A group of researchers from the Division of Rheumatology worked on the study under the leadership of Kristine Kuhn, MD, Ph.D., an associate professor of rheumatology. The study was recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Meagan Chriswell, a medical student at CU, is the paper’s lead author. “Work led by co-authors Drs. Kevin Deane, Kristen Demoruelle, and Mike Holers here at CU helped establish that we can identify people who are at risk for RA based on serologic markers, and that these markers can be present in the blood for many years before diagnosis,” Kuhn says....

This lasso locomotion, named because of a lasso-like body posture, may contribute to the success and impact of this highly invasive species. It allows these animals to access potential prey that might otherwise be unobtainable and may also explain how this species could climb power poles, leading to electrical outages. Researchers said they hope the findings will help people protect endangered birds from the snakes. The study, “Lasso locomotion expands the climbing repertoire of snakes,” is published today (January 11, 2021) in Current Biology....

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a reverberation or afterglow left from when the universe was about 300,000 years old. It was first discovered in 1964 as a ubiquitous faint noise in radio antennas. In the past two decades, satellite-based telescopes have started to measure it with great accuracy, revolutionizing our understanding of the Big Bang. Achim Kempf, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo and Canada Research Chair in the Physics of Information, led the work to develop the new calculation, jointly with Aidan Chatwin-Davies and Robert Martin, his former graduate students at Waterloo....

Growing evidence that highly processed and refined foods are the leading contributor to rising obesity rates in the Western world is backed by a year-long study of the dietary habits of 9,341 Australians. The new study was based on a national nutrition and physical activity survey undertaken by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), and further backs the ‘Protein Leverage Hypothesis’. It was conducted by the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre (CPC) and published in the latest issue of the journal Obesity....

The discovery was made by a team of scientists led by Dr. Rhys Grinter, Ashleigh Kropp, a Ph.D. student, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia. The team produced and studied a hydrogen-consuming enzyme sourced from a bacterium commonly found in soil. Recent work by the team has shown that many bacteria use hydrogen from the atmosphere as an energy source in nutrient-poor environments....

When researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil treated human melanoma cell lines with a synthetic compound similar to curcumin, one of the pigments that give turmeric (Curcuma longa) its orange color, they identified genes with altered expression in potentially invasive tumors and malignant cells resistant to chemotherapy. According to the scientists, if further studies confirm the importance of these genes to disease progression and increasing chemoresistance, it will be possible to explore their future use as biomarkers to assist diagnosis and even as therapeutic targets....

In people who have serious and long-term COVID-19, organs other than the lungs can be gravely affected. Complex symptoms and damage in, for example, the heart, kidneys, eyes, nose, and brain, as well as disturbed blood coagulation, can sometimes persist. Why the illness affects the body in this way has largely been a mystery. Now, researchers at LiU have found a biological mechanism that has never been described before, and which can be a part of the explanation....

After observing a nearby galaxy from which ultraviolet light is escaping, astronomers hypothesize that black holes may have punctured darkened galaxies and allowed light to escape. Soon after the Big Bang, the universe went completely dark. The intense, seminal event that created the cosmos churned up so much hot, thick gas that light was completely trapped. Much later—perhaps as many as one billion years after the Big Bang—the universe expanded; became more transparent; and eventually filled up with galaxies, planets, stars, and other objects that give off visible light....

The virus forms specifically shaped structures called trimers on its surface, which are designed to attach to and infect cells and produce more HIV. To escape the immune system, the trimer can change shapes over time into three separate conformations. Vaccines now under development target one form of those structures in order to spur an immune system response. However, the new study published April 10 in the journal Nature shows that the HIV may escape immune system detection by hiding in yet another trimer conformation, called State 1....

Thanks to work combining mathematical modeling and plant biology, the scientists were able to determine that cauliflowers, and Romanescos in particular, are in fact buds that are designed to become flowers but which never reach their goal. Instead, they develop into stems, which in turn continue trying to produce flowers. The cauliflower is born from this chain reaction, resulting in a succession of stems upon stems. This study shows that the brief incursion of buds into a flowering state profoundly affects their functioning and allows them, unlike normal stems, to grow without leaves and to multiply almost infinitely....

Canada should anticipate a resurgence of a childhood respiratory virus as COVID-19 physical distancing measures are relaxed, authors warn in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have risen sharply in Australia and, more recently, the United States as COVID-19 case counts have waned and pandemic public health measures have been relaxed. Respiratory syncytial virus affects the lower respiratory tract and can cause serious illness and death....

Solar Orbiter has detected a ‘tube’ of cooler atmospheric gases rapidly snaking its way through the Sun’s powerful magnetic field. This observation provides a fascinating new addition to the zoo of features revealed by the Solar Orbiter mission, which is led by the European Space Agency (ESA). It is especially intriguing because the snake was a precursor to a much larger eruption. The snake was spotted on September 5, 2022, as the Solar Orbiter spacecraft was approaching the Sun for a close pass that took place on October 12....

Turning off a newly identified enzyme could reverse a natural aging process in cells. Research findings by a KAIST team provide insight into the complex mechanism of cellular senescence and present a potential therapeutic strategy for reducing age-related diseases associated with the accumulation of senescent cells. Simulations that model molecular interactions have identified an enzyme that could be targeted to reverse a natural aging process called cellular senescence. The findings were validated with laboratory experiments on skin cells and skin equivalent tissues, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)....

Disease, in particular respiratory infection, is one of the biggest threats to ape conservation. Because humans and apes are so closely related, our ape cousins can catch many of the same diseases as us. However, respiratory infections that are relatively mild in humans can have major consequences in apes like gorillas and chimpanzees, where a case of the common cold or flu can be lethal. Scientists from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund studied 15 respiratory outbreaks across the last 17 years to understand how diseases transmitted through a population of mountain gorillas in the Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda....

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 1, 2022 This was SpaceX’s 50th launch of 2022 (44 weeks in). That puts SpaceX at a current pace of a launch every 6.10 days, putting the commercial company on track for 59 launches this year. It was also the year’s 70th orbital launch attempt for the US space industry and the 150th for the world. Liftoff occurred at 9:41 a.m. EDT (6:41 a.m. PDT) from launchpad 39A for the classified USSF-44 mission for the US Space Force....

Only a few percent of galaxies in the nearby universe are merging, but galaxy mergers were more common between 6 billion and 10 billion years ago, and these processes profoundly shaped our modern galactic landscape. For more than 10 years, scientists working on the Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey, or GOALS, have been using nearby galaxies to study the details of galaxy mergers and to use them as local laboratories for that earlier period in the universe’s history....

The analysis also suggests that social distancing interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic likely lowered the prevalence of AFM in 2020. Cases of the polio-like illness AFM, which rapidly results in limb weakness and lesions in the spinal cord, have been on the rise in the U.S. since 2012. The condition remains rare — affecting around 500 people in the U.S. annually — but researchers are concerned about its spread and are still unsure about what causes the disease....

A Stanford sleep medicine doctor insists that anyone can learn how to wake up earlier—and feel good about it. As an undergraduate student majoring in biology at the University of Puerto Rico, Rafael Pelayo worked three jobs to pay his way through school. To accommodate his employers, he took 7 a.m. classes, getting up at 5:30 in the morning and using his commute time to study. When he was a medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, N....