The protein, RIG-I, is an important sensor in the immune system of humans and other animals. It recognizes and responds to viral RNA by surrounding it, latching onto it, and launching the immune system into action. The Yale team, led by biologists Anna Pyle and Akiko Iwasaki, has designed molecules that jump-start the process. These synthetic, stem-loop RNA (SLR) molecules can be visualized as short cords with a knot at one end....

A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution suggests that birds have two alternative strategies for coping with the difficulties of humanity’s increasingly chaotic cities — either by having large brains or through more frequent breeding. Surviving in cities is so difficult that many bird species may be driven to extinction by the increasing urbanization of the world. But curiously, some birds cope, and even thrive, in these new environments....

A recent study, titled “The Pot at the End of the Rainbow,” is one of the first to examine motives for cannabis use among sexual minorities quantitatively. Led by Washington State University psychologists, researchers analyzed survey data from nearly 4,700 university students from across the country. Of the participants, 23% were classified as bisexual after indicating that they were not exclusively attracted to one gender. “The group classified as bisexual was more likely to report using cannabis to cope as well as for enhancement, which is a bit surprising,” said Kyle Schofield, a WSU Ph....

Black holes are surrounded by many mysteries, but now researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have come up with new groundbreaking theories that can explain several of their properties. The research shows that black holes have properties that resemble the dynamics of both solids and liquids. The results are published in the prestigious scientific journal, Physical Review Letters. Black holes are extremely compact objects in the universe. They are so compact that they generate an incredibly strong gravitational pull and everything that comes near them is swallowed up....

A new study set to appear in The Journal Neuroscience illustrates that it is the way the brain responds to food cues when individuals are not hungry that predicts weight gain and that the reasons why people gain weight can be fundamentally different. The way the brain responds while sipping a delicious milkshake can predict who will gain weight and who will not — but only if the individual has just eaten and has a certain genetic profile, a new brain imaging study by Yale School of Medicine researchers show....

Researchers engineer RNA-targeting compounds that disable the pandemic coronavirus’ replication engine. Scripps Research chemist Matthew Disney, PhD, and colleagues have created drug-like compounds that, in human cell studies, bind and destroy the pandemic coronavirus’ so-called “frameshifting element” to stop the virus from replicating. The frameshifter is a clutch-like device the virus needs to generate new copies of itself after infecting cells. “Our concept was to develop lead medicines capable of breaking COVID-19’s clutch,” Disney says....

Malaria researchers know little about the biology of these dormant parasites, so it has been difficult to develop drugs that target them. In an advance that could help scientists discover new drugs, MIT researchers have shown they can grow the dormant parasite in engineered human liver tissue for several weeks, allowing them to closely study how the parasite becomes dormant, what vulnerabilities it may have, and how it springs back to life....

The team has studied the most common kind of breast tumor — estrogen-positive (ER +) and accounting for 80% of breast cancer tumor cases — that is characterized by a long period of latency with no symptoms. The study has been published today in Nature Cell Biology. MSK1, the protein that keeps tumor cells dormant The team has identified the protein kinase MSK1 as a key regulator of dormant or latent metastases....

The worst of California’s fire season typically comes in autumn, but severe drought and bouts of unusually warm weather have helped sustain several major fires in northern California for much of August. On August 19, 2021, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite acquired a natural-color image (above) of fires raging in California. While smoke has often blown west in recent weeks, shifting winds have begun to darken skies in northern and central California, triggering air quality alerts in Sacramento and San Francisco....

Food enjoyment is greatly influenced by smell. According to recent research from Aarhus University, many individuals have lost, diminished, or distorted senses of smell, which can have an impact on their health and quality of life. According to Alexander Wieck Fjaeldstad, associate professor, MD, losing your sense of smell or having it altered has effects on more than just your eating and cooking habits. He was involved in the establishment of Denmark’s first smell and taste clinic, and he is the author of the study that was recently published in the scientific journal Foods....

The new immunotherapy, which silences a gene involved in immunosuppression, has been shown to be effective in shrinking tumors in mouse models of colon and pancreatic cancer when combined with chemotherapy and packaged into nanoparticles. “There are two innovative aspects of our study: the discovery of a new therapeutic target and a new nanocarrier that is very effective in selective delivery of immunotherapy and chemotherapeutic drugs,” said senior author Song Li, M....

In a paper published in Science, they describe how they identified the specific genetic changes that allow tumors to grow rapidly while also preventing their own death. This discovery could have significant implications for the way melanoma is understood and treated by oncologists. “We did something that was, in essence, obvious based on previous basic research and connected back to something that is happening in patients,” said Alder, assistant professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine at Pitt’s School of Medicine....

In their ongoing effort to make carbon capture more affordable, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a method to convert captured carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane, the primary component of natural gas. By streamlining a longstanding process in which CO2 is converted to methane, the researchers’ new method reduces the materials needed to run the reaction, the energy needed to fuel it and, ultimately, the selling price of the gas....

Now MIT engineers have developed a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels. The technique may help to speed up the manufacturing of airplanes and other large, high-performance composite structures, such as blades for wind turbines. The researchers detail their new method in a paper published today (January 13, 2020) in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces. “If you’re making a primary structure like a fuselage or wing, you need to build a pressure vessel, or autoclave, the size of a two- or three-story building, which itself requires time and money to pressurize,” says Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT....

Nature is an artist, and this time she seems to have let her paints swirl together a bit. What the viewer might perceive to be Saturn’s surface is really just the tops of its uppermost cloud layers. Everything we see is the result of fluid dynamics. Astronomers study Saturn’s cloud dynamics in part to test and improve our understanding of fluid flows. Hopefully, what we learn will be useful for understanding our own atmosphere and that of other planetary bodies....

According to a study of some of the oldest stars in the Universe, the building blocks of planets like Jupiter and Saturn likely begin to form while a young star is growing. It had been thought that planets only form once a star has reached its final size, but new results, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest that stars and planets ‘grow up’ together. The research, led by the University of Cambridge, changes our understanding of how planetary systems, including our own Solar System, formed, potentially solving a major puzzle in astronomy....

Neutron stars are the ultra-dense cores of massive stars that collapse and undergo a supernova explosion. This newly identified neutron star is a rare variety that has both a low magnetic field and no stellar companion. The neutron star is located within the remains of a supernova – known as 1E 0102.2-7219 (E0102 for short) – in the Small Magellanic Cloud, located 200,000 light years from Earth. This new composite image of E0102 allows astronomers to learn new details about this object that was discovered more than three decades ago....

Where do most of the elements essential for life on Earth come from? The answer: inside the furnaces of stars and the explosions that mark the end of some stars’ lives. Astronomers have long studied exploded stars and their remains — known as “supernova remnants” — to better understand exactly how stars produce and then disseminate many of the elements observed on Earth, and in the cosmos at large. Due to its unique evolutionary status, Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is one of the most intensely studied of these supernova remnants....

At this time of year, there are lots of gatherings often decorated with festive lights. When galaxies get together, there is the chance of a spectacular light show as is the case with NGC 2207 and IC 2163. Located about 130 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Canis Major, this pair of spiral galaxies has been caught in a grazing encounter. NGC 2207 and IC 2163 have hosted three supernova explosions in the past 15 years and have produced one of the most bountiful collections of super bright X-ray lights known....

Harvard scientists find that the same cell types that cause goosebumps are responsible for controlling hair growth. If you’ve ever wondered why we get goosebumps, you’re in good company — so did Charles Darwin, who mused about them in his writings on evolution. Goosebumps might protect animals with thick fur from the cold, but we humans don’t seem to benefit from the reaction much — so why has it been preserved during evolution all this time?...