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.
In honor of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birthday on February 12, 2009, Mike White at Adaptive Complexity decided to engage in a massive undertaking; 30 days of science in Show Me The Science month. Nothing new, you might think, because we do science 365 days a year and some people who are just bloggers post 5 things every day.
An unusual spiral galaxy in the Coma galaxy cluster has been imaged using data obtained by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. It reveals fine details of the galaxy, NGC 4921, and an extraordinary rich background of more remote galaxies stretching back to the early Universe. The Coma galaxy cluster, in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice, is one of the closest, very rich collections of galaxies in the nearby Universe. The cluster, also known as Abell 1656, is about 320 million light-years from Earth and contains more than 1000 members. The brightest galaxies, including NGC 4921 shown here, were discovered back in the late 18th century by William Herschel.
One testament to the pervasive nature of evolution is that so many varied groups, even ones in opposition to each other, found an endorsement in his work. Proponents of eugenics, slavery and even Hitler could rationalize their views saying it was just evoluti0n while abolitionists saw just the opposite.
The simple recipe scientists earlier discovered for making adult stem cells behave like embryonic-like stem cells just got even simpler. A new report in the February 6th issue of the journal Cell shows for the first time that neural stem cells taken from adult mice can take on the characteristics of embryonic stem cells with the addition of a single transcription factor. Transcription factors are genes that control the activity of other genes.
Laboratory work in animals showed limited activity when statins were given to prevent breast cancer, according to a report in the February issue of Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Statins, sold under brand names like Lipitor and Zocor, are primarily given to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease, and prominent cardiologists almost universally agree that their use has changed the landscape. The use of these drugs in cancer prevention has been more controversial. Results of epidemiology studies, which rely on looking backward rather than forward and thus are subject to confounding factors, have yielded mixed results when examining breast cancer.
Emergence of black-colored wolves is the direct result of humans raising dogs as pets and beasts of burden, according to new research by a University of Calgary biologist in Science. The dark coloring may also aid the survival of the species as wolf habitat is affected by climate change in the future, the study suggests.
A missing link in the evolution of the front claw of living scorpions and horseshoe crabs was identified with the discovery of a 390 million-year-old fossil by researchers at Yale and the University of Bonn, Germany.
Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History, have unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species they named Titanoboa cerrejonensis. Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world's largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in the Americas, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago.
As many as 2.4 million Americans have schizophrenia so a late or incorrect diagnosis and the lack of effective treatment options can destroy a sufferer's quality of life. Schizophrenia usually emerges between the ages of 18 and 30 but diagnosis before the disease manifests itself could be the key to developing more successful treatments, says Prof. Talma Hendler, of Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychology.Until now, detecting mental illness before symptoms appear has been nearly impossible. Building on her groundbreaking work on facial recognition and brain imaging, Prof. Hendler is hoping to make early diagnosis a reality by identifying the physical markers of mental illness — particularly schizophrenia — inside the brain.
Influenza is and remains a disease to reckon with. Seasonal epidemics around the world kill several hundred thousand people every year. In the light of looming pandemics if bird flu strains develop the ability to infect humans easily, new drugs and vaccines are desperately sought. Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the joint Unit of Virus Host-Cell Interaction (UVHCI) of EMBL, the University Joseph Fourier (UJF) and the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Grenoble, France, have now precisely defined an important drug target in influenza. In this week's Nature they publish a high-resolution image of a crucial protein domain that allows the virus to hijack human cells and multiply in them.
University of Minnesota researchers say they have identified the "master gene" behind blood vessel development. Using genetically engineered mice, researchers with the University of Minnesota Medical School's Lillehei Heart Institute were able to identify a protein, Nkx2-5, which activates a certain gene, and in turn, determines the fate of a group of cells in a developing embryo. Better understanding of how this gene operates in the early stages of development may help researchers find better treatments for heart disease and cancer.
An international research team of scientists from UC Riverside, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Geoscience Australia, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom has found the oldest evidence for animals in the fossil record.The researchers examined sedimentary rocks in south Oman, and found an anomalously high amount of distinctive steroids that date back to 635 million years ago, to around the end of the last immense ice age. The steroids are produced by sponges – one of the simplest forms of multicellular animals.
