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.
Biologists have found a major clue in a 50-year-old mystery about what happens to green sea turtles after they crawl out of their sandy nests and vanish into the surf, only to reappear several years later relatively close to shore.
Three University of Florida sea turtle scientists say they found the clue by analyzing chemical elements ingrained in the turtles’ shells. Their conclusion: The turtles spend their first three to five “lost years” in the open ocean, feeding on jellyfish and other creatures as carnivores. Only after this period do they move closer to shore and switch to a vegetarian diet of sea grass – the period in their lives when they have long been observed and studied.
A molecular “recycling plant” permits nerve cells in the brain to carry out two seemingly contradictory functions – changeable enough to record new experiences, yet permanent enough to maintain these memories over time.
The discovery of this molecular recycling plant provides new insights into how the basic units of learning and memory function. Individual memories are “burned onto” hundreds of receptors that are constantly in motion around nerve synapses – gaps between individual nerve cells crucial for signals to travel throughout the brain.
While the visual regions of the brain have been intensively mapped, many important regions for auditory processing remain terra incognita. Now, researchers have identified the region responsible for a key auditory process—perceiving “sound space,” the location of sounds. The findings settle a controversy in earlier studies that failed to establish the auditory region, called the planum temporale, as responsible for perceiving auditory space.
Leon Y. Deouell and colleagues published their findings in the September 20, 2007 issue of the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press.
Studies by other researchers had shown that the planum temporale was activated when people were asked to perform tasks in which they located sounds in space.
Retrieving material for composting from open dumps across the developing world could reduce the environmental impact of growing mountains of waste, according to researchers in India.
People in the developing world are encouraged to compost garden waste or dispose of it in "green" garbage bins for collection and processing. In the developing world, the problems are very different. Open dumps are prevalent and have a poor environmental record, according to environmental engineer Kurian Joseph and colleagues at Anna University in Chennai, India.
Joseph's team is proposing landfill mining as a viable means of rehabilitating these open dumps.
Your mother called it 'settling.' Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young said “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Let's face it, not everyone can have their perfect mate so you have to make do.
Yet in the animal kingdom, females and males apparently have ways to compensate that increase the chance their offspring will survive even if the parents are not genetic ideals.
Patricia Adair Gowaty calls it the "Compensation Hypothesis."
Imagine turning a bad micro-organism, like E. coli, into a micro-factory that produces pharmaceutical compounds to fight aging or obesity.
University at Buffalo researchers say they can do it and have filed for a patent.
First Wave Technologies, Inc. recently received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation to focus on the biosynthesis of a popular group of flavonoids called isoflavonoids.
Observations and climate model results confirm that human-induced warming of the planet is having a pronounced effect on the atmosphere’s total moisture content.
“When you heat the planet, you increase the ability of the atmosphere to hold moisture,” said Benjamin Santer, lead author from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Program for Climate Modeling and Intercomparison. “The atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988, and natural variability in climate just can’t explain this moisture change.
Phosgene is most famous for being part of the chemical arsenal used in the trenches during World War I - generals preferred it over chlorine because soldiers coughed less and therefore inhaled more. It was still stockpiled in military arsenals after the Second World War but its presence in the atmosphere today is due to man-made chlorinated hydrocarbons used in the chemical industry.
Phosgene still plays a major role in the preparation of pharmaceuticals, herbicides, insecticides, synthetic foams, resins and polymers.
Professor Peter Bernath of the Department of Chemistry at the University of York and a research team have carried out the first study of the global distribution of the gas.
An international team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope has discovered that the south pole of Neptune is much hotter than the rest of the planet. This is consistent with the fact that it is late southern summer and this region has been in sunlight for about 40 years.
The scientists are publishing the first temperature maps of the lowest portion of Neptune's atmosphere, showing that this warm south pole is providing an avenue for methane to escape out of the deep atmosphere.
"The temperatures are so high that methane gas, which should be frozen out in the upper part of Neptune's atmosphere (the stratosphere), can leak out through this region," said Glenn Orton, lead author of the paper reporting the results.
Everyone knows that how you say something can be as important as what you say. "Framing" is the science buzzword for 2007 and, as discussed in Do scientists need to 'frame' the debate for non-scientists? framing can be used for good or evil.
Both sides of the global warming debate accuse each other of framing and even some science sites persistently use framing to advance whatever agenda they are promoting. This has led to a great deal of discussion and research.
It's been recognized that most scientists are quite ethical in their research but discussions with non-experts is more of a grey area.
The Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to establish "The Origins Project," a center for integrated research, education and public outreach focused on the chemistry that may have led to the origin of life.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of California at Berkeley have now discovered that knowing the molecular structure of a substance can help predict whether we will find its smell pleasant or distasteful.
In sight and hearing our perceptions are determined by the physical properties of waves – the length of light waves in sight, and the frequency of sound waves in hearing - yet there was no known physical factor that could explain how our brains sense odors. The new study, conducted by Prof. Noam Sobel and his colleagues, represents a first step in understanding the physical laws that underlie our perception of smell.
