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Preclinical trial reveals how beta-glucan, a compound found in all fungi, can ‘reprogram’ immune cells to combat lung inflammation.

A recent study suggests that a common fungal component may help protect against flu-related lung damage.

Led by Professor Maziar Divangahi from McGill’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, the research team found that beta-glucan, when given to mice before influenza exposure, reduced lung damage, improved lung function, and lowered the risk of severe illness and death.

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Researchers from three of Virginia’s premier universities, including the University of Virginia’s Homa Alemzadeh, aim to take the risk out of self-driving vehicles by overcoming inevitable computer failures with sound engineering.

Cutting-edge research from three top Virginia universities, led by the University of Virginia’s Homa Alemzadeh, is on a mission to revolutionize the safety of self-driving vehicles. With a substantial $926,737 grant from the National Science Foundation, this powerhouse team is dedicated to pinpointing and neutralizing potential computer failures in autonomous vehicle systems.

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By harnessing this insight, they aim to fortify the resilience of the entire system and proactively eliminate safety risks. Alemzadeh, a trailblazing associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, is joined by the esteemed William & Mary professor of computer science, Evgenia Smirni, and the visionary lead investigator and George Mason University assistant professor of computer science, Lishan Yang.

Continue reading “Self-driving vehicles can be imperfect” | >

Researchers studying a protein linked to a rare, severe disease have made a discovery that sheds light on how cells meet their energy needs during a severe metabolic crisis. The findings could lead to new treatments for the disease and open new avenues of research for other conditions involving impaired fat metabolism.

When scientists at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona first identified a handful of protein-coding genes called TANGO in 2006, they had no idea that one of them, TANGO2, would eventually be linked to a life-threatening disorder in children. In 2016, the researchers found that mutations in TANGO2 cause a now officially recognized as TANGO2 Deficiency Disorder (TDD).

There are about 110 known patients with TDD worldwide, though there are thought to be an estimated six to nine thousand undiagnosed patients in total.

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Dear Colleagues.

In the context of an ageing world population, certain pathologies that are exacerbated in this process of ageing, such as osteoarthritis (OA), will become more prevalent in the coming years. Moreover, OA is one of the main causes of chronic pain and physical disability in the elderly. It is therefore of great relevance to gain a deep understanding on the pathophysiology of this disease, and also to identify potential prognostic and diagnostic tools along with novel promising therapeutic targets for OA.

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Beginning around 2.5 million years ago, Earth entered an era marked by successive ice ages and interglacial periods, emerging from the last glaciation around 11,700 years ago. A new analysis suggests the onset of the next ice age could be expected in 10,000 years’ time.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

An international team, including researchers from UC Santa Barbara, made their prediction based on a new interpretation of the small changes in Earth’s orbit of the sun, which lead to massive shifts in the planet’s climate over periods of thousands of years. The study tracks the natural cycles of the planet’s climate over a period of a million years. Their findings offer new insights into Earth’s dynamic climate system and represent a step-change in understanding the planet’s glacial cycles.

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Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the universe. They are the core of a collapsed megastar that went supernova, have a typical radius of 10 km—just slightly more than the altitude of Mt. Everest—and their density can be several times that of atomic nuclei.

Physicists love extreme objects like this because they require them to stretch their theories into new realms and see if they are confirmed or if they break, requiring new thinking and new science.

For the first time, researchers have used lattice quantum chromodynamics to study the interior of neutron stars, obtaining a new maximum bound for the speed of sound inside the star and a better understanding of how pressure, temperature and other properties there relate to one another.

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A platform developed nearly 20 years ago previously used to detect protein interactions with DNA and conduct accurate COVID-19 testing has been repurposed to create a highly sensitive water contamination detection tool.

The technology merges two exciting fields— and nanotechnology—to create a new platform for chemical monitoring. When tuned to detect different contaminants, the technology could detect the metals lead and cadmium at concentrations down to two and one parts per billion, respectively, in a matter of minutes.

The paper was published this week in the journal ACS Nano and represents research from multiple disciplines within Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering.

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has explored the atmosphere of a nearby brown dwarf binary designated WISE J045853.90+643451.9. As a result, they detected hydrogen cyanide and acetylene in the atmosphere of this binary, marking the first time these two species have been identified in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf. The finding was reported Feb. 19 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and stars. Astronomers generally agree that they are substellar objects occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses. One subclass of brown dwarfs (with effective temperatures between 500 and 1,500 K) is known as T-dwarfs, and represents the coolest and least luminous substellar objects so far detected.

Located just 30.1 light years away, WISE J045853.90+643451.9 (or WISE-0458) is a binary composed of two T-dwarfs of spectral type T8.5 and T9, with effective temperatures of 600 and 500 K, respectively. The pair has a semi-major axis of approximately 5.0 AU.

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Neutrinos have always been difficult to study because their small mass and neutral charge make them especially elusive. Scientists have made a lot of headway in the field and can now detect three flavors, or oscillation states, of neutrinos. Other flavors continue to be elusive—though that could be because they don’t even exist.

Sterile neutrinos, a flavor that has been proposed to play a role in neutrino mass generation and causing the oscillations of other neutrinos, have been hinted at in previous experiments but never detected.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, NOvA collaboration scientists did not find evidence of , but their work puts the tightest constraints on parameter space to date for where sterile neutrinos could be found.

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Overcoming the resolution limit in a light microscope of around half a wavelength of light (about 250 nanometers) is one of the most significant developments in optics. Due to the wave nature of light, even the best lens cannot produce a light spot smaller than 250 nanometers in diameter. All molecules within this bright spot are illuminated at the same time, light up together, and therefore, appear inseparable as a blurred whole.

In the early 1990s, Stefan Hell realized that molecules could be separated by briefly switching the molecular signal “OFF” and “ON” in such a way that closely neighboring molecules are forced to signal consecutively. Molecules that signal consecutively can be readily distinguished.

In fluorescence microscopy, this ON/OFF separation principle could be implemented to perfection, since molecular fluorescence can be easily switched on and off. In fact, STED and PALM/STORM, as well as the more recent super-resolution fluorescence microscopes, are all based on this ON/OFF principle.

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