Scientists say they have succeeded in treating immune cells in a way that enables them to inhibit unwanted immune reactions such as organ rejection. Their results have now been published in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
The immune system keeps us healthy: day and night it protects us against invading and harmful pathogens. But this fulltime surveillance can also turn into a problem, for example after an organ transplant. The immune system recognizes the new organ as "foreign" and starts fighting it. In the end, the life-saving transplant will be rejected. Until now, only special drugs have managed to keep the immune system silent and thus inhibit organ rejection.
Darwin knew that some mechanism had to govern how our physical features and behavioral traits have evolved over centuries, passing from a parent to their offspring with natural selection favoring those that give the greatest advantage for survival, but he did not have a scientific explanation for this process.
Scientists for decades have believed that differences in the way genes are expressed into functional proteins is what differentiates one species from another and drives evolutionary change but no one has been able to prove it - until now, say researchers at the University of Leeds.
It's two inches long, is shaped like a phallus and is commonly associated with wood. A middle school joke? No, it's a new species of stinkhorn mushroom discovered on the African island of Sao Tome and named after Robert Drewes, Curator of Herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences.
Phallus drewesii belongs to a group of mushrooms known as stinkhorns which give off a foul, rotting meat odor. There are 28 other species of Phallus fungi worldwide, but this particular species is notable for its small size, white net-like stem, and brown spore-covered head. It is also the only Phallus species to curve downward instead of upward.
A team of researchershas discovered a biological marker for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in older adults. The marker, a receptor known as CCR3, shows strong potential as a means for both the early detection of the disease and for preventive treatment.
Neovascular (or "wet-type") macular degeneration is caused by choroidal neovascularization (CNV) – the invasive growth of new blood vessels in the thin vascular layer that provides nourishment and oxygen to the eye. Central vision loss occurs when these abnormal blood vessels invade the retina, the light-sensitive tissue that lines the inner surface of the eyeball.
KUALA LUMPUR, June 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Sumitomo Heavy Industries Marine Engineering (SHI-ME) Co., Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sumitomo Heavy Industries Ltd., has successfully delivered the first ship yard designed using AVEVA Marine.
SHI-ME is one of Japan's leading shipyards and has been building ships for over 110 years. It was one of the first yards in Japan to subscribe to AVEVA Marine. SHI-ME started designing the 105,000 DWT Jasmin Joy in April 2007 and handed the Oil Tanker over to the owner in early April 2009.
Masao Takekawa, Director, SHI-ME, said:
Dr Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and a team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University say that a bacterium trapped more than a mile under under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets.
Almost 140 years ago, Charles Darwin formalized what many people already believed - mate selection isn't pure chance; it's a deliberate process that involves numerous factors, including biological ones.
Darwin scored a scientific bullseye but a very big question has been, "What have we learned since then?"
Adam Jones, a Texas A&M University evolutionary biologist, says that Darwin's beliefs about the choice of mates and sexual selection being beyond mere chance have been proven correct, as stated in Darwin's landmark book "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" in 1871. His work has withstood decades of analysis and scrutiny.
When you go to New York City, to Central Park, to the American Museum of Natural History, to the Hayden Planetarium, to a seminar hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the entire cosmos, you might think it would be hard to figure out who 'the star' will be.
PARIS, June 14 /PRNewswire/ --
Paris Air Show -- The Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) team developing the U.S. Air Force's Global Positioning System (GPS) III program has entered the Critical Design Review (CDR) stage on-schedule, an extensive phase that precedes production of the next-generation satellite system.
Over the next year, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Newtown, Pa., along with industry partners ITT, Clifton, N.J., and General Dynamics of Gilbert, Ariz. will conduct 70 individual CDRs for key GPS III spacecraft subsystems, assemblies and elements. The phase will culminate in the fall of 2010 with a final Space Vehicle CDR that will validate the detailed GPS III design to ensure it meets warfighter and civil requirements.
PARIS, June 14 /PRNewswire/ --
PARIS AIR SHOW -- Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) announced today that it has delivered the final block of a new flight software architecture that will provide highly reliable spacecraft command and control operations for the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) geosynchronous orbit (GEO) satellite constellation.
The SBIRS program is designed to provide early warning of missile launches, and simultaneously support other missions including missile defense, technical intelligence and battlespace awareness.
