Category Biology/Biotechnology

Regularly eating a small serving of dried goji berries may help prevent or delay the development of age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, in healthy middle-aged people, according to a small, randomized trial conducted at the University of California, Davis.

AMD is the leading cause of vision loss in older people, and is estimated to affect more than 11 million in the United States and 170 million globally.

“AMD affects your central field of vision and can affect your ability to read or recognize faces,” said Glenn Yiu, a co-author of the study...

New platform can program the transformation of 2D stretchable surfaces into specific 3D shapes. Flat materials that can morph into three-dimensional shapes have potential applications in architecture, medicine, robotics, space travel, and much more. But programming these shape changes requires complex and time-consuming computations.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a platform that uses machine learning to program the transformation of 2D stretchable surfaces into specific 3D shapes.

“While machine learning methods have been classically employed for image recognition and language processing, they have also recently emerged as powerful tools to solve mechanics problems,” said Katia Bertoldi, the Wil...

Newly identified toxin common in E. coli bacteria accelerated colon cancer in study mice; confirming link to human colorectal cancers could pave way for developing preventive drugs. The discovery raises the possibility that some of the roughly two million new cases of colorectal cancer every year around the world originate from brief and seemingly mild food-poisoning events. It also points to the possibility of future drugs that prevent colorectal cancers by neutralizing the newly identified toxin, UshA.

The findings were published January 12 in the January edition of Cancer Discovery.

Prior research has suggested that certain bacteria that reside in the gut can trigger colorectal cancer via persistent infections involving chronic gut inflammation...

Findings could lead to advances in plant breeding, human genetics. A simple roadside weed may hold the key to understanding and predicting DNA mutation, according to new research from University of California, Davis, and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany.

The findings, published January 12 in the journal Nature, radically change our understanding of evolution and could one day help researchers breed better crops or even help humans fight cancer.

Mutations occur when DNA is damaged and left unrepaired, creating a new variation. The scientists wanted to know if mutation was purely random or something deeper...