purdue University biosensor that can be printed in 3D using an automated printing system.

Understanding cellular metabolism - how a cell uses energy- could be key to treating a wide array of diseases, including vascular diseases and cancer.

While many techniques can measure these processes among tens of thousands of cells, researchers have been unable to measure them at the single-cell level.

Just how do spiders walk straight up -- and even upside-down across -- so many different types of surfaces? Answering this question could open up new opportunities for creating powerful, yet reversible, bioinspired adhesives. Scientists have been working to better understand spider feet for the past several decades.

Research shows that inhibiting necroptosis, a form of cell death, could be a novel therapeutic approach for treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), an inflammatory lung condition, also known as emphysema, that makes it difficult to breathe.

Published in the prestigious American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the study by a team of Australian and Belgian researchers, revealed elevated levels of necroptosis in patients with COPD.

Electrons are ubiquitous among atoms, subatomic tokens of energy that can independently change how a system behaves--but they also can change each other. An international research collaboration found that collectively measuring electrons revealed unique and unanticipated findings. The researchers published their results on May 17 in Physical Review Letters.

When animals are hot, they eat less. This potentially fatal phenomenon has been largely overlooked in wild animals, explain researchers from The Australian National University (ANU).

According to lead author Dr Kara Youngentob, it means climate change could be contributing to more deaths among Australia's iconic marsupials, like the greater glider, than previously thought.

Parenting is one of life's greatest joys, right? Not for everyone. New research from Michigan State University psychologists examines characteristics and satisfaction of adults who don't want children.

As more people acknowledge they simply don't want to have kids, Jennifer Watling Neal and Zachary Neal, both associate professors in MSU's department of psychology, are among the first to dive deeper into how these "child-free" individuals differ from others.

Postdoctoral Researcher Outi Keinänen from the University of Helsinki developed a method to radiolabel plastic particles in order to observe their biodistribution on the basis of radioactivity with the help of positron emission tomography (PET). As a radiochemist, Keinänen has in her previous radiopharmaceutical studies utilised PET imaging combined with computed tomography (CT), which produces a very accurate image of the anatomical location of the radioactivity signal.

These findings were published in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences on 8 June 2021.

Huge splicing diversity in the brain

In the majority of insects, metamorphosis fosters completely different looking larval and adult stages. For example, adult butterflies are completely different from their larval counterparts, termed caterpillars. This "decoupling" of life stages is thought to allow for adaptation to different environments. Researchers of the University of Bonn now falsified this text book knowledge of evolutionary theory for stoneflies.

In a new publication from Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications; DOI https://doi.org/10.15212/CVIA.2021.0011, Xiao-lei Yin, Dong-xue Liang, Lu Wang, Jing Qiu, Zhi-yun Yang, Jian-zeng Dong and Zhao-yuan Ma from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; Capital Medical University, Beijing, China and The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China analyse coronary angiography video interpolation methods to reduce x-ray exposure frequency based on deep learning.