Latest National Academy of Sciences Stories
A growing body of evidence underscores the importance of human gut bacteria in modulating human health, metabolism, and disease. Yet bacteria are only part of the story. Viruses that infect those bacteria also shape who we are. Frederic D. Bushman, PhD, professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, led a study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that sequenced the DNA of viruses -- the virome -- present...
Cap and trade programs to reduce emissions do not inherently provide incentives to induce the private sector to develop innovative technologies to address climate change, according to a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, said author Margaret Taylor, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who conducted the study while an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public...
Using the world's fastest light source -- specialized X-ray lasers -- scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have revealed the secret inner life of magnets, a finding that could lead to faster and "smarter" computers. Using a light source that creates X-ray pulses only one quadrillionth of a second in duration, the Boulder team was able to observe how magnetism in nickel and iron atoms works, and they found that each metal...
Scientists have identified a new compound that rapidly kills hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells, the most common form of liver cancer and fifth most common cancer worldwide, while sparing healthy tissue. The compound, Factor Qunolinone Inhibitor 1 (FQI1), works by inhibiting an oncogene originally discovered by a team of researchers led by Devanand Sarkar, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., Harrison Scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Massey Cancer Center, Blick Scholar and assistant professor...
Army scientists have demonstrated, for the first time, that antibody-based therapies can successfully protect monkeys from the deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses. In addition, the animals were fully protected even when treatment was administered two days post-infection, an accomplishment unmatched by any experimental therapy for these viruses to date. The work appears in this week's electronic edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The filoviruses, Ebola and Marburg,...
New research suggests that babies as young as 6 months old understand more than their own names, “mommy”, and “daddy”. By simply being exposed to basic, everyday language, infants are able to pick up and understand much more than previously thought. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the findings of this new study conducted by Elika Bergeson, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and her co-author, Professor Daniel Swingly,...
The hair cells of the inner ear have a previously unknown "root" extension that may allow them to communicate with nerve cells and the brain to regulate sensitivity to sound vibrations and head position, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have discovered. Their finding is reported online in advance of print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The hair-like structures, called stereocilia, are fairly rigid and are interlinked at their...
The Burgess Shale of British Columbia is arguably the most important fossil deposit in the world, providing an astounding record of the Cambrian "Explosion," the rapid flowering of complex life from single-celled ancestors. While most of the fossil record is comprised of shells, teeth and bones, the Burgess Shale preserves the softer bits—the eyes, guts, gills and other delicate structures—of animals belonging to Earth's earliest complex ecosystems a half a billion years ago. The process...
As temperatures warm along Antarctica’s outer fringes, it allows for invasive plants and organisms to be carried in inadvertently by visiting scientists and tourists, putting the pristine ecosystem at risk, researchers have found. An international team of researchers, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said they scoured the clothes and boots of those visiting the southernmost continent and found that most were carrying plant seeds. The risks from...
Understanding why immune cells, called T-cells, attack the body is vital in the war against autoimmune diseases like diabetes. University of Alberta researcher Troy Baldwin is a step closer to understanding why the body's T-cells sometimes attack healthy cells causing autoimmune diseases. Baldwin and graduate student Alex Suen looked at a specific molecule, Bim, which is vital in regulating T-cell death. When they removed Bim they found that the autoreactive T-cells, which are normally...
