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.
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer and its unique ability to see small details, astronomers have uncovered a flat, nearly edge-on disc of silicates in the heart of the magnificent Ant Nebula. The disc seems, however, too 'skinny' to explain how the nebula got its intriguing ant-like shape.
The Ant Nebula is located about 5 000 light-years away. The central star is as bright as 10,000 Suns and has a temperature of 35, 000 degrees Celsius. It is the last phase before this solar-like star will become a white dwarf.
The Ant Nebula is one of the most striking planetary nebulae known.
The H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus can pass through the placenta of pregnant women to the unborn fetus, and can infect organs other than the lungs in adults.
Professor Jiang Gu, Peking University, Beijing, China and colleagues studied post-mortem tissues of two adults – one man and one pregnant woman, and also tested the dead fetus of the dead woman. They investigated how H5N1 – an emerging infectious disease which causes respiratory symptoms and a high fatality rate – affects different organs in the body.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a very common chronic illness that affects around 1% of people in developed countries. It is caused by an abnormal immune reaction to various tissues within the body. As well as affecting joints and causing an inflammatory arthritis, it can also affect many other organs of the body.
A paper published this week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine provides strong evidence that one specific part of the genome is associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
Rene Toes and colleagues from Leiden University Medical Center, the Karolinska Institute, and Celera studied four groups of patients and matched controls.
Cell phones are increasingly sophisticated -- sporting such features as cameras, music players, games, video clips, Internet access and, lest we forget, the capability to phone someone -- but these features come at a price: memory.
Now computer engineers at Northwestern University and NEC Laboratories America, Inc. are the first to do what many thought impossible -- they have developed technology that doubles the usable memory on cell phones and other embedded systems without any changes to hardware or applications.
NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on its way to study a pair of asteroids after lifting off Thursday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:34 a.m. EDT.
Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., received telemetry on schedule at 9:44 a.m. indicating Dawn had achieved proper orientation in space and its massive solar array was generating power from the sun.
"Dawn has risen, and the spacecraft is healthy," said the mission's project manager Keyur Patel of JPL.
Contrary to arguments by critics, a University of Utah-led study found that legalizing physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and the Netherlands did not result in a disproportionate number of deaths among the elderly, poor, women, minorities, uninsured, minors, chronically ill, less educated or psychiatric patients.
Of 10 “vulnerable groups” examined in the study, only AIDS patients used doctor-assisted suicide at elevated rates.
“Fears about the impact on vulnerable people have dominated debate about physician-assisted suicide.
The Model Institutions for Excellence Program (MIE) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has developed a body of work over the past 11 years demonstrating successful strategies for recruiting underrepresented minority students to science and engineering fields and supporting their successful completion of science degrees.
Five minority-serving institutions--Bowie State University in Maryland, Spelman College in Atlanta, Universidad Metropolitana in Puerto Rico, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans--plus the Oyate Consortium, representing three tribal colleges in the Midwest, are MIE's participating institutions.
Two major steps toward putting quantum computers into real practice — sending a photon signal on demand from a qubit onto wires and transmitting the signal to a second, distant qubit — have been brought about by a team of scientists at Yale.
Over the past several years, the research team of Professors Robert Schoelkopf in applied physics and Steven Girvin in physics has explored the use of solid-state devices resembling microchips as the basic building blocks in the design of a quantum computer. Now, for the first time, they report that superconducting qubits, or artificial atoms, have been able to communicate information not only to their nearest neighbor, but also to a distant qubit on the chip.
Growing inside the caves of the tropical Pacific island of Borneo are some of the keys to understanding how the Earth's climate suddenly changed - several times - over the last 25,000 years. By analyzing stalagmites, the pilar-like rock formations that stem from the ground in caves, they were able to produce a high-resolution and continuous record of the climate over this equatorial rainforest.
"These stalagmites are, in essence, tropical ice cores forming over thousands of years," said Partin.
If our planet did not have the ability to store oxygen in the deep reaches of its mantle there would probably be no life on its surface, according to scientists at the University of Bonn who have subjected the mineral majorite to close laboratory examination.
Majorite normally occurs only at a depth of several hundred kilometres under very high pressures and temperatures. The Bonn researchers have now succeeded in demonstrating that, under these conditions, the mineral stores oxygen and performs an important function as an oxygen reservoir. Near the earth's surface the structure breaks down, releasing oxygen, which then binds with hydrogen from the earth's interior to form water. Without this mechanism our "Blue Planet" might well be as dry and inhospitable as Mars.
Analyses conducted by researchers from Université Laval’s Center for Northern Studies reveal that aquatic life in Ward Hunt Lake, the continent’s northernmost lake, is affected by climate change.
Ward Hunt Lake is a body of water located on a small island north of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, has undergone major transformations within the last two centuries. The speed and range of these transformations—unprecedented in the lake’s last 8,000 years—suggest that climate change related to human activity could be at the source of this phenomenon.
The researchers’ conclusions are based on the analysis of a sediment core extracted in the center of Ward Hunt Lake in August 2003.
World Wildlife Fund scientists said today that the discovery of 11 new animal and plant species in a remote area in central Vietnam underscores the importance of conservation efforts in the ancient tropical forests of the region.
Within the ancient tropical forests of a region known as Vietnam's "Green Corridor," scientists found a snake, five orchids, and two butterflies as well as three other plants new to science and exclusive to the Annamites Mountain Range. Ten other plant species, including four orchids, are still under examination but also appear to be new species.
Acanthosaurus lizard (C) Leonid Averyanov
