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.
Here are nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is a hundred to a thousand times smaller than our Milky Way Galaxy.
"These are among the lowest mass galaxies ever directly observed in the early universe," says Nor Pirzkal of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency in Baltimore, Md.
The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing.
It’s well known that the child’s brain has a remarkable capacity for change, but controversy rages about the extent to which such plasticity exists in the adult human brain -- particularly, in the part responsible for vision.
Now, scientists from The Johns Hopkins University and MIT offer evidence -- derived from both brain imaging and behavioral studies -- that the adult visual cortex (the area of the brain that receives images from the eyes) does, indeed, have the ability to reorganize. Moreover, that reorganization affects visual perception.
A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates biologists trying to save Colorado's native greenback cutthroat trout from extinction over the past several decades through hatchery propagation and restocking efforts have, in most cases, inadvertently restored the wrong fish.
According to a sophisticated DNA analysis, five of nine "relic" populations of what biologists believed to be greenback cutthroat trout living in isolated pockets of the state actually are Colorado River cutthroat trout, a closely related subspecies, said lead author Jessica Metcalf, a researcher in CU-Boulder's ecology and evolutionary biology department.
Physicists at the University of Michigan have coaxed two separate atoms to communicate with a sort of quantum intuition that Albert Einstein called "spooky."
In doing so, the researchers have made an advance toward super-fast quantum computing. The research could also be a building block for a quantum internet.
Scientists used light to establish what's called "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped a meter apart in separate enclosures (think of entangling like controlling the outcome of one coin flip with the outcome of a separate coin flip).
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (Lupus) are considered autoimmune inflammatory diseases, where the body’s immune system attacks healthy tissue. In RA, the immune system attacks the linings of the joints and sometimes other organs. In lupus, it attacks the internal organs, joints and skin. If not well controlled, both diseases can lead to significant disability.
A genetic variation has been identified that increases the risk of two these chronic diseases.
Reproductive efficiency has suffered a dramatic decrease since the mid-1980s despite rapid worldwide progress in genetics and management of high producing dairy herds.
Researchers from the University of Barcelona propose that summer heat stress is likely to be a major factor related to low fertility in high producing dairy herds, especially in countries with warm weather.
The environmental temperature, radiant energy, relative humidity, and wind speed all contribute to the degree of heat stress. Heat stress may be defined as any combination of environmental variables that give rise to conditions that are higher than those of the temperature range of the animal’s thermal neutral zone.
Rice University biomedical engineers have developed a new technique for growing cartilage from human embryonic stem cells, a method that could be used to grow replacement cartilage for the surgical repair of knee, jaw, hip, and other joints.
"Because native cartilage is unable to heal itself, researchers have long looked for ways to grow replacement cartilage in the lab that could be used to surgically repair injuries," said lead researcher Kyriacos A. Athanasiou, the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Bioengineering.
Scientists know that inside each cell, a little engine called RNA polymerase II does one essential job: It copies instructions from genes in the nucleus that get carried to production units in the rest of the cell to support our daily needs.
Now researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School have shown that RNA polymerase II also constantly scans the cell’s DNA for damage. When certain types of damage in DNA halt the action of RNA polymerase II, a stress signal is generated that alerts a key tumor-suppressor protein called p53.
The activities of p53, a master protein that responds to DNA damage by marshaling hundreds of genes to repair or eliminate damaged cells, have been the subject of thousands of studies.
New insights into the role of estrogen receptor in mammary gland development may help scientists better understand the molecular origin of breast cancer, according to new research from the University of Cincinnati.
About a decade ago, U.S. scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) developed a standard estrogen receptor (ER) gene knock-out mouse model to study the estrogen receptor’s role in human diseases.
“Unfortunately, because these mice lacked mammary glands as a consequence of genetic manipulation, using this model to study the relationship between the estrogen receptor and breast cancer proved ineffective,” explains Sohaib Khan, PhD, professor of cell and cancer biology.
A study by researchers at the University of Southampton has shown evidence of increased levels of hyperactivity in young children consuming mixtures of some artificial food colors and the preservative sodium benzoate.
The possibility of food colors and preservatives affecting children's behavior has long been an unresolved question for parents. This significant new research by a team from the University of Southampton's Schools of Psychology and Medicine provides a clear demonstration that changes in behavior can be detected in three-year-old and eight-year-old children.
A common hospital superbug called Clostridium has a protective coat of armor that can self assemble when put into a test tube on its own, which may have important commercial uses in nanotechnology, according to scientists.
Like many other micro-organisms, Clostridium difficile produces a lattice coat made of proteins to surround its cell wall and protect it like a suit of armour. The complete protein coat is then attached to the underlying cell wall with chemical bonds.
“We have discovered that these protein coats have a remarkable ability to self-assemble when they are taken off the bacteria and put into a test tube.
How we come to express the genes of one parent over the other is now better understood through studying the platypus and marsupial wallaby – and it doesn’t seem to have originated in association with sex chromosomes.
New research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology has shed light on the evolution of genomic imprinting, in which specific genes on chromosomes that have been inherited from one parent are expressed in an organism, while the same genes on the chromosome inherited from the other parent are repressed.
Imprinting arises from some kind of ‘epigenetic memory’ – modifications to the DNA from one parent, such as the way the chromosomal material is packaged, that do not allow particular genes to be expressed. The reasons why imprinting evolved are not understood.
