It is well-known that the risks of breast cancer increase dramatically for women over the age of 50, but what takes place at the cellular level to cause this increase has been a mystery. Some answers and the possibility of preventative measures in the future are provided in a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Mark LaBarge, a cell and molecular biologist in Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division, led a study in which it was determined that aging causes an increase in multipotent progenitors – a type of adult stem cell believed to be at the root of many breast cancers – and a decrease in the myoepithelial cells that line the breast’s milk-producing luminal cells and are believed to serve as tumor suppressors....

In a year defined by obstacles, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student rocket team persevered. Working together across five time zones, they successfully designed a hybrid rocket engine that uses paraffin and a novel nitrous oxide-oxygen mixture called Nytrox. The team has its sights set on launching a rocket with the new engine at the 2021 Intercollegiate Rocketry and Engineering Competition. “Hybrid propulsion powers Virgin Galactic’s suborbital tourist spacecraft and the development of that engine has been challenging....

The study, published in Nature Aging, found that gene expression “memory” can persist throughout a person’s life and may represent a new target for enhancing health in older adults. Lead author Dr. Nazif Alic (UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing, UCL Biosciences) said: “Health in old age partially depends on what a person experienced in their youth or even in the womb. Here, we have identified one way in which this happens, as changes in gene expression in youth can form a ‘memory’ that impacts health more than half a lifetime later....

Deep learning is an advanced type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can be trained to search X-ray images to find patterns associated with disease. “Our deep learning model offers a potential solution for population-based opportunistic screening of cardiovascular disease risk using existing chest X-ray images,” said the study’s lead author, Jakob Weiss, M.D., a radiologist affiliated with the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and the AI in Medicine program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston....

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have for the first time observed photochemical processes inside the smallest particles in the air. In doing so, they discovered that additional oxygen radicals that can be harmful to human health are formed in these aerosols under everyday conditions. They report on their results today (March 19, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications. It is well known that airborne particulate matter can pose a danger to human health....

To overcome the latest, scientists are developing systems that mimic tissues and organ functions in conditions very close to reality. These types of devices, called “Organ-on-a-chip”, include microenvironments and microarchitectures in order to emulate living organs and tissues. A team of scientists in Barcelona has developed a microfluidic device that mimics the human blood-retinal barrier. The scientists are from the Biomedical Applications Group of the Microelectronics Institute of Barcelona (IMB-CNM) of the Spanisch Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), the CIBER-BBN, and from the Diabetes and Metabolism group of the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), CIBERDEM- Institute of Health Carlos III, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)....

Late last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) alerted health care professionals that they are monitoring the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) for cases of young adults developing the rare heart-related complication myocarditis, after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. The COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group (VaST) of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is reviewing several dozen cases of myocarditis that have been reported in adolescents and young adults: more often in males rather than females; more frequently after the second dose rather than the first dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine; and typically appearing within 4 days of vaccination....

Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection risk in South Africa reveals differences among variants of concern. The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 evades immunity from prior infection, an analysis of routine surveillance data from South Africa indicates. Early in November 2021, South African scientists spotted SARS-CoV-2 reinfections consistent with the timing of the emergence of the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529). To address whether circulation of this and also other variants of concern was associated with increased reinfection risk, Juliet Pulliam et al....

Now, a team of researchers at Kyoto University has developed a prodrug form of curcumin, TBP1901, that has shown anti-tumor effects without toxicities. “Curcumin has long been used as a spice or food coloring, so we expect to see minimal side effects,” says lead author Masashi Kanai. Curcumin, a natural polyphenol, has demonstrated promising efficacy against tumors in several preclinical models. Such studies have reported anecdotal evidence of curcumin’s effect in cancer patients....

A fossil skull small enough to fit in the palm of your hand represents the oldest species of horned dinosaur named from North America. The discovery, announced by a multi-institution team including the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology at The Webb Schools, is 40 million years older than the iconic Triceratops. The new dinosaur is named Aquilops americanus, meaning “American eagle face.” The name refers to the hook-like beak at the front of the skull, used to snip plants during feeding....

