Lifeboat Foundation

Fever temperatures rev up immune cell metabolism, proliferation and activity, but they also — in a particular subset of T cells — cause mitochondrial stress, DNA damage and cell death, Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers have discovered.

The findings, published Sept. 20 in the journal Science Immunology, offer a mechanistic understanding for how cells respond to heat and could explain how chronic inflammation contributes to the development of cancer.

The impact of fever temperatures on cells is a relatively understudied area, said Jeff Rathmell, PhD, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Immunobiology and corresponding author of the new study. Most of the existing temperature-related research relates to agriculture and how extreme temperatures impact crops and livestock, he noted. It’s challenging to change the temperature of animal models without causing stress, and cells in the laboratory are generally cultured in incubators that are set at human body temperature: 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

A BREAKTHROUGH cancer treatment “could be the cure” for a “death sentence” form of the disease after making tumours disappear.

The experimental approach has seen remarkable success in some brain cancer patients — with experts saying it could be available on the NHS within five years.

New research done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reveals potential signs of a rocky, volcanic moon orbiting an exoplanet 635 light-years from Earth. The biggest clue is a sodium cloud that the findings suggest is close to but slightly out of sync with the exoplanet, a Saturn-size gas giant named WASP-49 b, although additional research is needed to confirm the cloud’s behavior. Within our solar system, gas emissions from Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io create a similar phenomenon.

Research on superconductivity has taken a significant leap with Princeton Universitys exploration of edge supercurrents in topological superconductors like molybdenum telluride.

Initially elusive, these supercurrents have been observed and enhanced through experiments with niobium, leading to intriguing phenomena such as stochastic switching and anti-hysteresis, altering the understanding of electron behavior in superconductors.

Superconductivity and Topological Materials.

Researchers will be able to analyze chemical compounds and atoms in greater detail than ever before using the brightest, clearest laser of its kind anywhere in the world.

“Tidal heating plays an important role in the heating and orbital evolution of celestial bodies,” said Alex Hayes, professor of astronomy.

“It provides the warmth necessary to form and sustain subsurface oceans in the moons around giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn.”

Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Maryland and NIST, Google AI, and Abu Dhabi set out to robustly estimate the free Hamiltonian parameters of bosonic excitations in a superconducting quantum simulator. The protocols they developed, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could contribute to the realization of highly precise quantum simulations that reach beyond the limits of classical computers.

All proteins are composed of chains of amino acids, which generally fold up into compact globules with specific shapes. The folding process is governed by interactions between the different amino acids—for example, some of them carry electrical charges—so the sequence determines the structure. Because the structure in turn defines a protein’s function, deducing a protein’s structure is vital for understanding many processes in molecular biology, as well as for identifying drug molecules that might bind to and alter a protein’s activity.

Protein structures have traditionally been determined by experimental methods such as x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. But researchers have long wished to be able to predict a structure purely from its sequence—in other words, to understand and predict the process of protein folding.

For many years, computational methods such as molecular dynamics simulations struggled with the complexity of that problem. But AlphaFold bypassed the need to simulate the folding process. Instead, the algorithm could be trained to recognize correlations between sequence and structure in known protein structures and then to generalize those relationships to predict unknown structures.

A rare configuration of seven galaxies aligned behind a galaxy cluster allows researchers to probe with high precision the dark matter distribution within the cluster.