Culture
PHILADELPHIA - The lens of the eye is an unusual organ. Unlike most of the body's organs, blood vessels don't reach the lens. If they did, they'd obscure our vision and we wouldn't be able to see. The lack of vasculature led scientists to believe immune cells, which travel via the bloodstream, couldn't get to this part of the body either. But a few years ago, Jefferson researchers challenged this long held assumption by demonstrating that immune cells populate the lens in response to degeneration.
Five years after NASA's MAVEN spacecraft entered into orbit around Mars, data from the mission has led to the creation of a map of electric current systems in the Martian atmosphere.
Enzymes: they are the central drivers for biochemical metabolic processes in every living cell, enabling reactions to take place efficiently. It is this very ability which allows them to be used as catalysts in biotechnology, for example to create chemical products such as pharmaceutics. A topic that is currently being widely discussed is photoinduced catalysis, in which researchers harness the ability of nature to start biochemical reactions with the aid of light. What they need for this purpose is enzymes which can be activated by means of light.
Traffic congestion is a serious problem in the United States, but a new analysis shows that interactive technology - ranging from 511 traffic information systems and roadside cameras to traffic apps like Waze and Google Maps - is helping in cities that use it.
Potentially, the researchers said, technology could limit the need to widen and expand roadways while saving commuters time and money and lessening environmental damage.
May 26, 2020 - (BRONX, NY) Montefiore Health System Albert Einstein College of Medicine have begun the next stage of the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT), to evaluate treatment options for people hospitalized with severe COVID-19 infection.
In cells, protein is synthesized based on the genetic code. Each protein is coded by the triplet combination of chemicals called "nucleotides," and a continuous "reading" of any set of triplet codes will, after a multi-step process, result in the creation of a chain of amino acids, a protein. The genetic code is matched with the correct amino acid by a special functional RNA aptly named transfer RNA or tRNA (which, incidentally, is itself composed of its own type of "codes").
The evolutionary processes underlying metastasis-the development of secondary malignant growths away from the primary tumor site-in human patients are still incompletely understood.
Metastases can form in locoregional lymph nodes draining the primary tumor-a form of progression that portends a worse prognosis but can still be curable-or they can develop in distant organs. The latter case defines stage IV disease and treatments for it are typically considered palliative.
COVID-19 pandemic is proving to be havoc for the whole world and an unending challenge for the healthcare systems, hospitals, medics and paramedics. The most vivid example is the shortage of equipment and preventive kits, including the n95 masks. Indeed, there has been high demand of the n95 masks in the hospitals but the shortage of it has forced many local hospitals to use the ordinary masks also. The bigger problem for the healthcare professionals and others in the hospitals is, how best to sterilize (clean) the masks for use and, if need arises, reuse.
Light and foraging ants seem totally unrelated, but they have one thing in common: they travel along time-reducing paths. According to Fermat's principle about the refraction of a ray of light, the light bends when it meets a matter with different refractive indices and travels through time-minimizing paths. Recently, similar behavior was reported in foraging ants in a lab setting: ants 'bend' their travel paths when they enter a substrate that slows them down.
Consumers often struggle to achieve self-set life improvement goals, but what if deliberately emulating the successful strategies used by their friends could help them?
Threats to self-esteem and negative feedback are pervasive in today's society. Social media researchers, for example, have shown a link between frequent usage of social media websites and upward social comparison and negative affect.
How does this influence consumer behavior? A new paper published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research examines how single and repeated exposure to negative feedback in one domain influences goal-directed consumer behaviors.
Renewable technologies are a promising solution for addressing global energy needs in a sustainable way.
However, widespread adoption of renewable energy resources from solar, wind, biomass and more have lagged, in part because they are difficult to store and transport.
As the search for materials to efficiently address these storage and transport needs continues, University of Delaware researchers from the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) report new techniques for characterizing complex materials with the potential to overcome these challenges.
One of the most commonly used diagnostic tools, particularly during this pandemic, is the reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction test (RT-PCR), which uses a person's respiratory sample to detect viral particles and determine if the person may have been exposed to a virus. Laboratory professionals across the U.S. and the globe have used RT-PCR to find out if a person has been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These tests have played a critical role in our nation's response to the pandemic.
More than 1.7 million Americans develop sepsis each year, and more than 270,000 die from it. The condition--which happens when the body has an extreme response to a bacterial or viral infection, causing a chain reaction that can lead to organ failure and death--has few strategies for treatment.
May 26, 2020 - Early in the pandemic, American Indian Reservations have experienced a disproportionately high incidence of COVID-19 infections: four times higher than in the US population, reports a study in the July/August issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.