Tag: cells

ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2011) University of Utah researchers have discovered a new class of compounds that stick to the sugary coating of the AIDS virus and inhibit it from infecting cells -- an early step toward a new treatment to prevent sexual transmission of the virus.


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ScienceDaily (June 22, 2011) Researchers from ETH Zurich have fitted human cells with a synthetic signaling cascade that can be used to switch on and regulate genes via blue light.
This "gene light switch" makes interesting therapies possible, which could be used to treat type 2 diabetes, for instance.

ScienceDaily (May 20, 2011) Scientists at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have further boosted the energy conversion efficiency of flexible solar cells made of copper indium gallium (di)selenide (also known as CIGS) to a new world record of 18.7 percent -- a significant improvement over the previous record of 17.6 percent achieved by the same team in June 2010.

The measurements have been independently certified by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg, Germany.

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2011) From a bucket of seawater, scientists have unlocked information that may lead to deeper understanding of organisms as different as coral reefs and human disease. By analyzing genomes of a tiny, single-celled marine animal, they have demonstrated a possible way to address diverse questions such as how diseased cells differ from neighboring healthy cells and what it is about some Antarctic algae that allows them to live in warming waters while other algae die out.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 4, 2011) A new microscope invented by scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus will let researchers use an exquisitely thin sheet of light -- similar to that used in supermarket bar-code scanners -- to peer inside single living cells, revealing the three-dimensional shapes of cellular landmarks in unprecedented detail.

The microscopy technique images at high speed, so researchers can create dazzling movies that make biological processes, such as cell division, come alive.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 24, 2010) The long, anxious wait for biopsy results could soon be over, thanks to a tissue-imaging technique developed at the University of Illinois.

The research team demonstrated the novel microscopy technique, called nonlinear interferometric vibrational imaging (NIVI), on rat breast-cancer cells and tissues. It produced easy-to-read, color-coded images of tissue, outlining clear tumor boundaries, with more than 99 percent confidence -- in less than five minutes.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2009) Scientists at UC Santa Barbara, in collaboration with scientists at University of Michigan, have developed synthetic particles that closely mimic the characteristics and key functions of natural red blood cells, including softness, flexibility, and the ability to carry oxygen.

The primary function of natural red blood cells is to carry oxygen, and the synthetic red blood cells (sRBCs) do that very well, retaining 90% of their oxygen-binding capacity after a week. The sRBCs also, however, have been shown to deliver therapeutic drugs effectively and with controlled release, and to carry well-distributed contrast agents for enhanced resolution in diagnostic imaging.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2009) Dr. Bernard Thיbaud lives in two very different worlds. As a specialist in the Stollery Children's Hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, he cares for tiny babies, many of whom struggle for breath after being born weeks before they are due. Across town, in his laboratory in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta, Dr. Thיbaud dons a lab coat and peers into a microscope to examine the precise effect of stem cells on the lungs.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2009) Determining what triggers the death of retinal cells, called photoreceptors, could hold the key to stopping blinding disorders caused by a wide range of eye diseases, Yale School of Medicine researchers report in the November journal Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science.

Dye-sensitized cells get a double boost from nanowires and optical fiber.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are flexible and cheap to make, but they tend to be inefficient at converting light into electricity. One way to boost the performance of any solar cell is to increase the surface area available to incoming light. So a group of researchers at Georgia Tech has made dye-sensitized solar cells with a much higher effective surface area by wrapping the cells around optical fibers. These fiber solar cells are six times more efficient than a zinc oxide solar cell with the same surface area, and if they can be built using cheap polymer fibers, they shouldn't be significantly more expensive to make.