New research shows that negative expectations, known as nocebo effects, exert a stronger and longer-lasting impact on pain perception than positive expectations, or placebo effects.
The immune system is comprised of two separate active arms of immunity to provide robust protection against disease. The two separate systems of immunity include the innate and adaptive immune responses. The innate immune system is the first on the scene when a pathogen enters the body. Different cells of this response include eosinophils, basophils, neutrophils, natural killer cells, macrophages, dendritic cells, and others. Once a pathogen is detected the innate immune system generates a generalized response to target a wide variety of diseases. The innate immune cells then relay detection of a foreign pathogen to the second level of immunity, the adaptive immune response. The second wave that fights off disease is more specific and includes T and B cells. The adaptive immune response is widely accepted as the stronger barrier of immunity because of its specificity and ability to mount a larger response. However, each work in concert with the other to elicit an optimal immune response and keep the body healthy.
Many different cells are involved in active immunity that help protect against infection. As a result, immunologists work to understand each cell’s impact on the immune system and how they function in the context of various pathologies. To activate the immune system during an infection or disease onset, immunotherapy is employed, which targets one or several immune cell types to redirect them to the infection. In particular, natural killer cells, are emerging as an optimal cell target for immunotherapy in ovarian cancer.
Natural killer cells are a type of white blood cell responsible for eliminating virus-infected cells and tumor cells. They secrete various molecules and proteins that signal a strong immune response. Additionally, they have been reported to develop immune memory, in which they can recognize previously encountered pathogen. These natural killer cells that develop immune memory are referred to as adaptive natural killer (aNK) cells. Scientists are working to understand more about these cell types and how they can be targeted for cancer immunotherapy.
Using ALMA, Teague’s team captured images of 15 young star systems sprinkled in space between a few hundred to 1,000 light-years from Earth. Rather than rely on direct detection of a young planet’s faint light, Teague’s team looked for the subtle clues these infant worlds imprint on their surroundings — such as gaps and rings in dusty disks, swirling gas motions caused by a planet’s gravity, and other physical disturbances that hint at a planet’s presence. To uncover these signatures, the researchers used ALMA to map the motion of gas within over a dozen protoplanetary disks.
“It’s like trying to spot a fish by looking for ripples in a pond, rather than trying to see the fish itself,” Christophe Pinte, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Planetary sciences and Astrophysics in France, who was also a principal investigator of the project, said in the statement.
Scientists have uncovered the hidden source of Earth’s largest volcanic eruption, solving a 120-million-year-old mystery about the Pacific’s volcanic evolution.
Hot bricks deploy an inner shape-shifting trick to fit the industrial processes bill for high performance energy storage.
Scientists in Osaka began clinical trials on proteins to enable children without permanent teeth to develop a third set of teeth by 2030.
A Kobe University team was able to edit the DNA of Lactobacillus strains directly without a template from other organisms. This technique is indistinguishable from natural variation and enabled the researchers to create a strain that doesn’t produce diabetes-aggravating chemicals.
Humans have improved the microorganisms we rely on for millennia, selecting variants that are better able to produce wine, yogurt, natto and many other products. More recently, direct genetic modification has emerged as a tool to exert more precise and efficient control over the improvement, but also has drawn much public criticism for often using DNA from unrelated organisms in these modifications. Kobe University bioengineer NISHIDA Keiji says, “As a consequence, using such transgenic techniques is not favorable for food products due to legislations being restrictive and social acceptance being low.”
Nishida and his team have developed a technique that gives even more precise control over the genetic content of a microorganism that does not rely on template DNA from other organisms. He says: “We have invented a DNA base editing technology named ‘Target-AID,’ which is superior to conventional techniques such as ‘CRISPR-Cas9’ in several aspects. For example, CRISPR-Cas9 induces DNA breaks and often causes cell death, while our Target-AID inserts precise point mutations without such breaks.”
Juan Lavista Ferres, CVP and chief data scientist at Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, and Meghana Kshirsagar, senior research scientist, discuss their research on protein symmetry.
While you won’t see a trace of this exoplanet or alien life, it’s easy to spot the red dwarf star that warms its surface.
You may never come face to face with your favorite rock star, but you can attend their concerts or listen to a music recording. Celestial bodies can be like that. Amateurs can’t see black holes, exoplanets, and accretion disks, but we can detect their presence by how they interact with their surroundings. At the very least we can picture them in our mind’s eye.
For example, a likely exoplanet orbits the 1st-magnitude star Pollux in the Gemini twins. It even has a name — Thestias. At public events, I point to Pollux and explain that a planet twice as massive as Jupiter orbits the red giant every 590 days. When it comes to novae, including the woefully-behind-schedule T Cor Bor, it’s fun to imagine the “single” star as a pair of tightly orbiting suns. One pilfers hydrogen from the other until enough material accumulates on the thief’s surface to detonate in a brilliant thermonuclear explosion. Voilà — a nova!