ScienceDaily

Researchers have identified the first mouse strain that is susceptible to severe COVID-19 without the need for genetic modification. This development marks a pivotal step forward in infectious disease research, providing an essential tool to develop vaccines and therapeutics for future coronavirus variants and potential pandemics.

A team of scientists has created a new shape-changing polymer that could transform how future soft materials are constructed.

Experts have used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to better understand the impact a gluten free diet has on people with celiac disease, which could be the first step towards finding new ways of treating the condition. Celiac disease is a chronic condition affecting around one person in every 100 in the general population. When people with celiac disease eat gluten, which is found in pasta and bread, their immune system produces an abnormal reaction that inflames and damages the gut tissue and causes symptoms such as abdominal pain and bloating.

In fields ranging from immunology and ecology to economics and thermodynamics, multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous. They are also notoriously difficult to model. Conventional approaches take either a bottom-up or top-down approach. But in disturbed systems, such as a post-fire forest ecosystem or a society in a pandemic, these unidirectional models can’t capture the interactions between the small-scale behaviors and the system-level properties. Scientists have worked to resolve this challenge by building a hybrid method that links bottom-up behaviors and top-down causation in a single theory.

A team of interdisciplinary scientists has developed flexible fibers with self-healing, light-emitting and magnetic properties. The Scalable Hydrogel-clad Ionotronic Nickel-core Electroluminescent (SHINE) fiber is bendable, emits highly visible light, and can automatically repair itself after being cut, regaining nearly 100 per cent of its original brightness. In addition, the fiber can be powered wirelessly and manipulated physically using magnetic forces.

People who climb too fast or too high risk acute altitude sickness, which can lead to life-threatening hypoxic brain injury. By using in vivo electrochemistry, researchers demonstrated that characteristic changes occur in the oxygen content of various brain regions before injury. The risk of brain damage could be predicted days in advance — perhaps a new approach for detecting high-altitude hypoxic injury.

Over the past two decades, scientists discovered that the majority of melanic wing color variants are controlled by a single genomic region surrounding the protein-coding gene ‘cortex’. It was assumed, then, that cortex was the melanic color switch. A team of international researchers has now discovered that cortex does not affect melanic coloration. Instead, a previously ignored microRNA (miRNA), is the actual color switch.

Researchers have built a drone that can walk, hop, and jump into flight with the aid of birdlike legs, greatly expanding the range of potential environments accessible to unmanned aerial vehicles.

An MRI-based imaging technique predicts the response of ovarian cancer tumors to treatment, and rapidly reveals how well treatment is working, in patient-derived cell models.

Scientists have developed a ‘molecular GPS’ to guide immune cells into the brain and kill tumors without harming healthy tissue.