#Breakthrough finds molecules that block previously'undruggable'protein tied to cancer A team of scientists at the University of Kansas has pinpointed six chemical compounds that thwart Hur,
an"oncoprotein"that binds to RNA and promotes tumor growth. The findings, which could lead to a new class of cancer drugs,
appear in the current issue of ACS Chemical Biology.""These are reported the first small-molecule Hur inhibitors that competitively disrupt Hur-RNA binding
thus blocking Hur function as a tumor-promoting protein, "said Liang Xu, associate professor of molecular biosciences and corresponding author of the paper.
The results hold promise for treating a broad array of cancers in people. The researcher said Hur has been detected at high levels in almost every type of cancer tested,
including cancers of the colon, prostate, breast, brain, ovaries, pancreas and lung.""Hur inhibitors may be useful for many types of cancer,
"Xu said.""Since Hur is involved in many stem cell pathways, we expect Hur inhibitors will be active in inhibiting'cancer stem cells,
'or the seeds of cancer, which have been a current focus in the cancer drug discovery field."
"Hur has been studied for many years, but until now no direct Hur inhibitors have been discovered, according to Xu.""The initial compounds reported in this paper can be optimized further
and developed as a whole new class of cancer therapy, especially for cancer stem cells, "he said."
"The success of our study provides a first proof-of-principle that Hur is druggable,
which opens a new door for cancer drug discovery. Many other RNA BINDING-PROTEINS proteins like Hur, which are so far undruggable,
"A cancer-causing gene, or oncogene, makes RNA, which then makes an oncoprotein that causes cancer
or makes cancer cells hard to kill, or both,"Xu said.""This is the problem we're trying to overcome with precision medicine."
"The scientist said the Hur-RNA binding site is like a long, narrow groove, not a well-defined pocket seen in other druggable proteins targeted by many current cancer therapies."
"Hur tightly binds to RNA like a hand, "Xu said.""The Hur protein grabs the'rope'r the RNAT a site called'ARE'on the rope.
We aimed to find a small-molecule compound that makes the hand release the rope by competing with ARE of the RNA."
"The research took more than 3 1/2 years and involved the collaboration of chemists, cancer biologists, computer modeling experts, biochemists and biophysicists at KUOTABLY the labs of Xu, Jeffrey Aubé in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Jon Tunge in the Department of chemistry.
Grants from the National institutes of health, along with funding from the state of Kansas, the Hall Family Foundation and Bold Aspiration funding from KU's Office of the Provost, supported the work.
For Xu, the findings are reflective of a personal commitment to improving odds for people diagnosed with cancer
the second-largest killer in the U s. after heart disease.""Trained as medical doctor and Ph d.,with both a grandfather and an uncle who died of cancer,
I devoted my career to cancer research and drug discoveryiming to translate discovery in the lab into clinical therapy,
to help cancer patients and their families, "he said.""We hope to find a better therapynd eventually a cureor cancer. c
#Synthetic muscle ready for launch Rasmussen developed the material at RAS Labs and has worked closely with researchers
and engineers at the U s. Department of energy's Princeton Plasma physics Laboratory (PPPL) to develop the material's ability to adhere to metal.
The Synthetic Muscle could be used in robotics in deep space travel such as travel to Mars because of its radiation resistance."
"Based on the good results we had on planet Earth, the next step is to see how it behaves in a space environment,
It is a gel-like material called an electroactive polymer that can potentially mimic human movement
energy and resources to follow their dreams.""Rasmussen credits PPPL with providing help and support during critical points in her project."
"It was and continues to be a wonderful resource not just because of the plasma physics but the people,
to adhere to the metal electrodes. Initially working with Lew Meixler on a federal Cooperative Research and development Agreement in the Plasma Surface Laboratory, she solved the problem by treating the metal (steel or titanium) with a plasma.
