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.
Experiments with ultrashort laser pulses support the idea that quantum interactions between molecules help plants, algae, and some bacteria efficiently gather light to fuel their growth - but that's about it. Key details of nature's vital light-harvesting mechanisms remain obscure, and the exact role that quantum physics may play in understanding them is more subtle than was once thought.
Overworked patent offices are struggling to keep up with the rapid explosion in information and technology that genetic sequences represent. An international project may have a solution - a free and open public resource that will bring transparency to the murky and contentious world of gene patenting.
"Apparently, many patent offices have no way of tracking genetic sequences disclosed in patents and currently do not provide them in machine-searchable format," said principal author Professor Osmat Jefferson, a Queensland University of Technology academic who leads an international team analysing biological patents for the open-access web resource, The Lens.
Almost 90 percent of children and adults with a highly aggressive form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) showed no evidence of cancer after receiving a personalized cell therapy that reprograms a patient's immune system.
In pilot studies of bio-engineered T cells that attack leukemia, 24 of 27 patients (89%) experienced complete responses within 28 days after treatment. In all, 27 patients received the treatment - 22 children treated at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and five adults treated at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Experimental techniques and computer simulations have determined a new way of predicting how water dissolves crystalline structures like those found in natural stone and cement.
In a new study, the team shows that their method is more efficient at predicting the dissolution rates of crystalline structures in water than previous methods. The research could have wide-ranging impacts in diverse areas, including water quality and planning, environmental sustainability, corrosion resistance and cement construction.
Microscopy is the universal diagnostic method for detection of most globally important parasitic infections.
But it's not cheap. Methods developed in well-equipped laboratories are not available at the basic levels of the health care system due to lack of resources. Researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, FIMM, University of Helsinki and Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, have now shown that novel techniques for high-resolution imaging and image transfer over data networks may be utilized to solve these diagnostic problems.
The majority of all violent crime in Sweden is committed by a small number of people and they have a definable demographic - personality disorders, substance abuse problems and almost all males (92%) who early in life develop violent criminality and begin with a large number of non-violent crimes.
In their paper, the scholars at Sahlgrenska Academy examined 2.5 million people in Swedish criminal and population registers
and matched all convictions for violent crime in Sweden between 1973 and 2004 with nation-wide population register for those born between 1958 to 1980 (2.5 million).
In recent times, olive oil became one of the lowest health fads. Its popularity grew to such an extent that it became difficult to know if you were even buying olive oil, much less the extra virgin kind it might say on the label.
You may have been better off with the vegetable oil that might have been in it, as it turns out. Corn oil significantly reduces cholesterol with more favorable changes in total cholesterol (TC) and LDL-C than extra virgin olive oil, according to a new paper presented today at the American Society for Nutrition's Advances&Controversies in Clinical Nutrition Conference.
Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have discovered that the skin is capable of communicating with the liver. The discovery has surprised the scientists, and they say that it may help our understanding of how skin diseases can affect the rest of the body.
Professor Susanne Mandrup and her research group in collaboration with Nils Færgeman's research group at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Southern Denmark was actually studying something completely different when they made the groundbreaking discovery: That the skin, which is the body's largest organ, can "talk" to the liver.
A human ancestor
dated to 1.34 million years old and belonging to Paranthropus boisei at the Olduvai Gorge World Heritage fossil site in Tanzania
is characterized by a "robust" jaw and skull bones and was a muscular creature with a gorilla-like upper body and more adaptive to its environment than previously thought, scientists have discovered.
The partial skeleton -- including arm, hand, leg and foot fragments -- represents one of the most recent occurrences of P. boisei before its extinction in East Africa.
A breakthrough in understanding how cataracts form could be used to help prevent the world's leading cause of blindness, which currently affects nearly 20 million people worldwide.
It has long been known that human eyes have a powerful ability to focus because of three kinds of crystallin proteins in their lenses, maintaining transparency via a delicate balance of both repelling and attracting light.
Two types of crystallin are structural, but the third – dubbed a "chaperone" – keeps the others from clumping into cataracts if they're modified by genetic mutation, ultraviolet light or chemical damage.
The image of robotics in popular culture is classic science fiction; cogwheels, pistons and levers with perhaps a layer of rubberized skin: miniaturized robots of the future will be "soft".
"If I think of the robots of tomorrow, what comes to mind are the tentacles of an octopus or the trunk of an elephant rather than the mechanical arm of a crane or the inner workings of a watch. And if I think of micro-robots then I think of unicellular organisms moving in water. The robots of the future will be increasingly like biological organisms," explains Antonio De Simone of
International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA).
Life grew as a result of natural processes that used Earth's raw materials.
Models of life's origins almost always look to minerals for such essential tasks as the synthesis of life's molecular building blocks or the supply of metabolic energy, but this assumes that the mineral species found on Earth today are much the same as they were during Earth's first 550 million years — the Hadean Eon — when life emerged.
A new analysis of Hadean mineralogy
published in American Journal of Science
