Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in pollen. In controlled trials, colonies fed this specially designed diet produced up to 15 times more young, showing a dramatic boost in reproduction and overall health. As climate change and modern agriculture reduce the availability of natural pollen, this innovation could offer a practical way to support struggling bee populations.
Researchers at the University of Seville’s Food Color and Quality Laboratory have studied the effects of different cooking methods used for tomatoes and carrots (in the oven, microwave or air fryer, among others) on the amount of carotenoids that are potentially available for absorption by the body following the digestion of these foods. According to the study, the bioavailability index varies significantly depending on how these foods are cooked. Carotenoids are compounds of great importance due to their positive health effects.
In the case of carrots, the bioavailability of total carotenoids increased ninefold when cooked in the oven. For tomatoes, the highest bioavailability values were obtained by cooking them in either an air fryer (190 °C for 10 minutes) or a conventional oven (180 °C for 20 minutes). There were no significant differences between the two methods. Although the increase in bioavailability was more modest (a 1.5-fold increase), it was also significant compared to raw tomatoes.
The researchers also highlight that the increases in the bioavailability of the vitamin A precursor carotenoids in tomatoes (α-carotene and β-carotene) ranged from 26 to 38 times and 46 to 71 times, respectively, compared with those in raw carrots. Cooking is, therefore, a sometimes-overlooked strategy for combating vitamin A deficiency, one of the world’s most serious nutritional problems.
Early results from preclinical studies and a clinical trial led by researchers at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and Stanford Medicine suggest that combining targeted radiation therapy with an experimental immune-boosting drug called BO-112 and anti-PD-1 therapy before surgery may help the immune system fight aggressive soft tissue sarcomas.
The findings, published in Cancer Discovery, show that the approach can reshape the tumor microenvironment to activate the body’s immune cells against cancer.
Soft tissue sarcomas are a rare and often hard-to-treat group of cancers that typically require a combination of surgery, radiation therapy and other systemic treatments. However, these tumors may still be resistant to standard therapies, highlighting the need for new treatment strategies.
CRISPR is a powerful DNA-editing tool that has underpinned huge advancements in human health care in the last decade. It is a precision tool, but is not perfect, and misplaced DNA edits can compromise safety and efficacy, costing billions each year. Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS), Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield have published research in Nature showing that the physical twisting of DNA plays an important role in these mistakes. Using a newly developed platform of tiny (nanometer-sized) DNA circles, called DNA minicircles, the team captured never-before-seen interactions between CRISPR and DNA, providing insights that could help eradicate errors altogether.
CRISPR-Cas9 has transformed biology by giving scientists a programmable way to cut and edit DNA. Its ever-growing impact includes groundbreaking therapies for genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia and an increasing role in personalized cancer treatment and rapid diagnostics. But even carefully designed CRISPR systems can sometimes cut DNA sequences that were not the intended targets.
“It’s a tool that is not perfect and can introduce errors and make edits where it shouldn’t make them,” says Professor David Rueda, head of the Single Molecule Imaging group at the LMS and Chair in Molecular and Cellular Biophysics at Imperial College London. “And it’s an important problem for the industry. It’s been estimated to be $0.3 to $0.9 billions per year in industry costs, in profiling off-targets, redesigning guides and delays.”
You’re probably used to the sight of smartwatches on people’s wrists. But what about smart clothes? Researchers at the University of Georgia are exploring how the clothes people wear can potentially track and protect their health. Smart textiles are fabrics that can monitor the body’s vitals and movement in real time. They’re flexible and lightweight, making them more comfortable to wear while moving.
The present publication focuses on MXenes, a class of two-dimensional, microscopic materials made from metals that can be coated or printed onto fabrics. The researchers conducted a comprehensive analysis of hundreds of published studies to examine the different properties of MXenes and how they could be used in smart textiles. The paper is published in the journal ACS Omega.
“MXenes have some advanced properties,” said Joyjit Ghosh, corresponding author of the study and a doctoral student in UGA’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences. Not only can they detect body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate, he said, but they are also antimicrobial, making them ideal for hospital settings.