This changed the metal's surface and made the gel adhere more closely to the metal PPPL was also involved with crucial tests of the material last summer,
when the material was exposed to over 300,000 RADS of gamma radiation. That is 20 times the amount that would be lethal to a human
along with Rasmussen and her staff, signed the back of the metal container or coupon holding the material."
300 pounds of supplies and payloads, including material for research experiments, to the International space station National Laboratory.
The International space station is an international science laboratory in low Earth orbit where astronauts conduct scientific research in biology, human biology, astronomy, meteorology and other fields in a gravity-free environment.
She recently received a grant from the Pediatric Medical device Consortium at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to research this possibility.
when Rasmussen was in graduate school. That experience fueled her ambition to develop better prosthetics, and she has devoted her life to doing just that.
Rasmussen is a synthetic polymer chemist, who founded RAS Labs in 2003. She began working with PPPL in the early stages of the company from 2007 through 2011.
She plans to attend the payload launch at the Cape canaveral Air force station Kennedy space center with her 12-year-old son Carl,
including putting Rasmussen and her brothers through college. Carman did so by working nights as a nurse.
For Rasmussen, the launch is the culmination of her dreams.""It just blows my mind that humans are able to do this.
"Rasmussen holds a Phd in chemistry, specialty polymer chemistry, from Virginia Tech and a master's degree in biology, specialty biophysics, from Purdue University.
She previously worked at Johnson & johnson in the 1990s, and lived in Hillsborough, New jersey, until 2011.
Rasmussen has worked also with numerous interns pursuing careers in science and engineering through PPPL's college internship program."
who headed the Department of Technology Transfer at PPPL until his recent retirement. Explore further:
Research could usher in next generation of batteries, fuel cells The research, which is published in the journal Nature Communications,
involves improving the transport of oxygen ions, a key component in converting chemical reactions into electricity.
and is currently in use as a solid oxide fuel cell electrolyte. Through the use of additives and a"smart"chemical reaction, they demonstrated a greatly enhanced conductivity in GDC.
The result is a faster and more efficient conversion into electricity.""This breakthrough will pave the path to fabricate next generation energy conversion and storage devices with significantly enhanced performance,
increasing energy efficiency and making energy environmentally benign and sustainable,"said Fanglin (Frank) Chen, a chemical engineering professor at the University of South carolina."
"The origin of the low grain boundary conductivity is known to be segregation of gadolinium (Gd) in the grain boundary
The grain boundary is extremely narrow, on the order of a few nanometers. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to characterize
and avoid the segregation of Gd at the interface we have added an electronic conductor cobalt iron spinel (CFO),
a professor at Clemson University and co-author of the work.""The CFO reacts with the excess Gd present in the grain boundary of GDC to form a third phase.
The approach of targeting emergent phases resulting in clean interfaces can be applied to a number of essential materials for energy conversion
and storage devices used in handheld electronics, vehicles, and power plants, making them more cost-effective, efficient and environmentally friendly.
Currently, ceramic composites consisting of ionic and electronic conductive components like those in this study are under consideration for membrane separation devices that provide oxygen for enhanced conversion of coal and natural gas
as well as for membrane reactors used in natural gas conversion and recovery y
#Go greener: Norway to clean up sovereign wealth fund Norway said Friday it would bar its state pension fund, the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund,
from investing in the worst climate-polluting companies. In its annual white book on managing the fund,
the right-wing government proposed to"introduce a new criterion to exclude companies whose conduct to an unacceptable degree entail greenhouse gas emissions."
"The proposal did not mention any companies by name. The new rule is in line with experts'recommendations in a December report,
though its conclusions had left environmentalists and the political opposition disappointed. They had wanted to see the fundhich is valued at 835 billion euros ($885 billion),
fuelled by Norway's state oil revenuesivest all of its holdings in companies linked to fossil fuels.
The experts'report had recommended instead the fund act on a case-by-case basis and that it use its role as a company shareholder to improve corporate practices.
