Culture
Within both plant and animal cells, motor proteins act like the engines in a busy train system. They shuttle material in the cell from one location to another. And just as commuter trains travel a predictable route in a defined direction, their volume of transport is commensurate with need. At rush hour, more trains are in operation. At midnight, there's no point in running trains every 10 minutes.
In February 2016, faced with a drastic increase in the number of Zika infections and in order to establish a link between the virus and neurological complications, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC)". In March 2016, with the aid of the REACting consortium, Inserm took charge of the establishment, sponsorship and scientific follow-up of a cohort of pregnant women exposed to Zika in the French territories in the Americas, monitored by the French Antilles-French Guiana Clinical Investigation Center (Inserm CIC 1424).
UCLA scientists have developed a new method that utilizes microscopic splinter-like structures called "nanospears" for the targeted delivery of biomolecules such as genes straight to patient cells. These magnetically guided nanostructures could enable gene therapies that are safer, faster and more cost-effective.
Mongooses living in large groups develop "specialist" diets so they don't have to fight over food, new research shows.
Banded mongooses cooperate closely but are also prone to violence - both between groups and within them - and competition for food increases as a group grows.
To get round this, individual mongooses find a dietary "niche", according to researchers from the universities of Exeter and Roehampton.
Group living has advantages and disadvantages, and the findings suggest specialisation is one way to prevent groups being torn apart by fighting.
Health chiefs are failing to investigate a clear pattern of rising death rates and worsening health outcomes in England and Wales, argue experts in The BMJ today.
Lucinda Hiam at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Danny Dorling at the University of Oxford say weekly mortality figures show 10,375 additional deaths (a rise of 12.4%) in England and Wales in the first seven weeks of 2018 compared with the previous five years.
The low priority given to children and young people's health threatens the UK's future prosperity, argues an expert writing in The BMJ today.
Professor Russell Viner at University College London's Institute of Child Health, says countries that invest in child health "reap impressive economic rewards, with each pound spent on children's health returning over £10 to society over a lifetime."
In contrast, poor health in childhood "leads to reduced workforce participation and productivity and lowers national wealth."
(Boston)--For the first time, researchers have produced a nearly complete three-dimensional structure for the yeast Nuclear Pore Complex (NPC). This discovery represents a major step toward identifying the atomic structure of the NPC, which soon may provide researchers with a better understanding of how the central transport channel functions.
Ever notice how a cut inside the mouth heals much faster than a cut to the skin? Gum tissue repairs itself roughly twice as fast as skin and with reduced scar formation. One reason might be because of the characteristics of gingival mesenchymal stem cells, or GMSCs, which can give rise to a variety of cell types.
HOUSTON, March 14, 2018 - Two University of Houston scientists are reporting that defects in a portion of the brain's hippocampus, called the dentate gyrus, is regulated by the nuclear receptor LXRβ (Liver X receptor Beta). The dentate gyrus, or DG, is responsible for emotion and memory and is known to be involved in autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
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A new lab-based study has shown that when airway cells damaged by cigarette smoke are exposed instead to glo vapour, the biological effects caused by smoke exposure are reversed.
glo is British American Tobacco's tobacco heating product (THP). It is designed to heat rather than burn tobacco, and the vapour produced has around 90-95% less of certain toxicants compared to cigarette smoke**.
Researchers have fused living and non-living cells for the first time in a way that allows them to work together, paving the way for new applications.
The system, created by a team from Imperial College London, encapsulates biological cells within an artificial cell. Using this, researchers can harness the natural ability of biological cells to process chemicals while protecting them from the environment.
Before the Wi-fi and the Internet, the telephone and the telegraph, the original instant messaging services of society were homing pigeons. After becoming the first domesticated birds, for an estimated 2,000 years, these reliable messengers have brought news from battlefronts and between heads of state.
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have developed a microbial detection technique so sensitive that it allows them to detect as few as 50-100 bacterial cells present on a surface. What's more, they can test samples more efficiently -- up to hundreds of samples in a single day.
Having a larger family is linked to a heightened tooth loss risk for mums, suggest the results of a large European study published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.
The popular saying: 'gain a child, lose a tooth' suggests that fertility may be linked to tooth loss, but there are no hard data to back this up.
To try and plug this gap, the researchers drew on data from Wave 5 of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).