Existing cancer immunotherapies act on only a fraction of the immune cells implicated in the disease. In this study, the research team developed an antibody, KWAR23, to block a different set of immune cells known as myeloid cells. Many of these cells infiltrate tumors, triggering tumor growth, inflammation, and resistance to treatment. In both cell culture and in mouse models with human cell membrane proteins, the research team found that the antibody blocked a protein that would otherwise limit the tumor-killing ability of myeloid cells....

Mutation is not expected to interfere with effectiveness of vaccines under development. A new study published in Science confirms that SARS-CoV-2 has mutated in a way that’s enabled it to spread quickly around the world, but the spike mutation may also make the virus more susceptible to a vaccine. The new strain of coronavirus, called D614G, emerged in Europe and has become the most common in the world. Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows the D614G strain replicates faster and is more transmissible than the virus, originating in China, that spread at the beginning of the pandemic....

Drug overdoses in the United States have risen sharply in the last two decades. Nearly 92,000 people died from overdoses of illegal drugs and prescription opioids in 2020—more than five times the number of deaths in the year 2000—and synthetic opioids like fentanyl are one of the main culprits. Naloxone (an injectable medicine also marketed as the nasal spray Narcan) has saved countless lives, but it only works for opioid overdoses and has other limitations....

Chemists and physicists at Kiel University joined forces with colleagues from France, and Switzerland to design, deposit and operate single molecular spin switches on surfaces. The newly developed molecules feature stable spin states and do not lose their functionality upon adsorption on surfaces. They present their results in the current issue of the renowned journal Nature Nanotechnology. The spin states of the new compounds are stable for at least several days....

Researchers from Penn State, The University of Texas at Austin, Iowa State University, Dow Chemical Company and DuPont Water Solutions published a key finding in understanding how membranes actually filter minerals from water, online today (December 31) in Science. The article will be featured on the print edition’s cover, to be issued tomorrow (January 1). “Despite their use for many years, there is much we don’t know about how water filtration membranes work,” said Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State, who led the research....

A new study published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice from the University of South Florida (USF) and the Women’s Institute for Independent Social Enquiry (WiiSE), estimates that for each child who requires intensive care for COVID-19, there are 2,381 children infected with the virus. This calculation follows a report from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention regarding its clinical study of over 2,100 children in China with COVID-19....

Acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines increased globally, from 75.2% in 2021 to 79.1% in 2022, according to a survey in 23 countries that represent more than 60% of the world’s population. However, vaccine acceptance decreased in eight countries and almost one in eight vaccinated respondents, particularly younger men and women, were hesitant about receiving a booster dose. Led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) and published on January 9 in the journal Nature Medicine, the study underlines a wide variability among countries and the need for tailored communication strategies in addressing vaccine hesitancy....

When two substances are brought together, they will eventually settle into a steady state called the thermodynamic equilibrium; in everyday life, we see examples of this when oil floats on top of water and when milk mixes uniformly into coffee. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland wanted to disrupt this sort of state to see what happens — and whether they can control the outcome. “Things in equilibrium tend to be quite boring,” says Professor Jaakko Timonen, whose research group carried out new work published in Science Advances on 15 September....

Researchers from Columbia University have developed a new technique for the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR to restore retinal function in mice afflicted by a degenerative retinal disease, retinitis pigmentosa. This is the first time researchers have successfully applied CRISPR technology to a type of inherited disease known as a dominant disorder. This same tool might work in hundreds of diseases, including Huntington’s disease, Marfan syndrome, and corneal dystrophies. Their study was published online today in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology....

Like nearly 4.6 million Americans, ancient hunter-gatherers also suffered from clogged arteries, revealing that the plaque build-up causing blood clots, heart attacks and strokes is not just a result of fatty diets or couch potato habits, according to new research in the journal The Lancet. The researchers performed CT scans of 137 mummies from across four continents and found artery plaque in every single population studied, from preagricultual hunter-gatherers in the Aleutian Islands to the ancient Puebloans of southwestern United States....