An international research team has successfully synthesized oriented belt-shaped vanadium dioxide (VO2(B)) single crystals via a hydrothermal reduction method, using one-dimensional vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) nanofibers as the starting material. This work, published in the journal ACS Sensors, provides a new material platform and design guidelines for the development of next-generation low-power gas sensors capable of operating at room temperature.
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from industrial activities and vehicle exhaust are major urban air pollutants. Because VOCs pose serious environmental and health risks, developing effective monitoring for them is a global concern. Gas sensors can monitor for VOCs, but it has been a major challenge for scientists to develop sensors that work reliably at room temperature. Currently, metal oxide semiconductor gas sensors operate at 200°C–400°C.
“This heating requirement greatly increases power consumption and limits their use in portable devices, battery-powered systems, and large-scale Internet of Things sensor networks,” said Professor Shu Yin from the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials (IMRAM), Tohoku University (also affiliated with the Advanced Institute for Materials Research, WPI-AIMR).
Toward the right side of the periodic table below oxygen, are the chalcogens, or “ore-forming” elements. The chalcogens that occur naturally, including sulfur, selenium and tellurium, are all somehow involved in biological processes. Molecules containing sulfur, like the antioxidant glutathione, play a central role in redox regulation, the balance between oxidation and reduction that is essential for maintaining cellular health.
Recent studies have suggested that the heavier selenium and tellurium are active in biological redox systems as well, but the instability of molecules containing chains of different chalcogen atoms has made structural analysis difficult.
Traditional methods have largely relied on mass spectrometry, which cannot be used to directly observe molecular bonds. This limitation motivated a team of researchers at Kyoto University to develop a method that would allow them to more clearly observe chains of chalcogens. The paper is published in the journal ACS Measurement Science Au.
Mozilla released Firefox 149 with added privacy protection through a built-in VPN tool offering up to 50GB of monthly traffic.
The feature uses a secure proxy server to route only traffic from the browser, unlike the company’s commercial Mozilla VPN, which covers system-wide traffic.
“Whether you’re using public Wi-Fi while traveling, searching for sensitive health information, or shopping for something personal, this feature gives you a simple way to stay protected,” Mozilla says.
Developmental biologist Tsuyoshi Momose cultures a newly discovered species of jellyfish in a tank of circulating water. Scientists want to understand how these unusual jellies keep time.
The passage of the sun across the sky — dawn, day, dusk, night — drives the clock of life. Some species wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. Others do the opposite, and a few keep odd hours. These naturally driven, 24-hour biological cycles are known as circadian rhythms, and they do more than cue bedtime: They regulate hormones, metabolism, DNA repair, and more. When life falls out of sync, there can be dire consequences for health, reproduction, and survival.
Lacking watches, many species keep time using an internal system — a set of interacting genes and their protein products that effectively keeps track of a 24-hour period — that is calibrated by sunlight. This kind of circadian clock is widespread, found even in single-celled algae, which suggests that biological timekeeping evolved billions of years ago. Across animals, most species have the same genetic system, using genes known as CLOCK, BMAL1, and CRY, or recognizable homologues. This form of biological clock mechanism appears even in ancient lineages, including sponges and some jellyfish.
But is this the only way to do it? In a pea-size jelly off the coast of Japan, biologists are examining a different kind of timekeeping.
Barbara J. Vilen & team now identify defective late endosomes and lysosomes (LELs) in patients with active lupus and show reduced LEL function promotes SLE through chronic PI3k activity and SHP-1/SHIP-1 defects:
The figure shows bone marrow-derived macrophages from lupus prone mice (MRL/lpr) have decreased recruitment of pSHIP-1Y1022 (green) to the plasma membrane, indicated by cholera toxin-stained lipid rafts (blue), compared with control mice (B6).
1Department of Microbiology and Immunology and.
2Division of Rheumatology, Allergy, and Immunology, Thurston Arthritis Research Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
3Division of Rheumatology and Immunology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA.