Chemical compounds in foods or beverages like green tea, muscadine grapes and dark chocolate can bind to and block the function of a particular enzyme, or protease, in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, according to a new study by plant biologists at North Carolina State University.

Proteases are important to the health and viability of cells and viruses, says De-Yu Xie, professor of plant and microbial biology at NC State and the corresponding author of the study. If proteases are inhibited, cells cannot perform many important functions — like replication, for example.

“One of our lab’s focuses is to find nutraceuticals in food or medicinal plants tha...

New cathode, electrolyte allow high-power battery previously considered impossible. Magnesium batteries have long been considered a potentially safer and less expensive alternative to lithium-ion batteries, but previous versions have been severely limited in the power they delivered.

Researchers from the University of Houston and the Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA) report in Nature Energy that they have developed a new cathode and electrolyte — previously the limiting factors for a high-energy magnesium battery — to ...

Using NASA’s SOFIA telescope, researchers have found CQ 4479, a galaxy which never had been closely studied before, to be generating new stars in spite of a luminous AGN at the galaxy’s center. Researchers from the University of Kansas have described a galaxy more than 5.25 billion light years away undergoing a rarely seen stage in its galactic lifecycle. Their findings recently were published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The galaxy, dubbed CQ 4479, shows characteristics that normally don’t coexist: an X-ray luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) and a cold gas supply fueling high star formation rates.

“Massive galaxies, such as our own Milky Way, host a supermassive black hole at their hearts — these are black holes that grow by accreting interstellar gas onto themselves to bec...

The labyrinth of jumbled blood vessels in the tumor microenvironment remains one of the toughest blockades for cellular therapies to penetrate and treat solid tumors. Now, in a new study published online today in Nature Cancer, Penn Medicine researchers found that combining chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy with a PAK4 inhibitor drug allowed the engineered cells to punch their way through and attack the tumor, leading to significantly enhanced survival in mice.

The researchers discovered in laboratory experiments that vascularization in solid tumors is driven by the genetic reprogramming of tumor endothelial cells—which line the walls of blood vessels—caused by an enzyme known as PAK4...