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.
All life depends on peaceful coexistence with a swarm of microbial life inside us that performs vital services from helping to convert food to energy to protection from disease. With the help of a squid that uses a luminescent bacterium to create a predator-fooling light organ and a fish that uses a different strain of the same species of bacteria like a flashlight to illuminate the dark nooks of the reefs where it lives, scientists have found that gaining a single gene is enough for the microbe to switch host animals.
Monash Institute of Medical Research (MIMR) scientists have created Australia's first induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines. They have derived the cells from skin cells, and reprogrammed them to behave as embryonic stem cells; a breakthrough that will allow Australian scientists unlimited access to study a range of diseases.Until now, Australian scientists have had to import human iPS cells from America or Japan.Program leader, Dr Paul Verma, said the significance of developing iPS cells 'in-house' cannot be underestimated. "We now have the capability to investigate any human disease we wish, rather than relying on iPS cells from specific diseases that have been generated elsewhere."
A new find in Arctic Canada strongly suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean. In 2006, John Tarduno, professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester and leader of the Arctic expedition, led an expedition to the Arctic to study paleomagnetism—the Earth's magnetic field in the distant past. Knowing from previous expeditions to the area that the rocks were rich with fossils, Tarduno kept an eye out for them and was rewarded when one of his undergraduate students uncovered the amazingly well preserved shell of a turtle.
If you're a woman and need an excuse not to clean the carpet, it's your lucky day. The bad news is, whatever you may already have done may have an impact on having kids. Researchers at the UCLA School of Public Health have found the first evidence that perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs — chemicals that are widely used in everyday items such as food packaging, pesticides, clothing, upholstery, carpets and personal care products — may be associated with infertility in women.
Want to know if you have an honest dentist? Tell him you want to try UV tooth bleaching. A study in Photochemical&Photobiological Sciences writes the lack of any enhanced bleaching effect is bad enough but it also damages skin and eyes up to four times as much as sunbathing.And as with sunbathing, fair-skinned or light-sensitive people are at even greater risk, said lead author Ellen Bruzell of the Nordic Institute of Dental Materials. Bruzell also found that bleaching damaged teeth. She saw more exposed grooves on the enamel surface of bleached teeth than on unbleached teeth. These grooves make the teeth more vulnerable to mechanical stress.Want skin damage?
Creationism, the rejection of the scientific basis of evolutionary theory, is experiencing a resurgence among Europeans. The Department of Biology and Didactics of Biology at the TU Dortmund has organized an international conference addressing the issue, titled “Attitude and Knowledge concerning Evolution and Science in Europe (AKESE)”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education.On February 20th, researchers from different scientific backgrounds and seven European countries will meet at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Dortmund to discuss the scientific significance of evolutionary theory, its lack of social acceptance and the negative attitude towards science that rejection of evolution entails.
It would seem that in a bad economy, tax cuts make the most sense. Letting people keep their money instead of letting the government spend money to collect taxes, spend money to institute government programs and then pay government employees to write checks is believed to lead to a great deal of waste.
How many Cardinals can fit on the head of a pin? Still unknown, but Stanford physicists can at least tell us how many letters formed by quantum electron waves can fit on the surface of a sliver of copper - two; as in "S" and "U." That's for 'Stanford' and 'University' if you haven't caught on and Cardinals are their ... oh, never mind, if you didn't already get it you stopped reading by now.So how small is that? The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter. Bonus: the wave patterns even project a tiny hologram of the data, which can be viewed with a powerful microscope.
Biology exists in a physical world and cancer researchers are increasingly looking to include concepts of physics and mathematics in their efforts to understand how cancer develops -- and how to stop it.Traditional cancer biology involves taking a sample of cells and holding them in time so they can be studied. Then the researchers look at that slice of cells to understand what signals and pathways are involved. But that doesn't capture the full picture, says Sofia Merajver, M.D., Ph.D., co-director of the Breast Oncology Program at the University of Michigan Health System Comprehensive Cancer Center.
When it comes to assessing the romantic playing field -- who might be interested in whom -- men and women were shown to be equally good at gauging men's interest during an Indiana University study involving speed dating -- and equally bad at judging women's interest. Researchers expected women to have a leg up in judging romantic interest, because theoretically they have more to lose from a bad relationship, but no such edge was found.
In almost every diet book you read, they tell you to never get hungry. You will binge if you do, they all say, because of temptation and that gnawing in your stomach. Yet all those snacks and meals have corresponded to a ballooning obesity problem which gets instead blamed on trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, salt - you name it.It may be that all those self-help books and catering to mental weakness has caused a drop in self-control, says psychological theory. If you want to lose weight, keep a house full of chocolate.
Variations in the brightness of the Q0957+561 quasar, also known as the “twin quasar” due to its duplicated image on Earth, are intrinsic to the entity itself and not caused by the gravitational effects of possible planets or stars from a far away galaxy.This is the conclusion of a study carried out by Spanish researchers resolving a mystery that has intrigued astronomers for the past 30 years.
