SAN DIEGO, Aug. 27, 2019 -- Traumatic brain injury (TBI) -- defined as a bump, blow or jolt to the head that disrupts normal brain function -- sent 2.5 million people in the U.S. to the emergency room in 2014, according to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, researchers report a self-assembling peptide hydrogel that, when injected into the brains of rats with TBI, increased blood vessel regrowth and neuronal survival.
A little bit of norovirus - the highly infectious microbe that causes about 20 million cases of food poisoning in the United States each year - goes a long way. Just 10 particles of the virus can cause illness in humans. A team of University of Arizona researchers has created a simple, portable and inexpensive method for detecting extremely low levels of norovirus.
Our body makes antibodies to fight infections. But the synthetic versions of these molecules could hold the key to stimulating the body's ability to regenerate.
The findings come from a decade-long collaboration between the teams of Sachdev Sidhu, a professor in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, and Stephane Angers, Associate Dean of Research in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, that have been creating synthetic antibodies for diverse applications.
Men are typically described by words that refer to behavior, while adjectives ascribed to women tend to be associated with physical appearance. This, according to a group of computer scientists from the University of Copenhagen and other universities that deployed machine learning to analyze 3.5 million books.
'Beautiful' and 'sexy' are two of the adjectives most frequently used to describe women. Commonly used descriptors for men include 'righteous', 'rational' and 'brave'.
The activation of mTor complex 1 in the cell is central to many vital processes in the body such as cell growth and metabolism. Overactivity of this signalling pathway can result in diseases such as in diabetic insulin resistance and cancer. A team led by the scientist Volker Haucke (Leibniz - Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie and Freie Universität Berlin) has now discovered how inactivation of a certain lipid kinase promotes mTor complex 1 activity, and may therefore constitute a new point of attack for the treatment of diabetes and cancer.
Nanoparticles are smaller than five nanometres - a nanometre being one millionth of a millimetre - which corresponds approximately to the size of macromolecules. Such tiny particles are very easily absorbed in body cells. There are two aspects to this feature. Firstly, it makes nanoparticles good vehicles for transporting a broad range of compounds or substances attached to them into normal diseased cells in a targeted manner.
In a bid to further explore how a mother-to-be's diet might affect her offspring's brain health, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers have found that pregnant and nursing rats fed high fat diets have offspring that grow up to be slower than expected learners and that have persistently abnormal levels of the components needed for healthy brain development and metabolism.
An apple plantation in spring. The trees are in full bloom. But to ensure that they also yield in autumn, workers have to do a real fluff job for weeks: each individual flower is manually pollinated with brushes - because there are no bees left to do the job. Not a nice vision of the future. But in some regions of China this is already reality. And the disappearance of the bees is reported all over the world.
For the past few hundred years, the colorful hair and unique patterns of the so-called "Fancy Mouse" have made them the stars of pet shows in Japan and beyond. Now, scientists have finally revealed the true cause of the genetic mutation responsible for the iconic black pigmentation in the popular East Asian pet.
Their findings were published on August 2, 2019 in Communications Biology.
The discovery of a new quasiparticle is analogous to the discovery of a new molecule, except molecules contain different elements, while quasiparticles are made from fundamental particles and interactions. As each molecule has its own unique properties, so do quasiparticles, and the discovery of a new one brings a range of possible technological applications.