Many normal situations have the potential to be unbelievably boring. Boredom is more than just one of life’s minor irritations; it has been linked to drug use, alcoholism, problematic gambling, and compulsive behavior. It has even been tied to potentially lethal errors in job execution since bored personnel perform less reliably than people engaged in their work. There hasn’t been much done in order to determine the actual cause of boredom, which can occur in a perplexingly broad range of situations, involving both our external environment and inner resources....

Even as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, lies dormant within a telescope dome on a mountaintop in Arizona, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the DESI project has moved forward in reaching the final formal approval milestone prior to startup. DESI is designed to gather the light of tens of millions of galaxies, and several million ultrabright deep-sky objects called quasars, using fiber-optic cables that are automatically positioned to point at 5,000 galaxies at a time by an orchestrated set of swiveling robots....

Biology encodes information in DNA and RNA, which are complex molecules finely tuned to their functions. But are they the only way to store hereditary molecular information? Some scientists believe life as we know it could not have existed before there were nucleic acids, thus understanding how they came to exist on the primitive Earth is a fundamental goal of basic research. The central role of nucleic acids in biological information flow also makes them key targets for pharmaceutical research, and synthetic molecules mimicking nucleic acids form the basis of many treatments for viral diseases, including HIV....

The findings were just published in the journal Scientific Reports. “For those of you who don’t always recognize a friend or acquaintance wearing a mask, you are not alone,” according to the researchers Prof. Tzvi Ganel, head of the Laboratory for Visual Perception and Action at the BGU Department of Psychology, and Prof. Erez Freud, who earned his Ph.D. at BGU and is now a faculty member at York University in Toronto, Ontario....

Ocean currents and winds form a never-ending feedback loop: winds blow over the ocean’s surface, creating currents. At the same time, the hot or cold water in these currents influences the wind’s speed. Understanding the relationship between the two phenomena is crucial to understanding Earth’s changing climate. Gathering data on this interaction can also help people track oil spills, plan shipping routes and understand ocean productivity in relation to fisheries....

A new study published in the International Journal of Cancer found an inverse relationship between mushroom consumption and the development of prostate cancer among middle-aged and elderly Japanese men, suggesting that regular mushroom intake might help to prevent prostate cancer. A total of 36,499 men, aged 40 to 79 years who participated in the Miyagi Cohort Study in 1990 and in the Ohsaki Cohort Study in 1994 were followed for a median of 13....

Einstein was not unfamiliar with mathematical difficulties. He found it difficult to define energy in a manner that respected both the rule of energy conservation and covariance, which is a key aspect of general relativity that states that physical laws apply to all observers equally. A research team at Kyoto University’s Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics has now proposed a novel approach to this longstanding problem by defining energy to incorporate the concept of entropy....

Gravitational lensing occurs when a large distribution of matter, such as a galaxy cluster, sits between Earth and a distant light source. As space is warped by massive objects, the light from the distant object bends as it travels to us and we see a distorted image of it. This effect was first predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Strong gravitational lenses provide an opportunity for studying properties of distant galaxies, since Hubble can resolve details within the multiple arcs that are one of the main results of gravitational lensing....

Engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology have developed innovative flat, optical lenses that are capable of manipulating light in ways that are difficult or impossible to achieve with conventional optical devices. The new lenses are not made of glass. Instead, silicon nanopillars are precisely arranged into a honeycomb pattern to create a “metasurface” that can control the paths and properties of passing light waves....

This is the finding of new Imperial College London research that modeled likely future cliff retreat rates of two rock coasts in the UK. The forecasts are based on predictions of sea level rise for various greenhouse gas emissions and climate change scenarios. Rock coasts, traditionally thought of as stable compared to sandy coasts and soft cliffs, are likely to retreat at a rate not seen for 3,000-5,000 years, according to the study’s results....