The sovereign wealth fund which at the end of December controlled 1. 3 percent of world market capitalisation,
is already bound by strict ethical regulations that bar it from investing in"particularly inhumane"weapons makers,
the tobacco industry and companies that are found guilty of violating human rights, causing serious environmental damage, or corruption.
Even before the adoption of this new criterion, and for strictly financial reasons, the fund has in recent years divested its holdings in several dozen companies,
including coal and cement producers, whose business models were deemed no longer tenable because of climate change or environmental costs.
The white book also proposed an increase in the share of earmarked"green"investments calling for between 30 and 60 billion kroner (between $3. 7 billion/3. 5 billion euros and 7. 0 billion euros/$7. 4 billion.
The current ceiling is 50 billion kroner. In addition, a group of experts was appointed to consider diversifying the fund's investments to include infrastructures
and increase its share in real estate. According to current rules, shares must represent 60 percent of the fund's portfolio, bonds 35 percent and real estate five percent.
The fund was created in the early 1990s to help finance the generous welfare state system once the wells run dry.
#New material set to change cooling industry"The world refrigeration market is expected to increase by about $7-8 billion by 2018,
Therefore, his breakthrough has a significant economic impact as well as an impact on the energy industry and environment.
"LSU's basic research into low temperature physics and materials science has potential applications in areas related to energy,
electronics and the environment,"said Michael L. Cherry, chair and professor, LSU Department of physics and Astronomy."
"Professor Stadler's magnetocaloric materials program is an example of this research that appears to be directly relevant to energy development and Louisiana's economy.
It also provides excellent training opportunities for Louisiana's students.""In this new technology, a magnetic field magnetically orders the material at ambient temperature,
which raises its temperature above ambient. The excess heat is removed through a thermal medium, such as water or air, bringing the material back to ambient temperature.
The magnetic field is removed then, the material becomes magnetically disordered and its temperature drops below ambient temperature leading to a cooling effect.
"Stadler's team's technological discovery is a promising alternative for refrigeration and air conditioning that can reduce the use of harmful gas fluorocarbons."
"We are excited about the potential applications that are available for Dr. Stadler's technology, "said Andrew Maas,
"The Department of energy, General electric and other companies around the world have been working with magnetocaloric materials for some time.
#Insights into potential substitutes for costly platinum in fuel cell catalysts Replacing inefficient and polluting combustion engines with fuel cells is not currently feasible
because the cells require platinum-based catalysts. The PNNL study shows how to create particles with a similar reactivity to platinum that replace some of the platinum with Earth-abundant metals.
The implications of this new preparation technique go far beyond fuel cells. It may be used to create alloy nanomaterials for solar cells, heterogeneous catalysts for a variety of chemical reactions, and energy storage devices."
"The new method gives scientists fine control over the composition and morphology of the alloy nanoparticles on surfaces,"said Dr. Grant Johnson,
a PNNL physical chemist who led the study. The team created the nanoparticles using magnetron sputtering
and gas aggregation. They placed them on a surface using ion soft landing techniques devised at PNNL.
The result is a layer of bare nanoparticles made from two different metals that is free of capping layers, residual reactants,
and solvent molecules that are unavoidable with particles synthesized in solution. The process begins when the scientists load 1-inch-diameter metal discs into an instrument that combines particle formation and ion deposition.
Once the metals are locked into a vacuum chamber in the aggregation region argon gas is introduced. In the presence of a large voltage the argon becomes ionized
and vaporizes the metals through sputtering. The metal ions travel through a cooled region where they collide with each other
The result is bare ionic metal nanoparticles that are about 4 to 10 nanometers across. The mass spectrometer filters the ionic particles,
such as glassy carbon, a commonly used electrode material. Creating the alloy particles in the gas phase provides a host of benefits.
The conventional solution-based approach often results in clumps of the different metals rather than homogeneous nanoparticles with the desired shape.
