Tech

UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers seeking novel ways to combat cancer found that giving acetate, a major compound produced in the gut by host bacteria, to mice sped up the growth and metastasis of tumors.

Bacteria living inside the gut can have beneficial, but potentially also harmful effects on human health. Further studies are needed to determine whether restricting acetate production by gut bacteria will affect growth of tumors.

Northern B.C. First Nation leaders who this week agreed to consider an alternate oil-pipeline proposal say they will block any attempt to move oil through B.C. by rail.

Electrical impulses play an important role in cells of the human body. For example, neurons use these impulses to transmit information along their branches and the body also uses them to control the contraction of muscles. The impulses are generated when special channel proteins open in the outer envelope of the cells, allowing charged molecules (ions) to enter or exit the cell. These proteins are referred to as ion channels.

After the European Court of Justice ruled that there was a “right to be forgotten” from Google’s search results, Google’s Advisory Council embarked on a roadshow aimed at debating the issue. While this debate poses many interesting questions, Google’s agenda is apparent in the way it has answered them – as revealed in the Advisory Council’s recently published report.

Ovarian cancer is the deadliest of all cancers affecting the female reproductive system with very few effective treatments available. Prognosis is even worse among patients with certain subtypes of the disease. Now, researchers at The Wistar Institute have identified a new therapeutic target in a particularly aggressive form of ovarian cancer, paving the way for what could be the first effective targeted therapy of its kind for the disease.

The findings were published online by the journal Nature Medicine.

Protecting people's privacy in an age of online big data is difficult, but doing so when using visual representations of such things as social network data may present unique challenges, according to a Penn State computer scientist.

"Our goal is to be able to release information without making personal or sensitive data available and still be accurate," said Sofya Raskhodnikova, associate professor of computer science and engineering. "But we have to figure out what 'privacy' means and develop a rigorous mathematical foundation for protecting privacy."

An estimated 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide. Age-related macular degeneration alone is the leading cause of blindness among older adults in the Western world. But this week at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Jose, California, Eric Tremblay from EPFL in Switzerland unveils a new prototype of his telescopic contact lens--the first of its kind--giving hope for better, stronger vision.

The engineering world just became even more colorful.

Northwestern University researchers have created a new technique that can transform silver into any color of the rainbow. Their simple method is a fast, low-cost alternative to color filters currently used in electronic displays and monitors.

Photograph of colorful images fabricated using focused ion beam technique for patterning on the thin films with oxide thickness variation. Credit:Northwestern

Launched in 2009, iSpot is a citizen science platform aimed at helping anyone, anywhere identify anything in nature. To date, around 42,000 people have registered as iSpot users and over 390,000 observations have been made, leading to the identification of more than 24,000 species.

A team of scientists has created a "conjugate" molecule -- one stitched together from two separate molecules -- that seeks out and blocks prostate cancer growth in lab animals.

The molecule NMI combines a near-infrared dye that targets cancer cells and a MAO-A inhibitor often used in antidepressants but recently shown to be effective at reducing or even eliminating prostate tumor growth in mice.

Massive elimination of neurons is a critical aspect of normal nervous system development but also represents a defining feature of neurodegenerative pathologies, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Extreme mechano-sensitive neurons of tactile-foraging ducks fit the bill for touch research.

When we reach out to touch something, our nervous system converts the mechanical input from our fingers contacting an object into an electrical signal in the brain. The process, known as mechanosensation, is one of our fundamental physiological processes, on par with sight and smell. But how it works on a cellular level remains poorly understood, holding back development of effective treatments for mechanosensory disorders like chronic pain.

Some of the most prized violins in the world were crafted in the Italian workshops of Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri -- master violinmaking families from the 17th and 18th centuries who produced increasingly powerful instruments in the renaissance and baroque musical eras. These violins, worth millions of dollars today, represent the Cremonese period -- what is now considered the golden age of violinmaking.

Scientists at Rigshopitalet, Herlev Hospital and the University of Copenhagen identify a new biomarker that can predict the risk of developing dementia by way of a simple blood test. In the long term, this could mean better prevention and thus at least postponement of the illness and at best evading the development all together. The study was recently published in an internationally acclaimed journal, the Annals of Neurology.

Injectable nanoparticles that could protect an injured person from further damage due to oxidative stress have proven to be astoundingly effective in tests to study their mechanism.

Scientists at Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) Medical School designed methods to validate their 2012 discovery that combined polyethylene glycol-hydrophilic carbon clusters -- known as PEG-HCCs -- could quickly stem the process of overoxidation that can cause damage in the minutes and hours after an injury.