Female giant African pouched rats, used for sniffing out landmines and detecting tuberculosis, can undergo astounding reproductive organ transformations, according to a new study.
Corporate investments in climate-tech start-ups are a growing but overlooked aspect of energy innovation. According to a new report from Morgan Edwards, a professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and her lead co-author at University of Maryland, these investments should be more fully considered as methods to advance climate technology.
In a study published in the journal Immunity, researchers describe a distinct and novel subset of memory B cells that predict long-lived antibody responses to influenza vaccination in humans.
Global data shows nearly 10 per cent of severe COVID-19 cases involve a secondary bacterial co-infection – with Staphylococcus aureus, also known as Staph A., being the most common organism responsible for co-existing infections with SARS-CoV-2.
UC San Diego researchers find stem cells use a surprising system for discarding misfolded proteins. This unique pathway could be the key to maintaining long-term health and preventing age-related blood and immune disorders.
The magnitude and quality of a key immune cell’s response to vaccination with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine were considerably lower in people with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to people without prior infection, a study has found.
The livelihoods of millions of people who live in river deltas, among the world’s most productive lands, are at risk. Created where large rivers meet the ocean and deposit their natural sediment load, river deltas are often just a few meters above sea level.
The gut is home to a cast of microbes that influence health and disease. Some types of microorganisms are thought to contribute to the development of inflammatory conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but the exact cascade of events that leads from microbes to immune cells to disease remains mysterious.
A new study by Tufts University researchers found a molecule that could be a target for treatment in patients who have become resistant to traditional anti-seizure drugs
Researchers show that mesophotic coral reefs function much differently than their shallower counterparts and are unlikely to offer a refuge for shallow water fishes trying to escape climate-change driven warming on the ocean’s surface.
In reviewing data from previous studies, a team lead by researchers at the University of Chicago and the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) found that individuals who had fewer than six hours of sleep per night in the days surrounding vaccination had a blunted antibody response. That indicates efforts to promote heathy sleep duration ahead of an immunization could be an easy way to improve vaccine effectiveness.
New insights into the effects of a hormonal treatment for transgender men, discovered by Cedars-Sinai investigators, could have implications for the treatment of breast cancer.
A shot of a liver-produced hormone called FGF21 sobered up mice that had passed out from alcohol, allowing them to regain consciousness and coordination much faster than those that didn’t receive this treatment, UT Southwestern researchers report in a new study. The findings, published in Cell Metabolism, could lead to effective treatments for acute alcohol intoxication, which is responsible for about 1 million emergency room visits in the U.S. each year.
UC San Diego researchers delve deep into the unknown cause of pediatric acute myeloid leukemia to identify a gene splicing dysregulation and potential target for treating the disease, which often becomes treatment-resistant.
Now, in a surprising new discovery, Harvard Medical School researchers have found that a class of regulatory T cells (Tregs) made in the gut play a role in repairing injured muscles and mending damaged livers.
In an even more unexpected twist, the researchers found that gut microbes fuel the production of Tregs, which act as immune healers that go on patrol around the body and respond to distress signals from distant sites of injury.
Avian functional diversity patterns in the Western U.S., where species and functional richness are both highest during the breeding season, are the polar opposite of what is seen in the East, where functional diversity is lowest when species richness is high, according to new research.
A tiny robot that could one day help doctors perform surgery was inspired by the incredible gripping ability of geckos and the efficient locomotion of inchworms.
Psyllium fiber protects against ulcerative colitis and suppresses inflammation by activating the bile acid nuclear receptor, a mechanism that was previously unrecognized, according to a new study by researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.
A new Australian study led by SAHMRI and Flinders University has uncovered fundamental differences in how the AstraZeneca and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines impact the immune system.
Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have generated the first induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from bats, gaining valuable insights into the close relationship between bats and viruses.
In a bid to understand why mosquitoes may be more attracted to one human than another, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have mapped specialized receptors on the insects’ nerve cells that are able to fine-tune their ability to detect particularly “welcoming” odors in human skin.
Regional differences in the spread of Japan’s two main ancestral groups have been revealed, thanks to new research at the University of Tokyo. Japanese people are generally thought to descend from two main groups: Jomon hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers from continental East Asia.
