Analyzing medical exam and mortality data from more than 14,000 adults has helped a team of scientists develop a new measure of obesity that incorporates body shape into the calculation called ABSI, “A Body Shape Index.” A new measure of obesity developed by a City College of New York researcher and a physician predicts early death better than BMI. BMI, or Body Mass Index, has long been the most common and convenient way to estimate a person’s percentage of body fat....

In an advance that could improve the treatment options available for osteoarthritis, MIT engineers have designed a new material that can administer drugs directly to the cartilage. The material can penetrate deep into the cartilage, delivering drugs that could potentially heal damaged tissue. “This is a way to get directly to the cells that are experiencing the damage, and introduce different kinds of therapeutics that might change their behavior,” says Paula Hammond, head of MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the study....

The findings from both groups paint a more complete portrait of the various cellular processes that SARS-CoV-2 targets to not only enter cells, but to then multiply and spread. The results also hint that the sequences could potentially serve as targets for new therapies for patients with COVID-19, although validation in cells and animal models is needed. Scientists know that SARS-CoV-2 binds the ACE2 receptor on the surface of human cells, after which it enters the cell through a process known as endocytosis....

CAR T-cell therapy is a relatively new type of immunotherapy that involves extracting a patient’s immune cells (known as T cells) from the blood and injecting them in a laboratory with a new gene that specifically attacks a molecule called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) on the surface of the tumor cells. When returned to the patients, the T cells are more aggressive, and attack the cancer cells like guided missiles....

Inflammatory immune response can cause T cells to become depleted, affecting patient outcomes in coronavirus cases and leaving them prone to secondary infection. Cytokine storms may affect the severity of COVID-19 cases by lowering T cell counts, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Immunology. Researchers studying coronavirus cases in China found that sick patients had a significantly low number of T cells, a type of white blood cell that plays a crucial role in immune response, and that T cell counts were negatively correlated with case severity....

In a discovery that challenges long-held dogma in biology, researchers show that mammalian cells can convert RNA sequences back into DNA, a feat more common in viruses than eukaryotic cells. Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed cell. That same class of machines, called polymerases, also build RNA messages, which are like notes copied from the central DNA repository of recipes, so they can be read more efficiently into proteins....

This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains, in the center-left of the heart feature, informally named “Tombaugh Regio” (Tombaugh Region) after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930. “This terrain is not easy to explain,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The discovery of vast, craterless, very young plains on Pluto exceeds all pre-flyby expectations....

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft recently took the closest images ever of a distant Kuiper Belt object – demonstrating its ability to observe numerous such bodies over the next several years if NASA approves an extended mission into the Kuiper Belt. In this short animation, consisting of four frames taken by the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on November 2, and spaced an hour apart, one can see this 90-mile (150-kilometer)-wide ancient body, officially called 1994 JR1, moving against a background of stars....

The Ring Nebula’s distinctive shape makes it a popular illustration for astronomy books. But new observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the glowing gas shroud around an old, dying, sun-like star reveal a new twist. “The nebula is not like a bagel, but rather, it’s like a jelly doughnut, because it’s filled with material in the middle,” said C. Robert O’Dell of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He leads a research team that used Hubble and several ground-based telescopes to obtain the best view yet of the iconic nebula....

“There has been a lot of excitement and interest in ketone drinks and supplements, which have really only been on the market and available to consumers for the last couple of years,” says Jonathan Little, associate professor at UBC Okanagan’s School of Health and Exercise Sciences and study lead author. “Because they’re so new, there’s very little research on how they can influence metabolism and we’re among the first to look at their use in non-athletes....

Astronomers at the University of Zürich, the ETH Zurich, the University of Leicester, and NAOC Beijing have found large amounts of invisible “dark matter” near the Sun. Their results are consistent with the theory that the Milky Way Galaxy is surrounded by a massive “halo” of dark matter, but this is the first study of its kind to use a method rigorously tested against mock data from high-quality simulations. The authors also find tantalizing hints of a new dark matter component in our Galaxy....

New method offers an easy route for making bilobalide and related compounds so scientists can explore their potential uses as drugs and pesticides. Chemists at Scripps Research have invented an efficient method for making a synthetic version of the plant compound bilobalide, which is naturally produced by ginkgo trees. It’s a significant feat because bilobalide—and closely related compounds—hold potential commercial value as medicines and “green” insecticides. Ginkgo trees produce the compound to repel insect pests, but it is effectively non-toxic to humans....

“You’ve heard of electric cars and e-books, but now we are talking about electric dark matter,” said Julian Munoz of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that has been published in the journal Nature. “However, this electric charge is on the very smallest of scales.” Munoz and his collaborator, Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., explore the possibility that these charged dark matter particles interact with normal matter by the electromagnetic force....

At present, 650,000 people die of malaria annually, almost 600,000 of whom are children under the age of five, despite the fact that the disease responds well to treatment with medication. However, these effective anti-malaria drugs have been unaffordable for many people to date. This is now set to change: “Our breakthrough in the production of artemisinin has the potential to save millions of lives by reducing the cost of, and increasing global access to, anti-malaria drugs,” says Peter H....

In their experiments, the researchers found that mice lacking a specific serotonin receptor were able to unlearn fear more quickly than wild-type mice. These findings may help to explain how medications commonly used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affect brain activity. PTSD patients often struggle with the inability to unlearn fear, which can hinder their ability to undergo therapies. The study was recently published in the journal Translational Psychiatry....

This ketamine-induced activity switch in key brain regions tied to depression may impact our understanding of ketamine’s treatment effects and future research in the field of neuropsychiatry. “Our surprising results reveal two distinct populations of cortical neurons, one engaged in normal awake brain function, the other linked to the ketamine-induced brain state,” said the co-lead and co-senior author Joseph Cichon, MD, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care and Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania....

In one paper,[1] Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France and his colleagues identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate. Meanwhile, in another study,[2] Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen, Germany, suggest that physical constants, such as the speed of light and the so-called impedance of free space, are indications of the total number of elementary particles in nature....

Melanoma is a deadly form of skin cancer that has been increasing in the U.S. for the past 30 years. Nearly 100,000 new cases of melanoma are diagnosed every year, and 20 Americans die every day from it, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. Now, researchers have developed a fast-acting skin patch that efficiently delivers medication to attack melanoma cells. The device, tested in mice and human skin samples, is an advance toward developing a vaccine to treat melanoma and has widespread applications for other vaccines....

Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not anymore. A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space....

Bone remodeling in the body is a delicate balancing act between osteoblasts, cells who produce bone, and osteoclasts, cells who break it down. Diseases like osteoporosis, arthritis, and periodontitis all cause bone loss and are associated with an increase in osteoclast activity. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues offer new insight on the regulation of osteoclasts in a recent study that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, potentially shedding light on the imbalances that may lead to disease....