Vaccines are one of the most important tools we have in our defense against infectious diseases, but not everyone responds to vaccination in the same way. Parasites such as worms and viruses change the way a person or animal’s immune system functions, and this can affect their ability to respond to vaccines.
Proper embryonic development of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is governed by patterns of protein activity bequeathed to the fertilized egg by its mother. While the embryo is still a single cell, the maternal cells surrounding it deposit certain proteins inside it at specific locations. This establishes protein gradients that direct the development of embryonic features along its anterior-posterior and ventral-dorsal axes. Later, the embryo receives another round of maternal information, called terminal patterning, that guides the development of its head and tail.
There are two paths. One leads to the arm of Noah Rose, a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. The other leads to a guinea pig.
For some species of mosquitoes, their preference for humans reveals something about their evolution — and the ecology of their ancestral homes. New research, published July 23 in the journal Current Biology, identifies the genetic components underlying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes’ affinity for humans and indicates that their human-seeking behavior can be traced to two environmental conditions: climate and urbanization.
The Republic of Armenia announced on July 18 that Princeton astrophysicist Adam Burrows is one of three recipients of the Viktor Ambartsumian International Science Prize “for his seminal and pioneering contributions to the theories of brown dwarfs and exoplanets and for his leadership role in educating a generation of scientists at the frontiers of brown dwarf and exoplanet research.”
From a mountain high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers with the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the oldest light in the universe. Their new observations plus a bit of cosmic geometry suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years.
Why don’t planets collide more often? How do planetary systems — like our solar system or multi-planet systems around other stars — organize themselves? Of all of the possible ways planets could orbit, how many configurations will remain stable over the billions of years of a star’s life cycle?
Rejecting the large range of unstable possibilities — all the configurations that would lead to collisions — would leave behind a sharper view of planetary systems around other stars, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Jo Dunkley, a professor of physics and astrophysical sciences, is the 2020 recipient of the Caterina Tomassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi Prize for her innovative work exploring the earliest moments of our universe.
Bacteria, as it turns out, are a lot like us. They get complacent in relaxed, non-threatening environments. And when they’re relaxed, they don’t produce defenses that guard against things that want to kill them, like competing organisms or microbial predators.
But when threatened, bacteria produce a veritable army of molecular defenses. Drilling down into these defenses and the elicitors that trigger them has enabled scientists to discover antibiotics and antivirals, knowledge that might yet prove useful in the fight against the coronavirus.
To find food, dazzle mates, escape predators and navigate diverse terrain, birds rely on their excellent color vision.
Far beyond the orbits of the planets are the hazy outlines of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble in space that we call home. This flexible cosmic bubble stretches and shrinks in response to the sun’s gasps and sighs.
