Culture
The art of tattooing may have found a diagnostic twist. A team of scientists in Germany have developed permanent dermal sensors that can be applied as artistic tattoos. As detailed in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a colorimetric analytic formulation was injected into the skin instead of tattoo ink. The pigmented skin areas varied their color when blood pH or other health indicators changed.
Robots and prosthetic devices may soon have a sense of touch equivalent to, or better than, the human skin with the Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin (ACES), an artificial nervous system developed by a team of researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The new electronic skin system achieved ultra-high responsiveness and robustness to damage, and can be paired with any kind of sensor skin layers to function effectively as an electronic skin.
Over the last few decades, the exponential increase in computer power and accompanying increase in the quality of algorithms has enabled theoretical and particle physicists to perform more complex and precise simulations of fundamental particles and their interactions. If you increase the number of lattice points in a simulation, it becomes harder to tell the difference between the observed result of the simulation and the surrounding noise.
Researchers in the group of Jan Michiels (VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology) identified a mechanism of how sleepy bacteria wake up. This finding is important, as sleepy cells are often responsible for the stubbornness of chronic infections. Findings published in Molecular Cell reveal new perspectives on how to treat chronic infections, for example by forcing bacteria to wake up.
Sleeping bacteria
Ribosomes are molecular machines that produce proteins in cells. Having finished the job, the ribosomes need regenerating. This process is important for the quality of the proteins produced and thus for the whole cell homeostasis as well as for developmental and biological processes. Biochemists from Goethe University Frankfurt together with biophysicists at LMU Munich have now watched one of the most important enzymes for ribosome recycling at work - ABCE1 - and shown that it is unexpectedly versatile in terms of structure.
Researchers have identified somatic mutations in the brain that could contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications last week.
Decades worth of research has identified inherited mutations that lead to early-onset familial AD. Inherited mutations, however, are behind at most half the cases of late onset sporadic AD, in which there is no family history of the disease. But the genetic factors causing the other half of these sporadic cases have been unclear.
WASHINGTON, July 18, 2019 -- There are some crazy poisons in this world of ours, and they're often found in things you'd least expect. In this week's episode of Reactions, we break down our top five strangest poisons: https://youtu.be/4hQ0G0GaYR8.
ANN ARBOR, Michigan -- For oncologists in the beginning of their career, scientific conferences present an opportunity to network, share their research, gain new knowledge and begin to advance in their career. But many women find themselves skipping these conferences because of family obligations, a new study finds.
UCF student Veronica Urgiles has helped describe two new frog species discovered in Ecuador, and she named one of them after one of her professors.
Urgiles and an international team of researchers just published their findings in the journal ZooKeys.
MINNEAPOLIS, MN- July 18, 2019 - New University of Minnesota Medical School research is the first to show that estrogen is essential to maintaining muscle stem cell health.
A combination of chemotherapy drugs during brain cancer surgery using a biodegradable paste, leads to long-term survival, researchers at the University of Nottingham have discovered.
In a new study published in Clinical Cancer Research, scientists found a significant survival benefit in rat models with brain tumours when a combination of two chemotherapy drugs, (etoposide and temozolomide), were delivered using a biodegradable polymer called PLGA/PEG.
The world is filled with millions upon millions of distinct smells, but how mammals' brains evolved to tell them apart is something of a mystery.
Now, two neuroscientists from the Salk Institute and UC San Diego have discovered that at least six types of mammals--from mice to cats--distinguish odors in roughly the same way, using circuitry in the brain that's evolutionarily preserved across species.
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Positive family relationships might help youth to maintain good asthma management behaviors even in the face of difficult neighborhood conditions, according to a new Northwestern University study.
For children with asthma, neighborhood environmental conditions -- the role of allergens and pollutants, for example -- have long been known to play an important role, but less is known about how social conditions in the neighborhood might affect children's asthma.
DNA has many different forms. Normally the two strands of DNA wind around each other in a right-handed spiral. However, another conformation, called Z-DNA, exists where the strands twist to the left. The function of the Z-DNA has remained a mystery since its discovery. A newly published paper unambiguously establishes that the Z-conformation is key to regulating interferon responses involved in fighting viruses and cancer. The study analyzes families with variants in the Z-binding domain of the ADAR gene.