Further, the particles lack a capping layer. This eliminates the need to remove these layers and clean the particles,
which makes them more efficient to use.""An important benefit is that it allows us to skirt certain thermodynamic limitations that occur
"This allows us to create alloys with consistent elemental constituents and conformation. Furthermore, the kinetically limited gas-phase approach also enables the deposition of intermediate species that would react away in solution."
At relatively short time frames on flat surfaces, the nanoparticles bind randomly. Leave the process running longer and a continuous film forms.
Stepped surfaces result in the nanoparticles forming linear chains on the step edges at low coverage.
scanning and transmission electron microscopes, as well as other tools in DOE's EMSL, a national scientific user facility.
While this work focuses on single nanoparticles, the final result is extended an array with implications that stretch from the atomic scale to the mesoscale."
"Mesoscale research is about how things work together in extended arrays, "said Johnson, "and, that's exactly what we've successfully built here."
"The researchers are now exploring different metal combinations with various platinum ratios to get the desired characteristics for fuel cell catalysts.
They plan on further studying these particles in the new in situ transmission electron microscope, planned to open in EMSL in 2015,
to understand how the particles evolve in reactive environments. Explore further: New nanomaterials will boost renewable energy More information:"
"Soft Landing of Bare Nanoparticles with Controlled Size, Composition, and Morphology.""Nanoscale 7: 3491-3503.
DOI: 10.1039/c4nr06758 8
#Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands Most recent advances in artificial intelligenceuch as mobile apps that convert speech to textre the result of machine learning, in
which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns. To make machine-learning applications easier to build,
computer scientists have begun developing so-called probabilistic programming languages, which let researchers mix and match machine-learning techniques that have worked well in other contexts.
In 2013, the U s. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an incubator of cutting-edge technology launched a four-year program to fund probabilistic-programming research.
At the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June, MIT researchers will demonstrate that on some standard computer-vision tasks,
short programsess than 50 lines longritten in a probabilistic programming language are competitive with conventional systems with thousands of lines of code."
"This is the first time that we're introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area, "says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper."
"The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code,
and then not do anything else. General-purpose inference schemes solve the problems.""By the standards of conventional computer programs, those"models"can seem absurdly vague.
One of the tasks that the researchers investigate, for instance, is constructing a 3-D model of a human face from 2-D images.
Their program describes the principal features of the face as being distributed two symmetrically objects (eyes) with two more centrally positioned objects beneath them (the nose and mouth.
It requires a little work to translate that description into the syntax of the probabilistic programming language,
but at that point, the model is complete. Feed the program enough examples of 2-D images
"Joining Kulkarni on the paper are his adviser, professor of brain and cognitive sciences Josh Tenenbaum;
and Pushmeet Kohli of Microsoft Research Cambridge. For their experiments, they created a probabilistic programming language they call Picture,
which is an extension of Julia, another language developed at MIT. What's old is new The new work,
Kulkarni says, revives an idea known as inverse graphics, which dates from the infancy of artificial-intelligence research.
Even though their computers were painfully slow by today's standards, the artificial intelligence pioneers saw that graphics programs would soon be able to synthesize realistic images by calculating the way in
which light reflected off of virtual objects. This is essentially, how Pixar makes movies. Some researchers,
like the MIT graduate student Larry Roberts, argued that deducing objects'three-dimensional shapes from visual information was simply the same problem in reverse.
Calculating the color value of the pixels in a single frame of"Toy story"is a huge computation,
what probabilistic programming languages are designed to do. Kulkarni and his colleagues considered four different problems in computer vision,
each of which involves inferring the three-dimensional shape of an object from 2-D information. On some tasks, their simple programs actually outperformed prior systems.
Learning to learn In a probabilistic programming language the heavy lifting is done by the inference algorithmhe algorithm that continuously readjusts probabilities on the basis of new pieces of training data.
