Tech
April 20, 2020--New guidance is available for physicians who must go through a number of steps to provide a probable diagnosis of sarcoidosis - an inflammatory disease that affects the lungs, lymph glands, and other organs. The American Thoracic Society has published an official clinical practice guideline in which a panel of experts strongly recommended a baseline serum test to screen for hypercalcemia, a potentially serious disease manifestation, along with 13 conditional recommendations and a best practice statement to improve diagnosis and detection of sarcoidosis in vital organs.
Free-swimming cholera bacteria are much less infectious than bacteria in biofilms, aggregates of bacterial cells embedded in a sticky matrix that form on surfaces. This accounts for the surprising effectiveness of filtering water through cloth, such as a folded sari, which can reduce infections dramatically in places where the disease is endemic, despite the fact that individual cholera bacteria easily pass through such a filter.
WASHINGTON, April 20, 2020 -- The flavor and aroma of a fine chocolate emerge from its ecology, in addition to its processing. But can you be certain that the bar you bought is really from the exotic locale stated on the wrapper? Now, researchers are presenting a method for determining where a particular chocolate was produced -- and someday, which farm its beans came from -- by looking at its chemical "fingerprint."
ITHACA, N.Y. -To address plastic pollution plaguing the world's seas and waterways, Cornell University chemists have developed a new polymer that can degrade by ultraviolet radiation, according to research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
In October 2019, scientists trapped a ship filled with equipment in Arctic sea ice with the intention of drifting around the Arctic Ocean for a full year, gathering data on the polar regions and sea ice floes. However, a new study indicates there is a chance the expedition may melt out months before the year-end goal.
When people suffer debilitating injuries or illnesses of the nervous system, they sometimes lose the ability to perform tasks normally taken for granted, such as walking, playing music or driving a car. They can imagine doing something, but the injury might block that action from occurring.
Brain-computer interface systems exist that can translate brain signals into a desired action to regain some function, but they can be a burden to use because they don't always operate smoothly and need readjustment to complete even simple tasks.
In the latest issue of Molecular Therapy, Skoltech and MIT researchers have published a new combinatorial therapy for the treatment of liver cancer. Using a siRNA approach, a field in which Dr Zatsepin (Skoltech) excels, coupled with lipid nanoparticle technology developed in the Anderson laboratory (MIT), the scientists targeted proteins that are involved in apoptosis, a regulated program for cell death. In combination with chemotherapy, this caused a significant decrease in tumor load in a mouse model of hepatocellular carcinoma.
Your phone's GPS, the WiFi in your house and communications on aircraft are all powered by radio-frequency waves, or RF waves, which carry information from a transmitter at one point to a sensor at another. The sensors interpret this information in different ways. For example, a GPS sensor determines its location by using the amount of time it takes to receive a signal from a satellite. For applications such as in-door localization and defeating spoofing GPS signals, a wireless sensor measures the angle at which it receives an RF wave.
Biophysicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have visualized a nearly complete transport cycle of the mammalian glutamate transporter homologue from archaea. They confirmed that the transport mechanism resembles that of an elevator: A "door" opens, ions and substrate molecules come in, the door closes, and they travel through the membrane.
AMHERST, Mass. - Only 10 years ago, scientists working on what they hoped would open a new frontier of neuromorphic computing could only dream of a device using miniature tools called memristors that would function/operate like real brain synapses.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is known as "the disease with a thousand faces" because symptoms and progression can vary dramatically from patient to patient. But every MS patient has one thing in common: Cells of their body's own immune system migrate to the brain, where they destroy the myelin sheath - the protective outer layer of the nerve fibers. As a result, an electrical short circuit occurs, which prevents the nerve signals from being transmitted properly.
Many MS medications impair immune memory
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Farmers in parts of the western United States who rely on snowmelt to help irrigate their crops will be among the hardest hit in the world by climate change, a new study reveals.
In an article published today in Nature Climate Change, an interdisciplinary team of researchers analyzed monthly irrigation water demand together with snowmelt runoff across global basins from 1985 to 2015. The goal was to determine where irrigated agriculture has depended on snowmelt runoff in the past and how that might change with a warming climate.
Elevated levels of nitrogen dioxide in the air may be associated with a high number of deaths from Covid-19. A new study by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) provides concrete data that back this assumption for the first time. The paper combines satellite data on air pollution and air currents with confirmed deaths related to Covid-19 and reveals that regions with permanently high levels of pollution have significantly more deaths than other regions. The results were published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
For years, researchers have searched for the working principles of self-assembly that can build a cell (complex biological organism) as well as a crystal (far simpler inorganic material) in the same way.
Now, a team of scientists in Turkey has demonstrated the fundamental principles of a universal self-assembly process acting on a range of materials starting from a few atoms-large quantum dots up to nearly 100 trillion atoms-large human cells. Their method is highlighted in Nature Physics.
WHAT: An exciting new project that aims to quantify the nursing behavior of humpback whale calves in the Maui breeding grounds.
The project is a collaboration between the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Marine Mammal Research Program, the Goldbogen Lab at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station and the Friedlander Lab at University of California, Santa Cruz.
WHO: UH Mānoa Marine Mammal Research Program Director Lars Bejder, PhD candidates Martin van Aswegen and Will Gough.