Protecting sensitive, precision-timed computing systems requires understanding the nature of cyberthreats. So researchers from Washington State University teamed up with experts at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and Metro State University to design an attack—dubbed NosyNeighbor—that lurks on the sidelines of time- and safety-critical computer systems, “infers” what’s happening inside and adapts its malicious approach.
Cancer cells survive by hiding from the immune system’s surveillance. A KAIST research team has developed a new anticancer platform that makes cancer cells send out their own danger signals—prompting immune cells to attack—while simultaneously delivering gene therapy. The approach is expected to offer a new treatment strategy that combines cancer immunotherapy and gene therapy in a single nanoparticle.
Immunogenic cell death (ICD) is a process in which dying cancer cells send danger signals to nearby immune cells, prompting them to attack. A polypeptide is a polymer made of a long chain of amino acids.
A team led by Professor Yeu-Chun Kim from the KAIST Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering developed a “helical polypeptide nanoparticle” platform that induces severe stress inside cancer cells to trigger immunogenic cell death while also delivering a range of gene therapeutics into the cells. The findings are published in the journal Biomaterials.
Glioblastoma is a malignant brain tumor and is among the most aggressive cancers in humans. Despite multimodal therapy with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, there is still no cure. A major reason is the tumor’s invasive behavior: Glioblastoma cells migrate far beyond the visible tumor into healthy brain tissue. These infiltrating cells cannot be completely removed and seed tumor recurrence—often within just a few months.
“To understand why glioblastoma keeps coming back, we need to look closely at the tumor cells that remain hidden in the brain after surgery,” says Dr. Matthias Schneider, deputy director of the Department of Neurosurgery at the UKB and head of the Brain Tumor Translational Research Group at the UKB and the University of Bonn. “Core2Edge allows us to study these infiltrative tumor cells in a model based entirely on human tissue, closely mirroring what we see in patients.”
The study is published in the journal Nature Protocols.
Built from stones weighing between 2 and 25 tonnes (2 to 28 tons), the structure of Stonehenge demonstrates a scale of construction hard to imagine before the invention of the wheel. The mystery deepens when you consider that the stones are not from the local bedrock. So why these stones, and how did they get there?
Recent work I carried out with geochemist Anthony Clarke from Curtin University in Australia might have an answer to these two questions for Stonehenge’s most far-traveled stone—the Altar Stone.
The Altar Stone was sourced from 700 km (435 miles) away in northeast Scotland, from a region of bedrock geology known as the Orcadian Basin that was once a lake called Lake Ocradie. The sandstone of the Altar Stone was formed from these lake sediments. Now, new work by our international team has tested the possibility that it was transported by glaciers.
Nanoporous material-based separation technology is vital in many applications because it can precisely distinguish between and separate nearly identical chemical or biochemical molecules.
Previous research by Professor Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (WPI-iCeMS) and colleagues, published in Nature, applied this technology to separate two very similar types of water molecules—regular water (H₂O) and heavy water (D₂O), which have similar overall properties but slightly different masses. But the underlying mechanisms of that separation were not well understood.
Now, a study led by Professor Shinji Saito of the Institute for Molecular Science (IMS) in Japan and published in Nature Communications in July has provided a theoretical explanation for that phenomenon, using H₂O and D₂O molecules to study nanopore behavior in a metal-organic framework.