In that respect, Kulkarni and his colleagues had the advantage of decades of machine-learning research. Built into Picture are several different inference algorithms that have fared well on computer-vision tasks.
Time permitting, it can try all of them out on any given problem, to see which works best.
Moreover, Kulkarni says, Picture is designed so that its inference algorithms can themselves benefit from machine learning, modifying themselves as they go to emphasize strategies that seem to lead to good results."
"Using learning to improve inference will be task-specific, but probabilistic programming may alleviate rewriting code across different problems,
"he says.""The code can be generic if the learning machinery is powerful enough to learn different strategies for different tasks.""
""Picture provides a general framework that aims to solve nearly all tasks in computer vision,
"says Jianxiong Xiao, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton university, who was involved not in the work."
"It goes beyond image classificationhe most popular task in computer visionnd tries to answer one of the most fundamental questions in computer vision:
What is the right representation of visual scenes? It is the beginning of modern revisit for inverse-graphics reasoning. h
#New technology provides superior ability to rapidly detect volatile organic compounds Over the past several decades,
the progress in micro fabrication technology has revolutionized the world in such fields as computing, signal processing,
and automotive manufacturing. Making various types of instruments smaller is another example of how the use of this technology has produced significant advancements.
One such instrument is the gas chromatography system used in a number of scientific, medical,
For the past several years, Masoud Agah, an associate professor In virginia Tech's Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer engineering
has used a National Science Foundation award to develop a credit-card-sized gas chromatography platform that can analyze volatile compounds within seconds."
A war zone might be considered a remote location. In conducting his research, Agah identified a problem that allowed him to develop his new technology.
He explained that the research community has pursued more actively"the hybrid integrated approach"for the development of micro gas chromatography system
to be miniaturized individually on separately fabricated chips. These components are assembled then manually using commercially available off-chip fluidic interconnects."
"This hybrid integration method leads to an increase in the fabrication cost since it involves the separate processing of the individual components,"Agah added.."
"The manual assembly of the individual components is really a cumbersome job and increases the overall weight and footprint of the micro gas chromatography system.
the hybrid integrated approach is inconsistent with the purpose of micro gas chromatography research since further improvement in terms of size, cost,
and performance can be achieved by the single chip or monolithic integration of micro gas chromatography components"he added.
His most recent advancement in this area is the subject of an article appearing in a peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry called Lab on a Chip.
Agah and his graduate students Muhammad Akbar (Islamabad, Pakistan), and Dr. Hamza Shakeel (Rawalpindi, Pakistan), developed a unique gas chromatography-on-chip module."
"The experimental results are really encouraging and address the deficiencies I described,"Agah revealed.""The gas chromatography on-a-chip provides highly efficient separations and detection,
reduced analysis times using temperature and flow programming, as well as fast detection response times suitable for high-speed gas chromatography."
"The system's reliability was also impressive. Results were found to be highly repeatable with less than 10 percent variations,
and no deterioration of the detector excitation electrodes was observed after 12 hours of continuous operation n
#Lab team develops hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvester A research team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee of the Department of Materials science and engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology (KAIST) has developed a hyper-stretchable elastic-composite energy harvesting device called a nanogenerator. Flexible electronics have come into the market
and are enabling new technologies like flexible displays in mobile phone, wearable electronics, and the Internet of things (Iots).
However, is the degree of flexibility enough for most applications? For many flexible devices, elasticity is a very important issue.
For example, wearable/biomedical devices and electronic skins (e skins) should stretch to conform to arbitrarily curved surfaces and moving body parts such as joints, diaphragms, and tendons.
They must be able to withstand the repeated and prolonged mechanical stresses of stretching. In particular, the development of elastic energy devices is regarded as critical to establish power supplies in stretchable applications.
