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.
If you're a man and have Lou Gehrig's Disease - Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - there is good news if you drink caffeine. Antioxidants, such as in coffee, can help. The bad news is you still have ALS and there is no caffeine benefit for women found so far.Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a fatal disease that damages key neurons in the brain and spinal cord. The disease causes progressive paralysis of voluntary muscles and often death within five years of symptoms. Although ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) was discovered over a century ago, neither the cause nor a cure have been found, but several mechanisms seem to play a role in its development, including oxidative stress.
According to lore (because apparently before the Internet, if it appeared in writing it had to be true) diarist Samual Pepes originally said, "Laughter is the best medicine."On a science site, we are inclined to note that 'medicine is the best medicine' - but studies have shown that laughter can't hurt ... and it may help.
How many times have you had some pithy comment in prose be misinterpreted when you just know that if the other people could simply hear your voice or see your face they would know how brilliant you are?It happens a lot and emoticons, along with their evil cousin ALL CAPITALIZATION AND !!! PUNCTUATION, were invented to try and close the communications gap. Now European researchers at the PASION project have developed a suite of tools to add non-verbal cues to email, phone calls, chats and other channels of electronic communication. Digital communication hasn’t the richness of face-to-face conversation because it cannot communicate the non-verbal cues and contextual information that are so important to us all.
Women get more knee injuries than men and new research from the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary say there may be a connection between the laxity of a woman's knee joint and her monthly hormone cycle.The research project — a collaboration between kinesiology, engineering and health sciences researchers — has found that not all woman experience knee laxity at the same time of their menst rual cycle. The researchers speculate that this is likely why previous research in the area has largely discounted a connection between the hormone cycle and knee injury.
The most crowded collision of galaxy clusters has been identified by combining information from three different telescopes. This result gives scientists a chance to learn what happens when some of the largest objects in the Universe go at each other in a cosmic free-for-all.Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, astronomers were able to determine the three-dimensional geometry and motion in the system MACSJ0717.5+3745 (or MACSJ0717 for short) located about 5.4 billion light years from Earth.
What's different about nocturnal mammals that have 'night vision'? According to a Cell report, the DNA within the photoreceptor rod cells responsible for low light vision is packaged in a very unconventional way. That special DNA architecture turns the rod cell nuclei themselves into tiny light-collecting lenses, with millions of them in every nocturnal eye.
There's a perception among some that it's a man's world and they get all the attention. If you've ever been in a bar or a library or a baseball game, you know this is not true - have a woman drop a napkin and see what happens whereas a man could be bleeding out his eyes and be unnoticed. But women want to keep men on their toes by pretending they are in charge.Now the gig may be up, thanks to biology. University of California, Berkeley biologist Doris Bachtrog and her colleagues say that the history of the X chromosome offers important clues to the origins and benefits of sexual reproduction. X even compensates for the degeneration of Y, which will get people talking.Take that, much-studied male-determining Y chromosome.
What? NASA wants to make Earth Day about space?Not at all, NASA is instead asking the public to vote for the most important contribution the space agency has made to exploring and understanding Earth and improving the way we live on our home planet. That's right, they call this our home planet, which means there may be a vacation planet on the way. That's thinking big, people.
Combating several human pathogens, including some biological warfare agents, may one day become a bit easier thanks to research reported by a University of Iowa chemist and his colleagues in the April 16 issue of the journal Nature.Amnon Kohen, associate professor of chemistry in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said that the study indicated a new mechanism by which certain organisms manufacture the DNA base thymidylate. This new mechanism is so very different from the way humans synthesize this base that drugs targeting this biosynthetic path in the pathogens are unlikely to affect the human path, thus resulting in very reduced side effects or no side effects at all.
An unmapped reservoir of briny liquid chemically similar to sea water, but buried under an inland Antarctic glacier, appears to support unusual microbial life in a place where cold, darkness and lack of oxygen would previously have led scientists to believe nothing could survive, according to newly published research.After sampling and analyzing the outflow from below the Taylor Glacier, an outlet glacier of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the otherwise ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, researchers believe that, lacking enough light to make food through photosynthesis, the microbes have adapted over the past 1.5 million years to manipulate sulfur and iron compounds to survive.
Scientists have found an ancient ecosystem below an Antarctic glacier and learned that it survived millions of years by transforming sulfur and iron compounds for growth.
New research provides insight into how the brain can execute different actions in response to the same stimulus. The study, published by Cell Press in the April 16 issue of the journal Neuron, suggests that information from single brain cells cannot be interpreted differently within a short time period, a finding that is important for understanding both normal cognition and psychiatric disorders.
