Newly discovered archaebacteria converts methane into carbon dioxide with the help of iron A microbe that ‘eats’ both methane and iron: microbiologists have long suspected its existence, but were not able to find it - until now. Researchers at Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen discovered a microorganism that couples the reduction of iron to methane oxidation, and could thus be relevant in controlling greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. ...

Genetic variants might also impact nicotine and other drug metabolism Depending on a person’s genetic make-up, he or she might be able to guzzle coffee right before bed or feel wired after just one cup, based on continuing research at Northwestern Medicine. Studying how genes impact coffee consumption habits is nothing new. In previous work from Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor in the department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, she identif...

In a proof-of-concept study with mice, scientists at The Johns Hopkins University show that a novel coating they made with antibiotic-releasing nanofibers has the potential to better prevent at least some serious bacterial infections related to total joint replacement surgery. A report on the study, published online the week of Oct. 24 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted on the rodents’ knee joints, but, the researchers say, the technology would have “broad appli...

As the focus on hospital-acquired infections intensifies, some medical device manufacturers are considering deep UV light emitting diodes for smaller, portable disinfection devices. Here's how the technology can be used in medical device design. Mark Pizzuto According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) one in every 25 hospital patients in the United States will contract a hospital-acquired infection (HAI) during their visit. Often expensive and sometime...

St. Jude Medical's Amplatzer PFO Occluder for patent foramen ovale (PFO) has received FDA approval, the company announced on October 28. The device, made of two nitinol mesh disks with thin polyester fabric, can now be used in the United States to close the PFO—a congenital hole in the tissue between the heart's left and right atria—in patients who have suffered an ischemic stroke, in order to reduce risk of recurrent stroke. Although PFO is relatively common, observed in about a quarter of a...

Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered circadian clocks in muscle tissue that control the muscle’s metabolic response and energy efficiency depending on the time of day. Muscles have circadian clocks that control exercise response. The finding in mice sheds light on the time-of-day differences in muscle’s ability to adapt to exercise and use oxygen for energy. Muscle cells are more efficient during an organism’s normal waking hours, the study found. All cells in the body, includin...

Born out of a desire for aircraft to be able to take off and land capably at airports with shorter runways to alleviate congestion at the major hubs, the circulation control wing concept has been floated by the aeronautical community as a possible solution for decades. The technology calls for increased amounts of high-pressure air, derived from either the jet engines or separate compressors, to flow over the leading and trailing edges of the wings, creating greater lift. Given extra lift, an ai...

Nucleotide database is a collection of sequences from several sources, including GenBank, RefSeq, TPA and PDB. Genome, gene and transcript sequence data provide the foundation for biomedical research and discovery. National Library of Medicine / National Institutes of Health. Offers many important databases (PubMed, GenBank, OMIM) and some tools. GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. ...

Thromboelastography (TEG) is a method of testing the efficiency of blood coagulation. It is a test mainly used in surgery and anesthesiology. Thromboelastography is a viscoelastic hemostatic assay that measures the global visco-elastic properties of whole blood clot formation under low shear stress. it shows the interaction of platelets with the coagulation cascade (aggregation, clot strengthening, fibrin cross linking and fibrinolysis). https://youtu.be/SjH05uGSGv0 EG® measures the ph...

The hygiene hypothesis proposes that a 20th century surge in allergies and asthma is because people are living in increasingly hygienic environments. Rather than the rural farm life of the agricultural 19th century, families live in urban and suburban communities, have fewer children who can exchange infections, bathe and wash their hands more frequently, and use antibiotics excessively. This all means reduced infant exposure to microbes that would have tempered excessive immune reactions, such ...

In a study led by the University of Leeds, scientists have solved one of the most long-standing challenges in atmospheric science: to understand how particles are formed in the atmosphere. Fundamental questions remain about the origin of newly formed atmospheric aerosol particles because data from laboratory measurements have been insufficient to build global models. In contrast, gas-phase chemistry models have been based on laboratory kinetics measurements for decades. Here we build a global...

New training technique would reveal the basis for machine-learning systems’ decisions. In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognize certain objects in digital images or to infer the topics of texts. But neural nets are black boxes. After training, a network may be very ...

One day, microrobots may be able to swim through the human body like sperm or paramecia to carry out medical functions in specific locations. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have developed functional elastomers, which can be activated by magnetic fields to imitate the swimming gaits of natural flagella, cilia and jellyfish. Using a specially developed computer algorithm, the researchers can now automatically generate the optimal magnetic conditions ...

Fossil fuels have ushered in the modern industrial age, but carbon-neutral methods of electricity production are needed for the future. Salinity gradient energy (SGE) is one approach that is based on using two solutions with large differences in salt concentration to produce electricity. These include naturally occurring water sources with different salinities, such as river water and seawater, and salt brines and seawater or river water, or treated used waters and seawater prior to discharge in...

