Curated News: PNAS

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Chemical analysis of some of the world’s oldest rocks, by an international team led by McGill University researchers, has provided the earliest record yet of Earth's atmosphere. The results show that the air 4 billion years ago was very similar to that more than a billion years later, when the atmosphere -- though it likely would have been lethal to oxygen-dependent humans -- supported a thriving microbial biosphere that ultimately gave rise to the diversity of life on Earth today.

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Picking a needle out of a haystack might seem like the stuff of fairytales, but our brains can be electrically “tuned” to enable us to do a much better job of finding what we’re looking for, even in a crowded and distracting scene, new research indicates.

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Case Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have identified new gene mutations unique to colon cancers in African Americans – the population with the highest incidence and death rates of any group for this disease.

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A team led by Tufts University researchers discovered that a communications breakdown between two biochemical pathways is involved in causing cataracts in mice. The newfound relationship between the ubiquitin and calpain pathways may lead to pharmaceuticals and dietary approaches that can prolong the function of the relevant pathways and delay the onset of cataracts in people.

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Case Western Reserve researchers have identified a two-pronged therapeutic approach that shows great potential for weakening and then defeating cancer cells. The team’s complex mix of genetic and biochemical experiments unearthed a way to increase the presence of a tumor-suppressing protein.

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A new study reveals that certain features of metal surfaces can stop the process of oxidation in its tracks. The findings could be relevant to understanding and perhaps controlling oxidation in a wide range of materials—from catalysts to the superalloys used in jet engine turbines and the oxides in microelectronics.

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An international research team has shown how changes in a flu virus that has plagued Chinese poultry farms for decades helped create the novel avian H7N9 influenza A virus that has sickened more than 375 people since 2013. The research appears in the current online early edition of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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New research shows that modern human skeletons evolved into their lightly built form only relatively recently — after the start of the Holocene about 12,000 years ago, and even more recently in some human populations. The work, based on high-resolution imaging of bone joints from modern humans and chimpanzees as well as from fossils of extinct human species, shows that for millions of years, extinct humans had high bone density until a dramatic decrease in recent modern humans.

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Scientists from Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School and Fudan University have shown that blocking the Notch pathway plays an essential role that determines cochlear progenitor cell proliferation capacity.

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Is an experienced policymaker a more rational and a more self-interested bargainer than the average person? That is what nearly all prior research has assumed. But a new study from the University of California, San Diego shows just the opposite.

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Ask any woman: urinary tract infections are painful and unpredictable. University of Michigan researchers identify genes to help fight the infections that are becoming resistant to antibiotics.

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Los acontecimientos cotidianos se olvidan fácilmente, sin embargo las vivencias traumáticas que desencadenan miedo pueden quedar grabadas en el cerebro durante años. Desde esta semana, científicos de la Universidad de Nueva York y del Instituto Riken de Ciencia Cerebral en Japón han logrado que entendamos este fenómeno mucho mejor.

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Long known for its ability to help organisms successfully adapt to environmentally stressful conditions, the highly conserved molecular chaperone heat-shock protein 90 (HSP90) also enables estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancers to develop resistance to hormonal therapy.

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Triple-negative breast cancer is as bad as it sounds. The cells that form these tumors lack three proteins that would make the cancer respond to powerful, customized treatments. Instead, doctors are left with treating these patients with traditional chemotherapy drugs that only show long-term effectiveness in 20 percent of women with triple-negative breast cancer.

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An international research collaborative has determined that a promising anti-malarial compound tricks the immune system to rapidly destroy red blood cells infected with the malaria parasite but leave healthy cells unharmed. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists led the study, which appears in the current online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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Researchers at MIT's Koch Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital describe how a new light-triggered strategy can provide more accurate control over where aptamers accumulate.

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University of North Carolina scientists discovered how the chemo drug topotecan affects individual neurons to potentially cause "chemo fog." A similar long-term affect in the developing brain could trigger autism.

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Science textbooks say we can’t see infrared light. Like X-rays and radio waves, infrared light waves are longer than the light waves in the visual spectrum. But an international team of researchers has found that under certain conditions, the retina can sense infrared light after all.

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The most commonly used medications for osteoporosis worldwide, bisphosphonates, may also prevent certain kinds of lung, breast and colon cancers.

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What some farmers grow as pasture plants others view as weeds. But with the need to cheaply feed food animals rising, circumstances are right for the weed invasion to escalate.

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A research team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Loius has discovered that a commonly prescribed muscle relaxant may be an effective treatment for a rare but devastating form of diabetes. The drug, dantrolene, prevents the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in animal models of Wolfram syndrome.

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A new study shows for the first time that playing action video games improves not just the skills taught in the game, but learning capabilities more generally.

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Cats and humans have shared the same households for at least 9,000 years, but we still know very little about how our feline friends became domesticated. An analysis of the cat genome led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reveals some surprising clues. The research appears Nov. 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

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NYU Langone yeast geneticists report they have developed a novel tool — dubbed “the telomerator” — that could redefine the limits of synthetic biology and advance how successfully living things can be engineered or constructed in the laboratory based on an organism’s genetic, chemical base-pair structure.

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Patches of soaked soil act as hot spots for microbes removing nitrogen from groundwater and returning it to the atmosphere.The discovery provides insight into forest health and water quality, say researchers from Virginia Tech and Cornell.

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Using a technique that illuminates subtle changes in individual proteins, chemistry researchers at Cornell University have uncovered new insight into the underlying causes of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

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New work by a pioneering scientist details how subtle changes in mitochondrial function may cause a broad range of common metabolic and degenerative diseases.