Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
Carbon dioxide, in its ionic form bicarbonate, has a regulating function in the splitting of water in photosynthesis. This means that carbon dioxide has an additional role to being reduced to sugar, according to scientists at Umeå University in Sweden.
Tobacco is a high-density crop that is mowed several times throughout its cycle and that can be a good thing, because it can produce as much as 160 tons of fresh biomass per hectare.
Biomass that is suitable for producing bioethanol. Smoking cigarettes is bad but renewable energy is good, tobacco just needs some help from science.
Singlet oxygen is an electronically excited state of oxygen that is less stable than normal oxygen. Its high reactivity has enabled its use in photodynamic therapy, in which light is used in combination with a photosensitizing drug to generate large amounts of singlet oxygen to kill cancer cells or various pathogens.
Global warming may be a topic of debate and arguments about measurements and models, but some things are measurable right now, like environmental pollutants.
Although persistent environmental pollutants are released worldwide, the Arctic and Antarctic regions are significantly more contaminated with persistent organic pollutants than elsewhere; marine animals living there have some of the highest levels of persistent organic pollutant (POP) contamination of any creatures and the Inuit people of the Arctic, who rely on a diet of fish, seals and whales, have also been shown to have higher POP concentrations than people living in our latitudes.
A new paper suggests that genes evolve more rapidly in species containing germ plasm, which
challenges a long held belief about the way certain species of vertebrates evolved.
The results came about as the researchers put to the test a novel theory that early developmental events dramatically alter the vertebrate body plan and the way evolution proceeds.
Dog owners in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia might want to consider penning up their dogs more often: hybridization of wolves with shepherd dogs might be more common, and more recent, than previously thought, according to a recently published study in the Journal of Heredity (DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esu014).
Glacial cycles at 104-yr time scale have been the focus of Quaternary paleoclimatology over the last century. In recent years with the emergence of continuous high-resolution records (ice cores, deep-sea sediments etc.) from the longer geological past, increasing evidence underscores the significance of long- duration processes at the time scale of 105-yr or more. WANG Pinxian and colleagues from the State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, reviewed long-term variations in the oceanic carbon reservoir and indicated their crucial role in major climate regime changes over Quaternary glacial cycles.
The mechanism which underlies the susceptibility of liver disease patients to life-threatening infection has been uncovered by Wellcome Trust-funded medical scientists, who have also suggested a possible treatment to reverse immune suppression in these patients.
Liver disease, or cirrhosis, is currently the fifth leading cause of death in the UK. Cirrhosis patients are more than five times more likely to pick up infections in hospital than patients with other chronic conditions, due to reduced immunity which is a well-recognised feature of the disease.
"They can smell but they can't distinguish between chemical cues," Dixson said.
Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is absorbed into ocean waters, where it dissolves and lowers the pH of the water. Acidic waters affect fish behavior by disrupting a specific receptor in the nervous system, called GABAA, which is present in most marine organisms with a nervous system. When GABAA stops working, neurons stop firing properly.
Coral reef habitat studies have found that CO2-induced behavioral changes, similar to those observed in the new study, increase mortality from predation by more than fivefold in newly settled fish.
A phenomenon has long been believed in psychology: traumatic experiences induce behavioral disorders that are passed down from one generation to the next, a kind of psychological epigenetics.
Recently, neuroscientists have set out to understand what physiological processes might underlie this hereditary trauma. "There are diseases such as bipolar disorder, that run in families but can't be traced back to a particular gene", explains Isabelle Mansuy, professor at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. With her research group at the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich, she has been studying the molecular processes involved in non-genetic inheritance of behavioural symptoms induced by traumatic experiences in early life.
Scientists at Yale University have devised a dramatically faster way of identifying and characterizing complex alloys known as bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), a versatile type of pliable glass that's stronger than steel.
Using traditional methods, it usually takes a full day to identify a single metal alloy appropriate for making BMGs. The new method allows researchers to screen about 3,000 alloys per day and simultaneously ascertain certain properties, such as melting temperature and malleability.
"Instead of fishing with a single hook, we're throwing a big net," said Jan Schroers, senior author of the research, which was published online April 13 in the journal Nature Materials. "This should dramatically hasten the discovery of BMGs and new uses for them."
The complexity of biology can befuddle even the most sophisticated light microscopes because biological samples bend light in unpredictable ways, returning difficult-to-interpret information to the microscope and distorting the resulting image.
New imaging technology developed at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus rapidly corrects for these distortions and sharpens high-resolution images over large volumes of tissue.
