Cell

(Tsukuba, 29 March 2013) The first observation of massive swelling and shrinkage of inorganic layered materials like a biological cell provides insights into the production of two-dimensional crystals.

A simple fermentation treatment can convert a by-product of biofuel production into a valuable chemical feedstock for a wide range of biomedical products

Tsukuba, Japan 6 March - A research group at WPI-MANA have discovered that it is possible to detect diluted ionic mercury in water with more than 10 times higher sensitivity than with the conventional spectroscopy method.

Women who were relocated from slums in central New Delhi to the city’s desolate periphery face daily indignities and danger as they collect water or access public toilets. Using the Women’s Safety Audit they have begun to realize their rights and demand better, safer services.

Kanazawa, Japan, 25 Feb - From uncovering maternal to paternal communications in mice; obesity-induced diabetes linked to enzyme deficiencies; ‘cool’ organic solar cell fabrication; links of asthma to gender and more in covered in the Kanazawa University Research Bulletin

Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) hosted an international symposium at the UNIST-OLYMPUS Biomedical Imaging Center (UOBC) on February 19, 2013 with over 100 participants including international scholars, medical professionals, business leaders, researchers and students.

An innovative technique which pinpoints protein locations and helps researchers unravel the protein's functions has been developed by the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researchers who recently moved from MIT to the Ulsan National Institute of Science (UNIST) explain.

(Kanazawa, Japan, 4 January 2013)　High-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) is providing the means to produce dramatic footage of moving biomolecules, and scientists at Kanazawa University leading the field.

An unconventional design for a nanoscale memory device uses a freely moving mechanical shuttle to improve performance

SINGAPORE, 9 November 2012: Singapore announces 8 biomedical sciences research programmes to advance understanding and treatment of diseases especially prevalent amongst the Asian population. This includes eye diseases, lung and stomach cancer and rare genetic diseases.

(Tokyo, 31 October 2012) Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science identify a means of controlling biological processes that could help treatments for immune disease, neurological disorders and cancer.

Glucose–amine rings turn star-shaped fluorescent dyes into powerful probes for imaging cancer cells in three dimensions.

(Okayama, Japan, 20 September 2012) This e-Bulletin highlights pioneering insights into water splitting/photosynthesis, analysis of the Itokawa asteroid brought to Earth by Japan's Hayabusa space probe, stemming the spread of cancer and identification of a rice transporter for manganese and cadmium uptake

Medical scientists at Tokai University School of Medicine in Japan announce the development of a new cancer therapy using ultra violet C (UVC) pulses of light. Details of these findings will be described by Johbu Itoh at the International Congress of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry (ICHC 2012), 26–29 August, 2012, Kyoto.

The process by which male fruit flies learn to focus their courtship away from females that have already mated and towards eligible partners is deciphered in Nature this week. It seems that the mantra is simple: be promiscuous at first, but become more selective if a mating attempt fails.

A method for printing colours at the highest possible resolution is reported in a paper published online this week in Nature Nanotechnology. The resolution of about 100,000 dots per inch could be useful for high-resolution printing for security purposes or for high-density optical data storage.

Fluid dynamics simulations aim to better predict how air circulating in a hard disk drive perturbs the vibrating read/write head

Using the correct annealing temperature is key to making fast, non-volatile computer memory

Oceanic uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide depends on climatically sensitive physical factors, such as winds and ocean currents, reports a study published online in Nature Geoscience this week.

Nanoparticle gels that deliver an immunostimulatory molecule and an inhibitor of an immunosuppressive factor to tumours over a period of a few days are reported this week in Nature Materials. When injected in melanoma tumours in mice, the nanoparticles delay tumour growth and significantly increase the survival time of the mice.

Research comparing 52 Native American populations along with 17 Siberian populations provides insight into migrations within the New World and is published online in Nature this week. David Reich and colleagues’ data suggest that the controversial hypothesis that the Americas were peopled in three migration waves may be true.

The cellular migration that occurs in our bodies during early development works on the same principle as the healing of wounds in adulthood: cells move in large monolayer sheets responding to chemical cues. A paper in Nature suggests that there is an additional feedback mechanism at work in cell migration involving physical forces.

Sequencing of a fetal genome using genetic material found circulating in the mother’s blood is described in Nature this week. Unlike a similar recently reported technique, the approach described this week doesn’t require knowledge of the father’s genetic information.

A growing proportion of the public in Western democracies deny anthropogenic climate change, and experts assume that climate deniers need to be ‘converted’ to get them acting in support of mitigation policy. A study in Nature Climate Change this week questions such common assumptions.

Clues to how a rare group of patients can resist infection by HIV are reported in a paper this week in Nature Immunology. So-called ‘elite controllers’ are able to retain normal immune function and undetectable levels of HIV infection despite regular exposure to the virus.

A rapid rise in radiocarbon around AD 775 measured in tree rings is attributed to an increase of cosmic-ray intensity. The specific cause of this cosmic-ray event remains to be determined, but this study suggests that neither a solar flare nor a local supernova is likely to have been responsible.

‘Tractor beams’ of light that pull objects towards them are no longer science fiction. Haifeng Wang at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers have now demonstrated how a tractor beam can in fact be realized on a small scale.

Groundwater depletion and water storage in reservoirs have led to a significant rise in global-mean sea level between 1961 and 2003, indicates a study published this week in Nature Geoscience. These estimated contributions, which result from changes in human terrestrial water storage, could help explain the magnitude of observed sea-level rise.

The oxidation–reduction cycle of the highly conserved protein, peroxiredoxin, constitutes a universal non-transcription-based circadian clock. This marker, conserved throughout all three phylogenetic domains suggests that this type of cellular timekeeping may have co-evolved across organisms since about 2.5 billion years ago.

Analysis reveals how a subset of immune cells rally defenses against infection while keeping harmful inflammatory reactions in check. Experiments confirm a central role for plasmacytoid dendritic cells in responding to infection, driving both the inflammatory response pathway and the production of pathogen-destroying cytotoxic T lymphocytes.