Every biologist knows that small structures can sometimes have a big impact: Millions of signaling molecules, hormones, and other biomolecules are bustling around in our cells and tissues, playing a leading role in many of the key processes occurring in our bodies.
Rice University scientists have figured out a way to engineer wood to trap carbon dioxide through a potentially scalable, energy-efficient process that also makes the material stronger for use in construction.
UC San Diego researchers report that a late-stage, pre-clinical small molecule inhibitor reverses malignant hyper-editing by a protein that promotes silencing of the immune response, metastasis and therapeutic resistance in 20 different cancer types.
The researchers looked at a ubiquitin ligase enzyme named FBXL2, known to degrade proteins at various cellular membrane compartments. They found that by attaching or detaching a fat molecule or lipid to FBXL2 — a process called palmitoylation and de-palmitoylation — they could direct where the FBXL2 went. They also discovered that in order to travel in the aqueous cellular environment for the delivery of lipid-modified FBXL2 to membrane compartments, it used a trafficking protein called PDE6D, which is known to shield the lipid modifications.
Plants can move in ways that might surprise you. Some of them even show “sleep movements,” folding or raising their leaves each night before opening them again the next day.
Society’s growing demand for high-voltage electrical technologies—including pulsed power systems, cars and electrified aircraft, and renewable energy applications—requires a new generation of capacitors that store and deliver large amounts of energy under intense thermal and electrical conditions. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Scripps Research have now developed a new polymer-based device that efficiently handles record amounts of energy while withstanding extreme temperatures and electric fields.
Nutrition researchers studied 80 people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and found that those who followed an alternate-day fasting diet and exercised were able to improve their health. In Cell Metabolism, the researchers report that over a period of three months people in the intervention saw increased insulin sensitivity and decreased liver fat, weight and ALT, or alanine transaminase enzymes, which are markers for liver disease.
A new grassroots effort—announced this month in Trends in Ecology and Evolution—is calling for a reevaluation of some terminology used in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) to make it more inclusive and precise.
Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital solved the 3D structure of a protein in cilia, an organelle important to many diseases at nearly ten times the resolution of previous efforts.
Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have identified CD70 as being highly expressed on drug-resistant cancer cells in EGFR-mutant non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), highlighting a novel therapeutic target that could be used to eliminate resistant cells remaining after treatment with commonly used EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). The study published today in Cancer Cell.
Melbourne researchers have improved our understanding of how the immune system is regulated to prevent disease, identifying a previously unknown role of ‘natural killer’ (NK) immune cells.
A new Cedars-Sinai study in collaboration with the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the Answer ALS consortium has examined the expression of thousands of genes in stem cell generated motor neurons that are known to die in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal neurological disorder known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease.
New research reveals differences in the gut microbiomes of people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) compared to those of healthy controls.
Snakes and mice don’t look alike. But much of what we know about skin coloration and patterning in vertebrates generally, including in snakes, is based on lab mice.
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have discovered a method cells use to turn genes on and off that involves portions of proteins whose function has long been a mystery. The findings, reported in Cell, could lead to new ways of controlling gene regulation and may one day lead to new treatments for a broad array of diseases.
Immunotherapy — drug treatment that stimulates the immune system to attack tumors — works well against some types of cancer, but it has shown mixed success against lung cancer.
Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.
Inmazeb (REGN-EB3), developed by Regeneron, is a three-antibody cocktail designed to target the Ebola virus glycoprotein. The drug was first approved for clinical use in October 2020, but its exact mechanism of action has remained unclear.
The complexity of the human brain is unparalleled. Fortunately, thanks to constant progress in neuroscience over the past decades, we have started to make some sense of the human brain.
Vinegar flies use pheromones to ensure that they court and mate with members of the same species. As new fly species split off from a common ancestor, but continue to share the same environment, they need a way to rapidly diversify their pheromones to suppress inter-species mating. New research identifies a link between the genetic instructions for the production and perception of sex pheromones.
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and King’s College London have created a tool to predict the effects of different diets on both cancerous cells and healthy cells.