Latest News Releases 14 September

Count Me In, a nonprofit cancer research initiative, is inviting all patients across the United States and Canada who have ever been diagnosed with colorectal cancer to participate in research and help drive new discoveries related to this disease.

Lettuce drop is a lettuce disease that results in browning or wilting of leaves, plant collapse, and death. The disease has not been well-researched, but a new study shows that a stronger stem increases resistance to lettuce drop.

Daniel Tapia Takaki of the University of Kansas is leading a new $250,000 project, dubbed the Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) program, designed to speed scientific discovery in quantum chromodynamics and prepare the next generation of U.S. researchers for multi-team international collaborations.

Real satellite water vapor isotope data were assimilated in a general circulation model to determine whether including these data could improve forecast accuracy at both the global and local scales. Overall, forecast accuracy was improved by several percentage points. The effect was especially notable for variables closely related to water vapor isotope fractionation, such as air temperature and specific humidity, and a local-scale pressure pattern over Japan in 2013 was modeled more clearly.

Using supercomputer analysis, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have found that the pathogenesis of both Alzheimer disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration hinges on a single protein, HMGB1. Identification of this central regulator of neuronal damage suggests that inhibiting HMGB1 is a promising avenue for developing novel therapeutics for patients with these two forms of dementia.

Phononic crystals are an innovative resonant platform for sensing and understanding the volumetric properties of liquids, attracting a growing interest from researchers. In The Journal of Applied Physics, by AIP Publishing, researchers from France and Germany propose the design of a tubular phononic crystal for the purpose of sensing the biochemical and physical properties of a liquid filling the hollow part of the tube.

Our bodies can fine-tune the immune response to an infection and make it proportional to the threat at hand. New research from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden describes how B lymphocytes, the immune cells that make antibodies, choose between different cell fates to balance the magnitude of the acute immune response and the memory response that protects against future threats. The study, published in Immunity, may contribute to the optimisation of vaccines to fight viruses or other pathogens.