A Tufts School of Medicine researcher is developing a test to predict lung cancer risk more accurately and reduce the number of scans to detect the condition.
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Physicists are reimagining dark matter
Dr Freese has also made the case for a Dark Big Bang that could have given rise to dark matter independently of normal matter in the days after the Big Bang. The traditional model of the universe says that matter and dark matter were produced at the same time. The earliest evidence of dark matter, however, only appears later in the early evolution of the universe, when cosmic structure starts to form.
One explanation for this is that matter and dark matter did not, in fact, appear together, but that dark matter entered the universe in a second cataclysmic release of energy from the vacuum—the Dark Big Bang—as much as a month after the traditional Big Bang. The model that Dr Freese and her co-author Martin Winkler explored would explain why dark matter might be completely decoupled from traditional matter and it also naturally produces SIDM candidates. If there was such a Dark Big Bang, it would have left a clear signature—a pattern in the frequencies of the gravitational waves that hum across the universe—that could be picked up by future gravitational-wave detectors.
New insights into the growth and spread of cancer cells
Cancer cells are characterized by their aggressiveness: they grow rapidly and spread to other parts of the body. To enable this, numerous mechanisms come into play, and one of them involves a protein called MYC, which activates certain genes on the cancer cell’s DNA strand, causing the cancer cell to grow and divide.
The MYC protein is also present in healthy individuals, where it plays a crucial role in regulating many cell functions.
“When cancer occurs, it is due to an accumulation of mutations in our DNA, often resulting in the overactivation of the MYC protein. Therefore, this protein plays a crucial role in most cancer forms,” says Rasmus Siersbæk, head of research at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark.
Advances Needed for Diabetic Foot Infections, Experts Say
With a mobile app powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Caitlin Hicks, MD, MS, reviews selfies of patients’ feet in real time to track their wounds as part of a clinical trial. The app saves time for Hicks, a vascular surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medicine, but also reduces clinic trips for her patients with diabetes in inner-city Baltimore, many of whom are elderly and less mobile or have other socioeconomic barriers to care. Hicks knows that for these patients, wound vigilance is the linchpin to preventing infection, hospitalization, or, worse, amputation or even death.
Despite their crushing toll, diabetic foot infections remain stubbornly hard to treat, but multidisciplinary care teams, new drugs and devices on the horizon, and practical solutions to socioeconomic factors could budge the needle.
Beam balance designs could elucidate the origins of dark energy
One of the greatest problems in modern physics is to reconcile the enormous difference between the energy carried by random fluctuations in the vacuum of space, and the dark energy driving the universe’s expansion.
Through new research published in The European Physical Journal Plus, researchers led by Enrico Calloni at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, have unveiled a prototype for an ultra-precise beam balance instrument, which they hope could be used to measure the interaction between these vacuum fluctuations and gravitational fields. With some further improvements, the instrument could eventually enable researchers to shed new light on the enigmatic origins of dark energy.
Inside a vacuum, electromagnetic waves are constantly emerging and disappearing through random fluctuations, so that even though the space doesn’t contain any matter, it still carries a certain amount of energy. Through their research, Calloni’s team aimed to measure the influence of these fluctuations using a state-of-the-art beam balance.
Regulatory mechanism that keeps the immune system in check identified
Researchers from the UoC’s Center for Biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine and the UoC CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Aging Research have discovered that an excessive immune response can be prevented by the intramembrane protease RHBDL4.
In a study now published in Nature Communications under the title “RHBDL4-triggered downregulation of COPII adaptor protein TMED7 suppresses TLR4-mediated inflammatory signaling,” the previously unknown regulatory mechanism is described.
The researchers discovered that the cleavage of a cargo receptor by a so-called intramembrane protease reduces the localization of a central immune receptor on the cell surface and thereby the risk of an overreaction of the immune system.
Discovery of ‘molecular machine’ brings new immune therapies a step closer
Guanylate binding proteins (GBP) were discovered by YSM’s John MacMicking, PhD, and colleagues over a decade ago as major organizers of cellular immune response.
In a recent study, MacMicking’s team used advanced cryo-and electron microscope technology to visualize in high resolution the way GBPs…
Yale scientists have discovered a family of immune proteins, which they describe as a “massive molecular machine,” that could affect the way our bodies fight infection.
Our immune system mobilizes numerous proteins to detect viruses and bacteria — and to bring them under control. But until recently, limits to research technology have thwarted scientists’ understanding of how to prevent different pathogens from occupying and replicating within specific parts of our cells in the first place.
Harnessing the latest cryo‐electron microscopy techniques to look inside human cells, researchers at the Yale Systems Biology Institute have identified a family of large immune proteins that assemble into a massive signaling platform directly on the surface of microbial pathogens.
Neutron star mergers: New physics signals
There is reason to believe that novel physics outside the standard model may be on the horizon.
When two neutron stars merge, a short-lived, hot, dense remnant is created. This residue provides an excellent environment for the synthesis of unusual particles. For a brief while, the remnant becomes far hotter than the individual stars before congealing into a larger neutron star or, depending on the original masses, a black hole.
A new study suggests that neutron star mergers are a treasure trove for new physics signals, with implications for determining the true nature of dark matter.