Menu

Blog

Latest posts

Oct 4, 2024

Scientists Discover Dual Roles of Antibodies in COVID-19 Infections

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the Midwest Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Center have made a surprising discovery: antibodies can have opposite effects on viral infections in human cells.

The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, enables the virus to enter human cells and is the primary target for the body’s antibodies. Previous research has shown that antibodies can either block the virus, have no effect, or, in rare cases, assist the virus in infecting cells. While antibody drugs work to block infections, this new study challenges current understanding of their mechanisms.

Published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, this study is the first to identify an antibody that can both assist and block the virus. This particular antibody helps pre-omicron variants of the virus infect cells while preventing the omicron variant from doing the same. The study also explains how the antibody aids the pre-omicron virus in invading cells while blocking the omicron virus from succeeding.

Oct 4, 2024

Wastewater bacteria can break down plastic for food, yielding new possibilities for cleaning up plastic waste

Posted by in category: food

Researchers have long observed that a common family of environmental bacteria, Comamonadacae, grow on plastics littered throughout urban rivers and wastewater systems. But exactly what these Comamonas bacteria are doing has remained a mystery.

Oct 4, 2024

Brain scan study shows what happens in the brain when a person with schizophrenia hears voices

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Patients with certain mental disorders, including schizophrenia, often hear voices in the absence of sound.


Auditory hallucinations are likely the result of abnormalities in two brain processes: a broken corollary discharge that fails to suppress self-generated sounds, and a noisy efference copy that makes the brain hear these sounds more intensely than it should. That is the conclusion of a study published October 3 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Xing Tian, of New York University Shanghai, China, and colleagues.

In the new study, researchers carried out electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments measuring the brain waves of 20 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia with and 20 patients diagnosed with who had never experienced such hallucinations.

Oct 4, 2024

Developer Shows Interactive Water Made for AR

Posted by in category: augmented reality

Noah Rayburn mixes realities.

Oct 4, 2024

A new era of solar observation: International team produces global maps of coronal magnetic field

Posted by in categories: mapping, space

For the first time, scientists have taken near-daily measurements of the sun’s global coronal magnetic field, a region of the sun that has only been observed irregularly in the past. The resulting observations are providing valuable insights into the processes that drive the intense solar storms that impact fundamental technologies, and thus lives and livelihoods, here on Earth.

Oct 4, 2024

X-rays advance understanding of Earth’s core-mantle boundary and super-Earth magma oceans

Posted by in category: space

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have revealed new details about Earth’s core-mantle boundary and similar regions found in exoplanets.

Oct 4, 2024

Traces of antimatter in cosmic rays reopen the search for ‘WIMPs’ as dark matter

Posted by in category: cosmology

One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to reveal the nature of dark matter. We know it exists (it constitutes more than 85% of the matter in the universe), but we have never seen it directly and still do not know what it is.

Oct 4, 2024

Mercury’s magnetic landscape mapped in 30 minutes

Posted by in category: space

As BepiColombo sped past Mercury during its June 2023 flyby, it encountered a variety of features in the tiny planet’s magnetic field. These measurements provide a tantalizing taste of the mysteries that the mission is set to investigate when it arrives in orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet.

Oct 4, 2024

3D anatomy of the Cretaceous–Paleogene age Nadir Crater

Posted by in category: futurism

A 9.2 km diameter rim, concentric normal faults and an extended damage zone are observed in 3-dimensional seismic reflection data from the Nadir crater offshore Western Africa and provide strong evidence for an impact origin.

Oct 4, 2024

People infer the past better than the future, study finds

Posted by in category: futurism

If you started watching a movie from the middle without knowing its plot, you’d likely be better at inferring what had happened earlier than predicting what will happen next, according to a new Dartmouth-led study published in Nature Communications.

Page 1 of 11,79212345678Last