Tag: ScienceDaily

ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2012) — DNA sequences from tumor cells can be used to direct the immune system to attack cancer, according to scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The immune system relies on an intricate network of alarm bells, targets and safety brakes to determine when and what to attack. The new results suggest that scientists may now be able to combine DNA sequencing data with their knowledge of the triggers and targets that set off immune alarms to more precisely develop vaccines and other immunotherapies for cancer.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2011) Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University.

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ScienceDaily (July 12, 2010) For centuries, "man-made fibers" meant the raw stuff of clothes and ropes; in the information age, it's come to mean the filaments of glass that carry data in communications networks. But to Yoel Fink, an Associate professor of Materials Science and principal investigator at MIT's Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are much too passive. For the past decade, his lab has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.

ScienceDaily (June 11, 2010) With controlled stretching of molecules, Cornell researchers have demonstrated that single-molecule devices can serve as powerful new tools for fundamental science experiments. Their work has resulted in detailed tests of long-existing theories on how electrons interact at the nanoscale.

The work, led by professor of physics Dan Ralph, is published in the June 10 online edition of the journal Science. First author is J.J. Parks, a former graduate student in Ralph's lab.

ScienceDaily (May 25, 2010) For over 10 years, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has repeatedly observed the Andromeda Galaxy for a combined total of nearly one million seconds. This unique data set has given astronomers an unprecedented view of the nearest supermassive black hole outside our own Galaxy.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2010) Material scientists at the Nano/Bio Interface Center of the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated the transduction of optical radiation to electrical current in a molecular circuit.
The system, an array of nano-sized molecules of gold, respond to electromagnetic waves by creating surface plasmons that induce and project electrical current across molecules, similar to that of photovoltaic solar cells.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 6, 2010) Galaxy morphology, or the study of the shapes and formation of galaxies, is a critical and much-debated topic in astronomy. An important tool for this is the Hubble sequence or Hubble tuning-fork diagram [1], a classification scheme invented in 1926 by the same Edwin Hubble in whose honour the space telescope is named.

A team of European astronomers led by Franחois Hammer of the Observatoire de Paris has, for the first time, completed a demographic census of galaxy types at two different points in the Universe's history -- in effect, creating two Hubble sequences -- that help explain how galaxies form. In this survey, researchers sampled 116 local galaxies and 148 distant galaxies.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 3, 2010) Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have determined for the first time that prions, bits of infectious protein devoid of DNA or RNA that can cause fatal neurodegenerative disease, are capable of Darwinian evolution.

The study from Scripps Florida in Jupiter shows that prions can develop large numbers of mutations at the protein level and, through natural selection, these mutations can eventually bring about such evolutionary adaptations as drug resistance, a phenomenon previously known to occur only in bacteria and viruses. These breakthrough findings also suggest that the normal prion protein -- which occurs naturally in human cells -- may prove to be a more effective therapeutic target than its abnormal toxic relation.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2009) The search for the holy grail of regenerative medicine -- the ability to "grow back" a perfect body part when one is lost to injury or disease -- has been under way for years, yet the steps involved in this seemingly magic process are still poorly understood.

Now researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified an essential cellular pathway in zebrafish that paves the way for limb regeneration by unlocking gene expression patterns last seen during embryonic development. They found that a process known as histone demethylation switches cells at the amputation site from an inactive to an active state, which turns on the genes required to build a copy of the lost limb.