Australian researchers have uncovered an enzyme capable of transforming air into energy. The study, which was recently published in the prestigious journal Nature, shows that the enzyme utilizes small amounts of hydrogen in the air to generate an electrical current. This breakthrough paves the way for the development of devices that can literally generate energy from thin air.

The discovery was made by a team of scientists led by Dr. Rhys Grinter, Ashleigh Kropp, a Ph.D. student, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia. The team produced and studied a hydrogen-consuming enzyme sourced from a bacterium commonly found in soil.

Recent work by the team has shown that many bacteria use hydrogen from the atmosphere as an energy source in nutrient-poor environments. “We’ve known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean,” Professor Greening said. “But we didn’t know how they did this, until now.”

Researchers at the University of East Anglia have developed a new drug that works against all of the main types of primary bone cancer.

Cancer that starts in the bones, rather than cancer that has spread to the bones, predominantly affects children.

Current treatment is grueling, with outdated chemotherapy cocktails and limb amputation.

Scientists working in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin have made an important breakthrough in understanding what goes wrong in our bodies during the progression of inflammatory diseases and—in doing so—unearthed a potential new therapeutic target.

The scientists have found that an enzyme called fumarate hydratase is repressed in macrophages, a frontline inflammatory cell type implicated in a range of diseases including lupus, arthritis, sepsis and COVID-19.

Professor Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity, is the lead author of the research article that has just been published in the journal, Nature. He said, “No one has made a link from fumarate hydratase to inflammatory macrophages before and we feel that this process might be targetable to treat debilitating diseases like lupus, which is a nasty autoimmune disease that damages several parts of the body including the skin, kidneys and joints.”

Transcatheter mitral valve repair for heart failure patients with mitral regurgitation can reduce the long-term rate of hospitalizations by almost 50 percent, and death by nearly 30 percent, compared with heart failure patients who don’t undergo the minimally invasive procedure.

These are the breakthrough findings from a new study led by a researcher from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. This multi-center trial is the largest trial to examine the safety and effectiveness of transcatheter mitral-valve repair in a heart failure population using Abbott’s MitraClip system. It shows this treatment option significantly improves outcomes for patients with heart failure that do not respond to conventional treatments.

The five-year results from the “Cardiovascular Outcomes Assessment of the MitraClip Percutaneous Device” study, or COAPT, were announced Sunday, March 5, in a Late Breaking Clinical Trial presentation at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions Together with World Congress of Cardiology (ACC.23/WCC) in New Orleans, and published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers hope KRAS test can serve renewed function as soon as possible Scientists have found an existing gene test frequently used on the NHS can also shed light on whether a bowel cancer patient will respond positively or negatively to chemotherapy. Researchers from The Institute of Cancer Research, Imperial College London and the Netherlands Cancer Institute have found the KRAS test can have use beyond its current function of predicting how patients will react to cancer drug cetuximab.