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An international team of paleontologists led by Virginia Tech has discovered and named a new, early dinosaur. The skeleton — incredibly, mostly intact — was first found by a graduate student in the Virginia Tech Department of Geosciences and other paleontologists over the course of two digs, in 2017 and 2019. The findings of this new sauropodomorph — a long-necked dinosaur — newly named Mbiresaurus raathi were been published today in the journal Nature. The [...]

More than 40 percent of American adults have obesity, a complex condition that can increase the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers. One mechanism by which obesity can lead to other health problems is by causing low-grade chronic inflammation, the accumulation of immune cells in insulin-sensitive tissues. Scientists hypothesize that reversing – known as resolving – this chronic inflammation could prevent the onset of obesity-related diseases including [...]

Researchers at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo state, Brazil, have resorted to a thoroughly unconventional method to treat COVID-19 in a patient with a rare genetic disease that makes her immune system unable to combat viruses and other pathogens. She was instructed to take 30 milliliters of breast milk every three hours for a week. The breast milk was donated by a woman who had been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2. After testing positive for 120 days by RT-PCR, the [...]

Converting agroindustrial waste into molecules of interest to society, such as biofuels and biochemicals, is one of the ways to mitigate dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. As one of the world’s largest producers of plant biomass, Brazil is well-placed to lead this transition, but lignocellulosic raw materials (containing lignin, hemicellulose and cellulose) are hard to deconstruct, or (more technically put) recalcitrant to microbial and enzymatic degradation. Scientists in [...]

In a study published May 02, 2022 in Nature Communications, scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine used human brain organoids to reveal how a genetic mutation associated with a profound form of autism disrupts neural development. Using gene therapy tools to recover the gene’s function effectively rescued neural structure and function. Several neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia have been [...]

Vaccines can be made over 25% more effective by adding left-handed chiral gold nanoparticles as adjuvants, according to a study by an international collaboration in which Brazilian researchers took part. An article reporting the results is published in Nature. Three research groups collaborated on the study, one affiliated with the University of Michigan in the United States, and another with Jiangnan University in China. The Brazilian group was led by André Farias [...]

Years of toil in the laboratory have revealed how a marine bacterium makes a potent anti-cancer molecule. The anti-cancer molecule salinosporamide A, also called Marizomib, is in Phase III clinical trials to treat glioblastoma, a brain cancer. Scientists now for the first time understand the enzyme-driven process that activates the molecule. Researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that an enzyme called SalC assembles what the team calls the [...]

It’s not easy to be sure that drugs and supplements with twisted—or chiral—structures are turning in the correct direction. Now, twirling infrared light can probe both the structures of molecular crystals and their twists, research led by the University of Michigan has shown. The researchers hope that the technique could also help diagnose harmful accumulations of twisted molecules in the body, including bladder stones, insulin fibrils and amyloid aggregations such as the [...]

In a 38-year-old man who manifested mild symptoms of COVID-19 for 20 days, the novel coronavirus continued to be detected in his organism and to undergo mutations for 232 days. If he had not been given continuous medical care, maintained social distancing and worn a mask, he could have spread the virus throughout these seven months. The atypical case of infection by SARS-CoV-2 was part of a study involving 38 Brazilian patients followed on a weekly basis between April and November 2020 by [...]