Captured on Oct. 20, 2020 during the OSIRIS-REx mission's Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event, this series of images shows the SamCam imager's field of view as the NASA spacecraft approaches and touches down on asteroid Bennu's surface, over 200 million miles (321 million km) away from Earth. The sampling event brought the spacecraft all the way down to sample site Nightingale, touching down within three feet (one meter) of the targeted location. The team on Earth received confirmation at 6:08 pm EDT that successful touchdown occurred.
A newly developed light-sensing protein called the MCO1 opsin restores vision in blind mice when attached to retina bipolar cells using gene therapy. The National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, provided a Small Business Innovation Research grant to Nanoscope, LLC for development of MCO1. The company is planning a U.S. clinical trial for later this year.
- Language is one of the most powerful tools available to humanity, and determining why and when language evolved is central to understand what it means to be human
- Being able to track relationships between words in a sentence, both next to one another and across a sentence, is foundational to language processing. This ability was examined in monkeys, apes and humans by researchers from the University of Warwick and University of Zurich.
Researchers find combo with probiotics may help them heal
Hamilton, ON (Oct. 21, 2020) - People with celiac disease may find themselves more comfortable with extra Thanksgiving turkey dinners.
An international team of researchers led by McMaster University has found that tryptophan, an amino acid present in high amounts in turkey, along with some probiotics, may help them heal and respond better to a gluten-free diet.
Humans are not the only beings that can identify rules in complex language-like constructions - monkeys and great apes can do so, too, a study at the University of Zurich has shown. Researchers at the Department of Comparative Language Science of UZH used a series of experiments based on an 'artificial grammar' to conclude that this ability can be traced back to our ancient primate ancestors.
HOUSTON - (Oct. 21, 2020) - How life works may come down to dumbbell-like bits of DNA.
Rice University scientists on a long quest to study the structure and function of chromosomes have found that amid the apparent chaotic state of DNA during interphase, when cells are between divisions, there are pockets of order in the configuration of certain gene-containing regions.
These structures, reported in an open-access eLife study, offer a window into how chromosomes function and promise new avenues of research for those digging into their secrets.
(Toronto - Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020) -- Ancient embedded elements in our DNA from generations past can activate a powerful immune response to kill cancer cells like an infection.
The work builds on Princess Margaret Senior Scientist Dr. De Carvalho's previous ground-breaking discovery known as viral mimicry-- the ability to cause cancer cells to behave as though they have been infected, thereby activating the immune system to fight cancer like an infection.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- People have different susceptibilities to SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, and develop varying degrees of fever, fatigue, and breathing problems -- common symptoms of the illness. What might explain this variation?
Scientists at the University of California, Riverside, and University of Southern California may have an answer to this mystery.
BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, October 21, 2020 - The identification of human migration driven by climate change, the spread of COVID-19, agricultural trends, and socioeconomic problems in neighboring regions depends on data -- the more complex the model, the more data is required to understand such spatially distributed phenomena. However, reliable data is often expensive and difficult to obtain, or too sparse to allow for accurate predictions.
Some dreams are so vivid that they can be recalled as if they were movies, full of connections and with a beginning, middle and end. Others in contrast resemble WhatsApp GIFs, or at best a script for a video clip à la TikTok, often with powerful or meaningful images, but lacking that complex storylike structure.