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    From Rocks in Colorado, Evidence of a ‘Chaotic Solar system’

    February 23, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The layer cake of sedimentary rock near Big Bend, Texas, shows the alternating layers of shale and limestone characteristic of the rock laid down at the bottom of a shallow ocean during the late Cretaceous period. The rock holds the 87 million-year-old signature of a 'resonance transition' in the orbits of Mars and Earth, definitive geologic evidence that the orbits of the planets in our solar system behave differently than prevailing theory, which held that the planets orbit like clockwork in a quasiperiodic manner. Credit: Bradley Sageman, Northwestern University

    The layer cake of sedimentary rock near Big Bend, Texas, shows the alternating layers of shale and limestone characteristic of the rock laid down at the bottom of a shallow ocean during the late Cretaceous period. The rock holds the 87 million-year-old signature of a ‘resonance transition’ in the orbits of Mars and Earth, definitive geologic evidence that the orbits of the planets in our solar system behave differently than prevailing theory, which held that the planets orbit like clockwork in a quasiperiodic manner. Credit: Bradley Sageman, Northwestern University

    Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of WM and NW has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in th...

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    Surprising Dunes on Comet Chury

    February 23, 2017, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    © ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA). Left, an image of comet Chury showing outgassing of water vapor, which entrains dust (© ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM). Right, the neck region, between the comet's two lobes. Various types of relief can be seen, including the dunes, at bottom left (circled in red), in the sandy region.

    © ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA). Left, an image of comet Chury showing outgassing of water vapor, which entrains dust (© ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM). Right, the neck region, between the comet’s two lobes. Various types of relief can be seen, including the dunes, at bottom left (circled in red), in the sandy region.

    Surprising images from the Rosetta spacecraft show the presence of dune-like patterns on the surface of comet Chury. Researchers at the Laboratoire de Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes (CNRS/ESPCI Paris/UPMC/Université Paris Diderot) studied the available images and modeled the outgassing of vapor to try to explain the phenomenon...

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    CAR T cells more powerful when built with CRISPR

    February 22, 2017, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs): (a) anatomy and evolution of CAR design, and (b) CAR T cells recognize specific antigens on cancer cell surface and trigger T-cell–mediated killing. - See more at: http://www.targetedonc.com/publications/targeted-therapies-cancer/2015/june-2015/engineered-t-cells-for-leukemia-a-review-of-current-approaches-and-applications#sthash.j8qfDAeT.dpuf

    Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs): (a) anatomy and evolution of CAR design, and (b) CAR T cells recognize specific antigens on cancer cell surface and trigger T-cell–mediated killing.

    Researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have harnessed the power of CRISPR/Cas9 to create more-potent chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells that enhance tumor rejection in mice. The unexpected findings uncover facets of CAR immunobiology and underscore the potential of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to advance immunotherapies for cancer.

    CRISPR is a genome-editing tool that enables scientists to cut and manipulate a cell’s DNA with high precision. In the Nature paper, MSK investigators show that CRISPR technology can deliver the CAR gene to a very specific location in the genome of the T cell...

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    Proteins Biomarkers in your Runny Nose could Verify Viral infection from Cold or Flu

    February 22, 2017, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Study design and experimental workflow. A two-phased strategy was employed to identify and characterize candidate protein biomarkers of ARV infection from NPL samples collected from participants in four experimental ARV challenge cohorts. For phase 1 discovery analysis, four NPL pools were prepared from H3N2 #1 cohort and analyzed using unbiased 2D-LC-MS/MS. The numbers of subject (N) with samples included in each pool are shown (Uninf = uninfected individuals; Inf = infected individuals; BL = baseline; T = time of maximal symptoms). For phase 2, the original and three additional independent challenge cohorts were assayed by targeted MRM. Quantitative peptide expression data from 80 individuals and 156 total samples were used in the derivation of an NPL ARV classifier, and classification performance was assessed in independent challenge cohorts using LOOCV.

    Study design and experimental workflow. A two-phased strategy was employed to identify and characterize candidate protein biomarkers of ARV infection from NPL samples collected from participants in four experimental ARV challenge cohorts. For phase 1 discovery analysis, four NPL pools were prepared from H3N2 #1 cohort and analyzed using unbiased 2D-LC-MS/MS. The numbers of subject (N) with samples included in each pool are shown (Uninf = uninfected individuals; Inf = infected individuals; BL = baseline; T = time of maximal symptoms). For phase 2, the original and three additional independent challenge cohorts were assayed by targeted MRM...

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