A microbial fuel cells (MFC) or biological fuel cell is a bio-electrochemical system that drives a current by using bacteria and mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature. MFCs can be grouped into two general categories: mediated and unmediated. Renewable and clean forms of energy are one of society's greatest needs.  At the same time, 2 billion people in the world lack adequate sanitation and the economic means to afford it.  In this research, we are working to address both of these hum...

Robots have traditionally been made from hard materials such as metal and plastic. They have been driven by motors and other heavy electro-mechanical actuators. These robots are more like machines than biological organisms. Soft robotics on the other hand seeks to make robots that are soft, flexible and compliant, just like biological organisms. The ‘body’ of a soft robot is soft like natural tissue. A soft robot is driven not by heavy motors but by soft artificial muscles. The energy stor...

U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved pembrolizumab (KEYTRUDA, Merck & Co., Inc.) for the treatment of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors express PD-L1 as determined by an FDA-approved test. This is the first FDA approval of a checkpoint inhibitor for first-line treatment of lung cancer. This approval also expands the indication in second-line treatment of lung cancer to include all patients with PD-L1-expressing NSCLC. The FDA approval ad...

Kidney cancer—also called renal cell cancer—is one of the major types of cancer for which new immune-based cancer treatments are currently in development. This page features information on kidney cancer and immunotherapy clinical trials for kidney cancer patients, and highlights the Cancer Research Institute’s role in working to bring effective immune-based cancer treatments to kidney cancer patients. In its early stages, kidney cancer typically has no symptoms. As a tumor grows, symptoms may...

Colorado Therapeutics LLC, a privately held medical device company with a proprietary technology platform for the production of innovative cross-linked tissue products, announced today that it has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) for a novel xenogenic biologic tissue matrix. The Colorado Therapeutics xenograft implant is intended to be used for implantation to reinforce soft tissue where weakness exists and for the surgical repair of damaged or rupt...

Identifying whether a potential drug is having an effect on cancer cells is not always obvious. If enough cells change their morphology, it’s fairly easy to see the change under a microscope. Spotting individual cells that are unique among millions of others is what researchers at Brown University have been working on. They developed a high speed vision system that outlines cells that just went through an epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT). Within tumors such cells lead to greater malignanc...

As humans, we sniff out different scents and aromas using chemical receptors in our noses. In technological gas detection, however, there are a whole host of other methods available. One such method is to use infrared lasers, passing a laser beam through the gas to an adjacent separate detector, which measures the degree of light attenuation it causes. TU Wien's tiny new sensor now brings together both sides within a single component, making it possible to use the same microscopic structure for ...

Approximately 2% of Americans have a visual disability— vision that cannot be corrected even with the strongest prescription—and in developing countries where infectious disease or untreated cataracts are more common, the percentage is often higher. Many different diseases and conditions can cause low vision, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and cone dystrophy (a genetic mutation affecting the cone cells of the retina). People with low vision find everyday act...

Recent research suggests that nanotechnologies may lead to the development of novel cancer treatment. Gold nanoparticles with their unique physical and chemical properties hold great hopes for the development of thermal-based therapies against human malignancies. This review will focus on various strategies that have been developed to use gold nanoparticles as photothermal agents against human cancers. Pancreatic cancer begins in the tissues of your pancreas — an organ in your abdomen that li...

Team of scientists, led by the University of Southampton, have produced a fast nanoscale optical transistor using gold nanoantenna assisted phase transition. The work, published in the journal Light, Science and Applications, opens up new directions in antenna-assisted switches and optical memory. Small nanostructures that can interact strongly with light are of interest for a range of emerging new applications including small optical circuits and metasurface flat optics. Nanoantennas are ...

Phenotypic plasticity can be defined as the ability of one genotype to produce more than one phenotype when exposed to different environments. Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment. With climate change forcing plant and animal species to adapt, shape-shifters are taking a unique approach that involves changing their physical appearance without having to migrate or evolve in order to cope, new research shows. A ...

Did you know that your brain processes information in a hierarchy? As you are reading this page, the signal coming in through your eyes enters your brain through the thalamus, which organizes it. That information then goes on to the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain, where populations of neurons respond to very specific basic properties. For instance, one set of neurons might fire up because the text on your screen is black and another set might activate because there are vertical l...

From the journey of protons racing through the world’s largest particle collider in Europe to up-close views of the Big Bang and emergent universe, and the nearly mile-deep descent to an underground experiment in South Dakota, a new planetarium show is designed to immerse audiences in the manifold search for dark matter. Michael Barnett, a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), imagined these scenes coming to life inside planetarium domes...

For years, doctors have had reliable charts of the body and its organs -- blood circulation, digestive system, nerves and the like -- but always with one frustrating grey zone: the brain. On Wednesday, a team of neuroscientists, computer specialists and engineers said they had compiled what "could be the most accurate map yet" of the mysterious expanse between our ears. In the process, they discovered nearly 100 previously unreported regions of the organ's wrinkly outer layer -- called the...