A phase 2 trial found that the apoE mimetic peptide CN-105 was safe and feasible in older adults after surgery, supporting the need for a phase 3 trial to assess effects on postoperative delirium.
This randomized clinical trial investigates the safety and feasibility of the apolipoprotein E mimetic peptide CN-105 vs placebo for reducing postoperative delirium in older patients.
Neuroendocrine cells are unique in their ability to act both as nerve cells and hormone-making cells. They’re scattered throughout the body, including the stomach, intestines, pancreas and lungs. Tumors that arise from these cells are called neuroendocrine tumors and are often rare and slow growing.
Around 70% of all neuroendocrine tumors arise in the pancreas or gastrointestinal tract and are known as gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, or GEP-NETs. Targeting these tumors is often challenging because cells become resistant to treatment.
In a recent study published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, University of Michigan researchers have identified a new target that can suppress tumor growth. Their findings may lead to new treatment methods for GEP-NETs.
“It’s getting slurped up by AI or people are gonna copy it, or something else like that.”
A new microscope captures how atoms rearrange themselves when they are illuminated inside an optical cavity.
When light hits an atom, it exerts a force on the atom. As weak as these light-induced forces may be, understanding them allows scientists to levitate particles, create the coldest atomic gases in the Universe, operate solar sails, and observe gravitational waves. More exotic phenomena occur when light is confined between a pair of mirrors known as an optical cavity. When a gas of atoms is placed inside such a cavity, light emitted by one atom can be absorbed by another atom. Through the exchange of photons, each atom simultaneously tugs on all the other atoms, causing the ensemble to autonomously rearrange itself into a periodic pattern called a density wave. Now Jean-Philippe Brantut and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) have built a microscope to, for the first time, image this light-induced density wave in an ultracold atomic gas [1].
Everyone’s idea of the perfect cup of coffee is different. Whether you have yours black, with a splash of milk or extra sweet, you like it your way. But is there a universal law that governs how that flavor gets into your cup? According to new research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, part of the answer lies in the permeability of the puck, the name for the bed of tightly packed coffee grains through which water passes under high pressure.
To make a really good espresso is essentially trial and error. No matter the coffee type, baristas must constantly adjust how finely the coffee is ground and how much is packed into the puck to achieve the right flow rate. This is the volume of liquid passing through the puck over a specific amount of time and determines how long the water stays in contact with the grounds. This new research helps take some of the guesswork out of the process.
University of Mississippi research offers hope that cancer drug therapies packaged in 3D-printed carriers could deliver medication directly to tumors while reducing many of the side effects that cancer patients endure. In a study published in Pharmaceutical Research, the Ole Miss team demonstrated that 3D-printed spanlastics—a tiny carrier filled with cancer-fighting drugs—could be implanted directly at the site of a tumor and kill those cells.
“This paper introduced a new 3D printing concept called FRESH 3D printing,” said Mo Maniruzzaman, chair and professor of pharmaceutics and drug delivery. “It uses spanlastics as a new nano-drug delivery vehicle for anticancer drug delivery. We actually applied this on breast cancer cells and we got some really, really promising data.”
Traditional chemotherapy is often given orally or injected into the bloodstream, where the circulatory system disperses cancer-fighting therapy throughout the body.
Materials that repel water are used in countless applications, including industrial separation processes, routine laboratory pipetting, and medical devices. When water touches these surfaces, the interface where they meet tends to acquire a small electrical charge—an effect that is ubiquitous, yet poorly understood. KAUST researchers have now studied this in detail and their findings could have broad implications. The findings are published in the journal Langmuir.
“This is not a niche laboratory curiosity,” says Yinfeng Xu, a Ph.D. student who led the experimental work in Himanshu Mishra’s laboratory. “This phenomenon plays a role in environmental processes such as dew droplets and raindrops; in industrial operations involving sprays, condensates, or emulsions; and in modern microfluidic and liquid-handling systems used in laboratories worldwide.”
Debates over how geometry is understood and learned date back at least to the days of Plato, with more recent scholars concluding that only humans possess the foundations of this understanding. However, a new analysis by New York University psychology professor Moira Dillon concludes that geometry’s foundations are shared by humans and a variety of other animals—from rats to chickens to fish.
“Our ability to think geometrically may not come from a built-in, uniquely human ‘math module’ in the brain, but rather from the same cognitive systems that help humans, as well as animals, find their way home,” explains Dillon, whose work appears in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. “Put another way, our understanding of geometry may very well come from wandering rather than from worksheets.”
While Plato and, later, Descartes and Kant all debated the origins of geometry and the role of cognition in its beginnings, only in the latter half of the 20th century did scientists start testing how it is learned.
A research team at the University of Tokyo has developed a new microscopy platform that can observe a previously hidden layer of biomolecular chemistry linked to weak magnetic fields. The work, led by Project Researcher Noboru Ikeya and Professor Jonathan R. Woodward at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, addresses a long-standing technical gap in life-science measurement: Many important intermediates in spin-dependent reactions are “dark” molecules that do not emit light directly and therefore escape conventional fluorescence imaging.
To solve this, the team combined two precisely timed light pulses with a synchronized nanosecond magnetic pulse. The approach, called pump-field-probe fluorescence microscopy, compares signals as the magnetic field switches at different points in time. This comparison isolates the spin-dependent part of the chemistry and reveals precisely how magnetically sensitive intermediates appear and disappear. The findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The researchers validated the method in flavin-based model systems that are widely used to study biologically relevant photochemistry. They showed that the platform can recover reaction lifetimes and magnetic responses with high sensitivity, including at low concentrations matching cellular conditions. The system was capable of detecting very small signal changes under practical low-damage single-experiment per frame settings, an important step toward future live-cell studies.
Creating artificial systems that mimic the functioning of cells is one of the goals of what is known as synthetic biology. These models, known as synthetic or biomimetic cells, allow some of the basic processes of life to be reproduced in the laboratory to better understand how natural cells work and develop new technologies. In this context, a study involving a team of researchers from the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS) of the University of Santiago (USC) proposes a more flexible chemical strategy to create this type of system.
The objective, explain the researchers, is to design structures that mimic certain cellular functions and that can be used as small chemical reactors. The study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
“The idea is to try to replicate cellular functions at the level of encapsulation of communication enzymes,” explains researcher Lucas García, referring to artificial systems capable of recreating processes that in real cells allow, for example, different reactions to take place within the same compartment.