A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
The farthest we have 'seen' in space just got a little farther away, thanks to ESO's Very Large Telescope and GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) 090423.VLT has shown that a faint gamma-ray burst detected last Thursday is the signature of the explosion of the earliest, most distant known object in the Universe (a redshift of 8.2). The explosion apparently took place more than 13 billion years ago, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang.
An international team of researchers has determined key structural features of the largest known virus -the mimivirus, called by some a possible "missing link" between viruses and living cells. It was discovered accidentally by French scientists in 1992 but wasn't confirmed to be a virus until 2003. The findings may help determine whether the unusual virus causes any human diseases.The virus infects amoebas, but it is thought to possibly be a human pathogen because antibodies to the virus have been discovered in pneumonia patients. However, many details about the virus remain unknown, said Michael Rossmann, Purdue University's Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences.
Facial recognition is not as automatic as it may seem, according to researchers who have identified specific areas in the brain devoted solely to picking out faces among other objects we encounter.Two specific effects have been established as being critical for facial recognition – holistic processing (in which we view the face as a whole, instead of in various parts) and left-side bias (in which we have a preference for the left side of the face). Psychologists Janet H. Hsiao from the University of Hong Kong and Garrison W. Cottrell from the University of California, San Diego wanted to test if these effects were specific for facial recognition or if they help us to identify other objects as well.
"The Lost World", published in 1912, is not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous work but his account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago has lasted into modern times in a way Sherlock Holmes has not - at least until the new Robert Downey movie comes out with him in the starring role.
In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affected animals so that they could assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus might emerge and determine how dangerous it would be.Their reasoning was that the worst fears of infectious disease experts - that the H5N1 avian influenza virus circulating in parts of Asia might combine with a human-adapted flu virus, namely if someone with a flu virus also contracted the avian virus - might result in a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world. A pandemic of the kind not seen in almost a hundred years.
Filligent, a Hong Kong-based biotech company, is mobilizing stocks of its anti-infective BioMask to help combat the global spread of the deadly new Mexican strain of Influenza A. The BioMask is the first medical face mask to kill the Influenza A virus within seconds of contact while retaining the breathability required by front-line workers and children, who are often the first to fall in a contagious episode.
If pizza isn't already on the list of 7 greatest inventions of the post-modern world (because nothing goes with wanting to strangle someone who invokes Foucault like a nice slice of pepperoni) a new discovery may put it there; the physics of the perfect pizza toss have inspired Monash University to design the next generation of micro motors ... thinner that a human hair.
The idea that far distant particles can somehow 'talk' to each other led Einstein to call it 'spooky action at a distance'.Having confirmed its existence, scientists today are learning how to use this 'spooky action' as a helpful tool. Now a team of physicists at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London have harnessed this phenomenon to shed light on another unusual and previously difficult aspect of quantum physics - that of distinguishing between two similar quantum devices.In the everyday world any process can be considered as a black box device with an input and an output; if you wish to identify the device you simply apply inputs, measure the outputs and determine what must have happened in between.
Autism is a complex brain disorder that impairs social, communications and behavioral development. It is often characterized by extreme behavior. A new study by University of Utah School of Medicine researchers and conducted with Utah children says kids who are firstborn or breech or whose mothers are 35 or older when giving birth are at significantly greater risk for developing an autism spectrum disorder.Firstborn? Those are 50% of all kids in America. In the April 27, 2009,issue of Pediatrics, the researchers say that: Women who give birth at 35 or older are 1.7 times more likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), compared with women between the ages of 20-34;
Scientists of Helmholtz Zentrum München, led by Professor Martin Hrabé de Angelis, director of the Institute of Experimental Genetics, have developed a new mouse model with a genetic mutant in which a single base of a specific microRNA seed region has been altered. Mice carrying this miR-96 mutation suffer progressive hearing loss as they get older. Moreover, if they carry two of these mutants, their sensory hair cells are impaired from birth on.
Most people are expert readers, but it is something of an enigma how our brain achieved expertise in such a recent cultural invention which requires a cognitive interface between vision and language.The first alphabetic scripts are thought to have been invented only around four to five thousand years ago so it is unlikely that enough time has elapsed to allow the evolution of specialized parts of the brain for reading. While neuroimaging techniques have made some progress in understanding the neural underpinning of this essentially cultural skill, the exact unfolding of brain activity has remained elusive.
The theory that the Chicxulub crater holds the clue to the demise of the dinosaurs and 40 percent of all species 65 million years ago is challenged in a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society. The Chicxulub crater, discovered in 1978 in northern Yucutan and measuring about 112 miles in diameter, lies under a km of debris and records a massive extra-terrestrial impact by an object 10-20 km in size.