Conducted in partnership with colleagues at the UCL, Université Libre de Bruxelles & Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, France, the research combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis, pioneered by lead author Christophe Snoeck during his doctoral research in the School of Archaeology at Oxford. While there has been much speculation as to how and why Stonehenge was built, the question of ‘who’ built it has received far less attention....

“These new observations of Phaethon show it may be similar in shape to asteroid Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, but 10 times larger,” said Patrick Taylor, a Universities Space Research Association (USRA), Columbia, Maryland, scientist and group leader for Planetary Radar at Arecibo Observatory. “The dark feature could be a crater or some other topographic depression that did not reflect the radar beam back at us.” Radar images obtained by Arecibo indicate Phaethon has a diameter of about 3....

Researchers from Sohail Tavazoie’s Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology found that in a variety of human cancers, this amino acid becomes limited, prompting these cells to seek a clever genetic workaround: when arginine levels drop, they manipulate proteins at their disposal to more efficiently take up arginine and other amino acids. And remarkably, in a bid to keep growing, they induce mutations that reduce their reliance on it. “It’s like if you had a LEGO set, and you’re trying to build a fancy model plane, and you run out of the right bricks,” says first author Dennis Hsu, a former member of Tavazoie’s lab and now a physician-scientist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Hillman Cancer Center in Pittsburgh....

As described in a paper to be published today (October 17) in Nature Machine Intelligence, the new model, called CODE-AE, can screen novel drug compounds to accurately predict efficacy in humans. In tests, it was also able to theoretically identify personalized drugs for over 9,000 patients that could better treat their conditions. Scientists expect the technique to significantly accelerate drug discovery and precision medicine. Accurate and robust prediction of patient-specific responses to a new chemical compound is critical to discovering safe and effective therapeutics and selecting an existing drug for a specific patient....

All the matter in the Universe exists in the form of ‘normal’ matter or the notoriously elusive and invisible dark matter, with the latter around six times more prolific. Curiously, scientists studying nearby galaxies in recent years have found them to contain three times less normal matter than expected, with our own Milky Way Galaxy containing less than half the expected amount. “This has long been a mystery, and scientists have spent a lot of effort searching for this missing matter,” says Jiangtao Li of the University of Michigan, USA, and lead author of a new paper....

Quasars are galaxies with massive black holes at their cores around which vast amounts of energy are being radiated. Indeed, so much light is emitted that the nucleus of a quasar is much brighter than the rest of the entire host galaxy, and their tremendous luminosities allow quasars to be seen even when they are very far away. The quasar SDSSJ1029+2623, for example, is so distant that its light has been traveling towards us for 11....

Two research groups of Heidelberg astronomers have independently of each other discovered a rare planet. The celestial body, called Kepler-432b, is one of the most dense and massive planets known so far. The teams, one led by Mauricio Ortiz of the Center for Astronomy of Heidelberg University (ZAH) and the other by Simona Ciceri of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, report that the planet has six times the mass of Jupiter, but about the same size....

CfA astronomers Sarah Sadavoy and Mike Dunham were members of a team of astronomers that used the VLA and ALMA radio and millimeter-wave facilities to study seventeen protostellar systems of multiple stars in the nearby Perseus cloud. The sensitive observations were able to reveal the environments of the systems and determine the presence of any small-scale rotation or surrounding material. Twelve of the systems were spatially resolved, and eight showed dust emission structures surrounding the pair....

The Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST) will be able to characterize the atmosphere and surface of exoplanets within 200 light-years. ATLAST will have a 16-meter aperture, which means that it will have an angular resolution five to ten times better than the JWST, along with a sensitivity limit 2,000 better than Hubble. ATLAST is designed not only to search for habitable exoplanets, but to make measurements of their atmospheres and surfaces....

The culprit: an autoimmune antibody that’s circulating in the blood, attacking the cells and triggering clots in arteries, veins, and microscopic vessels. Blood clots can cause life-threatening events like strokes. And, in COVID-19, microscopic clots may restrict blood flow in the lungs, impairing oxygen exchange. Outside of novel coronavirus infection, these clot-causing antibodies are typically seen in patients who have the autoimmune disease antiphospholipid syndrome. The connection between autoantibodies and COVID-19 was unexpected, says co-corresponding author Yogen Kanthi, M....