Thyme and oregano possess an anti-cancer compound that suppresses tumour development, but adding more to your tomato sauce isn't enough to gain significant benefit. The key to unlocking the power of these plants is in amplifying the amount of the compound created or synthesizing the compound for drug development. Researchers at Purdue University achieved the first step toward using the compound in pharmaceuticals by mapping its biosynthetic pathway, a sort of molecular recipe of...
Alberta's world renown in carbon capture and sequestration is set to receive another lift thanks to the promise of a material invented and tested in the province that offers an efficient way to pull carbon dioxide out of industrial emissions. A team from the University of Alberta's Faculty of Engineering characterized a CO2-capturing microporous material developed by a group led by George Shimizu at the University of Calgary that attracts gas molecules and sees...
Facebook is notifying nearly 50,000 users in more than 100 countries that they may have been targets of hacking attempts by surveillance companies working for government agencies or private clients, the company said. The notification is the result of a months-long investigation by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, into what Meta officials called “cyber-mercenaries” who engage in “surveillance for hire”, the Washington Post reports. As a result, Facebook said it was taking enforcement actions against seven surveillance...
Why do 80-90% of people infected with COVID-19 experience only mild cases while 10-20% face more severe or life-threatening symptoms? Researchers in the lab of Yale's Richard Flavell decided to pose this question to mice they have engineered to possess human-like immune systems. These "humanized mice" revealed that the causes of severe COVID may lie in our own antiviral inflammatory response to the virus, the researchers report Dec. 17 in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The study also...
How did supermassive black holes form? What is dark matter? In an alternative model for how the universe came to be, in opposition to the "textbook" history of the universe, a team of astronomers propose that both of these cosmic mysteries could be explained by so-called "primordial black holes." Nico Cappelluti (University of Miami), Günther Hasinger (European Space Agency science director), and Priyamvada Natarajan (Yale University), suggest that black holes existed since the beginning...
Hundreds of people tricked into making explicit videos for porn websites have been awarded the rights to the videos and millions of dollars in damages, reports the BBC. The sites, GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, had been the subject of a long-running legal battle. The U.S. Department of Justice has ruled that rights to videos and images produced by the now-defunct sites belong to the women. More than 400 victims can now ask for the online footage to be...
An investigational COVID-19 vaccine made by Novavax was found to be 90% effective at preventing COVID-19 illness, according to results from a Phase 3 clinical trial published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the study, researchers recruited nearly 30,000 adult volunteers at 113 clinical sites in the United States and six sites in Mexico. Approximately 20,000 participants received two doses of the vaccine spaced three weeks apart, and 10,000 received placebo. In addition to being...
Researchers have developed a computer program that can control a robot using electrical signals emitted by a patient's brain. No voice control or touch function is needed; patients can move the robot simply with their thoughts. The study has been published in Communications Biology. To develop their system, the researchers started with a robotic arm that had been developed several years ago. This arm can move back and forth from right to left, reposition objects in front of it and get around objects in...
U.S. cybersecurity officials have ordered federal agencies to protect their systems against a major computer vulnerability by Christmas Eve, reports the BBC. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) set the deadline for security patches to tackle Log4shell, one of the most serious security flaws in the past decade. CISA head Jen Easterly has called it "a severe risk." Separately, Microsoft has warned some nation-state hacking groups are using Log4shell. "Multiple tracked nation-state activity groups originating from China, Iran, North Korea,...
A team of University of Arizona Health Sciences researchers at the UArizona College of Medicine—Tucson found that a combination of bacterial extracts used in Europe to treat respiratory infections may offer a new way to prevent or reduce infection by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, showed that a specific combination of bacterial extracts known as OM-85 inhibited SARS-CoV-2 infection by reducing the virus's...
