Category Biology/Biotechnology

For polar bears, the insulation provided by their fat, skin, and fur is a matter of survival in the frigid Arctic. For engineers, polar bear hair is a dream template for synthetic materials that might lock in heat just as well as the natural version. Now, materials scientists in China have developed such an insulator, reproducing the structure of individual polar bear hairs while scaling toward a material composed of many hairs for real-world applications in the architecture and aerospace sectors. Their work appears June 6 in the journal Chem.

“Polar bear hair has been evolutionarily optimized to help prevent heat loss in cold and humid conditions, which makes it an excellent model for a synthetic heat ...

Intensive radiotherapy can be toxic in 60% of patients with tumors located in the gastrointestinal cavity. Increases in levels of the protein URI protect mice against high-dose ionizing radiation-induced gastrointestinal syndrome and enhance mouse intestinal regeneration and survival in 100% of the cases...

Up to 90% of people with autism suffer from gut problems, but nobody has known why. New research reveals the same gene mutations – found both in the brain and the gut – could be the cause.

The discovery confirms a gut-brain nervous system link in autism, opening a new direction in the search for potential treatments that could ease behavioural issues associated with autism by targeting the gut.

Chief Investigator Associate Professor Elisa Hill-Yardin, RMIT University, said scientists trying to understand autism have long been looking in the brain, but the links with the gut nervous system have only been recently ex...

Can your liver sense when you’re staring at a television screen or cellphone late at night? Apparently so, and when such activity is detected, the organ can throw your circadian rhythms out of whack, leaving you more susceptible to health problems.

That’s one of the takeaways from two new studies by University of California, Irvine scientists working in collaboration with the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona, Spain.

The studies, published tod...