Although several researchers have explored diverse stretchable electronics, due to the absence of the appropriate device structures and correspondingly electrodes,
researchers have not developed ultra-stretchable and fully-reversible energy conversion devices properly. Recently researchers from KAIST and Seoul National University (SNU) have collaborated
and demonstrated a facile methodology to obtain a high-performance and hyper-stretchable elastic-composite generator (SEG) using very long silver nanowire-based stretchable electrodes.
Their stretchable piezoelectric generator can harvest mechanical energy to produce high power output (4 V) with large elasticity (250%)and excellent durability (over 104 cycles.
These noteworthy results were achieved by the non-destructive stress-relaxation ability of the unique electrodes as well as the good piezoelectricity of the device components.
The new SEG can be applied to a wide-variety of wearable energy harvesters to transduce biomechanical-stretching energy from the body (or machines) to electrical energy.
Professor Lee said, "This exciting approach introduces an ultra-stretchable piezoelectric generator. It can open avenues for power supplies in universal wearable and biomedical applications as well as self-powered ultra-stretchable electronics."
"This result was published online in the March issue of Advanced Materials, which is entitled"A Hyper-Stretchable Elastic-Composite Energy harvester
#Bacterial raincoat discovery paves way to better crop protection Researchers have discovered how communities of beneficial bacteria form a waterproof coating on the roots of plants,
to protect them from microbes that could potentially cause plant disease. Their insights could lead to ways to control this shield
and improve its efficiency, which could help curb the risk of unwanted infections in agricultural or garden plants,
the team says. Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee studied the protective film formed by the common soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis.
They found it incorporates proteins that change shape as they reach the film surface. This exposes an impervious surface on the protein molecules
Researchers say that being able to control the production of the biofilm in agricultural products could enable improved protection for plants.
The study, funded by the Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council, is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Cait Macphee, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy said:"
"Dr Nicola Stanley-Wall, of the University of Dundee's Division of Molecular Microbiology, said:"
"Our findings highlight one of the amazing mechanisms that bacteria have evolved to provide protection from changes in their environment.
when biologists and physicists work together on a problem of mutual interest.""Explore further: Antibiotics give rise to new communities of harmful bacteria More information:
#Shape changing display could spell the end for the 2d graph Imagine your computer screen could change shape.
Imagine if that screen could spring to life at the touch of a fingertip, translating numbers and trends into shapes
Researchers have developed a 3d prototype display which brings data to life in just this way sounding the death knell for the two dimensional bar chart.
Human computer interaction specialists at Lancaster University have built a device which translates data into a three dimensional display.
The interactive grid of 100 moving columns enables people to understand and interpret data at a glance.
People can also physically interact with data points by touching selecting and swiping through them to hide,
filter and compare sets of data easily. The 3d display is radically different to interacting with data on a flat screen.
A month's sales figures for example spring to life and take on a'shape'in front of you,
numbers become'things, 'trends become gradients which you can reach out and touch. Lancaster hosts a world-leading Human computer interaction research lab, developing the kind of shape changing displays
which could one day make it into our homes, offices and perhaps even our mobile phones. The group, led by Dr Jason Alexander
will present some of their work to one of the world's leading human computer interaction conferences CHI 2015 in April.
Dr Alexander believes this type of technology, which enables people to quickly identify patterns and absorb large amounts of information,
could bring about a step change for business and education. But for these shape-changing displays to be effective,
researchers and developers first need to understand how people interact with them. So the Lancaster team has been testing out their 21st century bar chart prototypes on the public.
Dr Alexander said:""Humans know how to explore, and interpret physical artefacts, we do it all day, every day.
This tactile platform allows us to use those inherent skills to examine datasets normally confined to flat 2d displays."
"Our challenge was to produce a design that allows users to quickly comprehend large datasets
lighter and with more'bars'so devices like these could be installed in meeting room tables
and in public areas to quickly and meaningfully convey data-driven information. He said:""What would it be like
if every pixel on your screen could move? Imagine the possibilities. Our lab works to develop new devices that merge the physical and digital worlds
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