Scientists develop nanotech-laser treatment that kills cancer cells without harming healthy tissue
...e Holy Grail would be finding a way to selectively kill cancer cells and not damage healthy ones." Nanotechnology For the PNAS experiment, Dai and his colleagues used a basic tool of nanotechnology--carbon nanotubes, synthetic rods that are only half the width of a DNA molecule. Thousands of nanotubes c...Roundup(r) kills frogs as well as tadpoles, Pitt biologist finds
...om the experiments was that a chemical designed to kill plants killed 98 percent of all tadpoles within three weeks and 79 percent of all frogs within one day," Relyea wrote. Previous studies have determined that it is Roundup(r)'s surfactant (polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, an "inert" ingredient ad...Study shows big game hunters, not climate change, killed off sloths
...to the ground because usually somebody is there to kill it," he said. For the study, Steadman sent samples from the large collection of ground sloth skeletons at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, to Paul Martin, a professor emeritus of geosciences at the University of Arizona, for ra...Quantum cascade lasers key to handheld gas and liquid sensors
...al so lethal that only small amounts are needed to kill thousands of people. But the chemical never reaches its targets. Tiny liquid phase sensors at strategic points in the city's water mains detect the chemical as it passes and tell a computer to close down the affected pipes. Current technology is too ......med water must be effectively treated to remove or kill pathogens before use, regardless of irrigation method." Finding such uses for reclaimed water is vital, said Experiment Station wastewater researcher Dr. Naomi Assadian. "Wastewater reuse for agriculture and managed landscapes will be necessary to me...Sticky mutant proteins implicated in Lou Gehrig's disease
... prevalence of ALS, the biological mechanisms that kill the motor neurons in most patients are incompletely understood. However, for a fraction of inherited ALS patients, mutations in the gene for SOD1 cause the disease by creating a toxic enzyme. Evidence suggests that misfolding or partial unfolding of ...Researchers discover new tumor defense system
...s that interfere with the cells that are trying to kill them. Consequently, strategies that reduce the amo...ch inhibit the cytotoxic T lymphocytes' ability to kill tumor cells. "We found two things," explains Dr. Kleinfeld. "First, the most common type of free fat...Vibrio bacteria could be a risk to fish as well as humans
...io bacteria discovered in the last five years, can kill fish and crustacea, according to researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The most common disease of vibrios is cholera, which has caused millions of cases of illness and fatality in humans. Recent interest in this genus of bacteria has le...Researchers find how some antibiotics kill bacteria
...uncovered how members of one family of antibiotics kill bacteria that make people sick. This new knowledge may help drug developers make slight changes to these antibiotics to make them more effective against drug-resistant strains of bacteria, said Irina Artsimovitch, a study co-author and an assistant p...Bacteria recognize antimicrobials, respond with counter-defenses
...hting chemicals, called antimicrobial peptides, to kill harmful bacteria. In a counter move, some disease-causing bacteria have evolved antimicrobial detectors. The bacteria sense the presence of antimicrobial peptides as a warning signal. This alarm sets off a reaction inside the bacteria to avoid destru...Malfunctioning bone marrow cells sabotage nerve cells in diabetes
...ulations," he said. They produce proteins that can kill or subvert the purposes of nerve cells "almost like a suicide bomb," said Chan. Diabetes mellitus, which afflicts roughly 18 million Americans, is a major health problem that affects multiple organs and tissues. Diabetes can be treated. However, tre...VCU study shows hormone-like molecule kills cells that cause inflammation in allergic disease
..., have identified a hormone-like molecule that can kill these cells by programming them to die in studies with mice. The findings move researchers another step closer to understanding the life cycle of mast cells, and may help researchers develop new treatments for allergy and inflammatory responses in a...A double punch for female survival
...alled MSL-2, which is essential in males but would kill female flies." An mRNA molecule is linear, with a protein-encoding part sandwiched in the middle between regulatory regions near the head and the tail. Most research has focused on interactions between the head region and the ribosome, because it is ...Novel plague virulence factor identified
...e ways pathogens such as the plague can infect and kill their hosts," said Pamela Marino, Ph.D., scientist...l enter the worm's digestive system and eventually kill it by using a method different from food blockage," Aballay explained. "We did in fact show that as ...Unusual antibiotics show promise against deadly 'superbugs'
...otic closely related to penicillin. They appear to kill bacteria by masquerading as components of the bacterial cell wall in order to deactivate an enzyme that functions as a key bacterial defense mechanism, the researchers say. In preliminary lab tests, the new antibiotics the first to exhibit this mimi...Dangerous tricksters: Some bacterie use immune cells to reproduce
...n these macrophages which are actually supposed to kill them. One of these pathogens is Rhodococcus equi. This bacterium can cause a lung disease in young foals which is very similar to tuberculosis in humans. Hence, it is not too surprising that Rhodococcus equi is closely related to the tubercle bacill...Cancer drug target Chk1 may also be source of drug resistance
...tion of a cell. If not repaired, these errors can kill the cell when it attempts to divide and proliferate. In cancer cells, Chk1 is responds as a natural defense to the therapeutic damage done by radiation and chemotherapy and attempts to effect repair to DNA damage caused by the cancer therapy, thus m...UTSA researchers awarded $6.4 million to study tularemia
...s it uses to evade immune responses and eventually kill its host," said Klose. While Klose is concentrating on understanding how Franciscella tularensis causes tularemia, UTSA immunologist Bernard Arulanandam hopes to characterize and identify mechanisms that could lead to long term immunity. Teale and ...Emerald Spectre haunts Ontario's ash forests
...es lay eggs under tree bark and the feeding larvae kill trees by disrupting the flow of nutrients in the soft tissues under the bark. The new study funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) reveals that unprecedented actions taken to stop the borer's spread have so ...Scavenger cells could be key to treating HIV-related dementia
...rophages also may explain why current drugs cannot kill the virus that causes AIDS. Researchers have known...ock HIV from replicating in new T cells, but don't kill the virus in infected macrophages. And the drugs cannot stop the virus from evolving into new forms,...