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Blog – Page 1403

Forget painting the town red. Revelers wanting to escape the heat may be adopting a new turn of phrase following the recently revealed results of a real-world study.

As detailed by Phys.org, NTU Singapore researchers found that using “cool paint coatings” in urban areas resulted in pedestrians feeling 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit cooler — helping to mitigate the dreaded heat island effect.

“This is a minimally intrusive solution for urban cooling that has an immediate effect, compared to other options that often require major urban redevelopment to deploy,” lead author Dr. E V S Kiran Kumar Donthu told the outlet.

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“We want to better understand what causes cancer to resist or respond to immunotherapy to help design more effective strategies for patients,” said senior author Gregory Beatty, MD, PhD, an associate professor of hematology-oncology and the director of clinical and translational research for the Penn Pancreatic Cancer Research Center. “Our findings show that liver cells—with their release of SAA proteins—effectively serve as an immune checkpoint regulating anticancer immunity, making them a promising therapeutic target.”

The study builds on previous research from the team, including co-lead authors Meredith Stone, PhD, a research associate, and Jesse Lee, a graduate student, into liver inflammation in cancer: In a 2019 study, they showed how it promotes pancreatic tumor metastasis to that organ. In 2021, researchers from the Beatty Lab observed that systemic inflammation, involving many of the same molecules implicated in liver metastasis, is associated with worse responses to immunotherapies in pancreatic cancer patients.

The latest study was designed to investigate in more detail how liver inflammation may block the effects of these immune-boosting therapies.

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A team of astronomers believes the near-Earth asteroid Kamo’oalewa, a space rock between 130 and 328 feet in diameter, was once part of the Moon.

More specifically, a research team led by Tsinghua University astronomer Yifei Jiao suggests the rock was gouged from a geological feature on the far side of the Moon called the Giordano Bruno crater, named after a 16th-century Italian cosmological theorist.

“We have explored the processes for impact-induced lunar fragments migrating into Earth co-orbital space and presented support for Kamo’oalewa’s possible origin from the formation of the Giordano Bruno crater a few million years ago,” the researchers write in their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy last week.

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I found this on NewsBreak:

The crew of the International Space Station has stumbled upon a drug-resistant bacteria on board, leaving them baffled as to how it arrived.

Scientists working in the low orbit lab have confirmed the discovery, which raises concerns about the potential evolution of more robust bacteria that could defy current treatments. The unique microgravity environment of the ISS is suspected to be a factor in the bacteria’s persistence.

The origin of the bacteria remains a mystery to the team, who can’t recall how it might have been introduced to the station. Life in space presents different growth conditions for organisms, leading to alternative evolutionary paths compared to their Earth-bound counterparts.

Continue reading “International Space Station crew find ‘drug-resistant bacteria’ and have no idea how it got there” | >