ROCKVILLE, MD - The Biophysical Society is honored to celebrate Kandice Tanner, a physicist and Senior Investigator at the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Tanner is being recognized for her pioneering work on the biophysics of the metastatic spread of cancer ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - The Biophysical Society is proud to announce its 2024 Society Fellows. This award honors the Society's distinguished members who have demonstrated excellence in science and contributed to the expansion of the field of biophysics ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - The Biophysical Society is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2024 Society Awards. These awards are very competitive in nature and are intended to recognize Society members for excellence in biophysics. The winners will be honored at the Society's 68th Annual Meeting being held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from February 10-14, 2024 ..read more

Carlas S. Smith, PhD, of Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands was honored as the recipient of the Biophysical Journal Paper of the Year-Early Career Investigator Award at the 67th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society, held February 18-22 in San Diego, California. This award recognizes the work of outstanding early career investigators in biophysics ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - Women are often underrepresented in cardiac clinical trials--yet they are at least at equally high risk of death due to cardiovascular disease, and at higher risk of developing drug-induced heart complications compared to men. Clinical trials of medicines generally rely on electrocardiograms (EKG) to measure a patient's heart's response to a medicine and determine its safety, yet males and females have a number of differences in their heart physiology that are reflected in consistent variations in their EKGs ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - COVID-19 infections can cause potentially life-threatening heart issues. Studies suggest that people with COVID-19 are 55% more likely to suffer a major adverse cardiovascular event, including heart attack, stroke and death, than those without COVID-19. They're also more likely to have other heart issues, like arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - In 1920, inventor Nikola Tesla patented a type of pipe that he called a "valvular conduit," which was built to draw fluid in one direction without any moving parts or added energy, and has applications ranging from soft robotics to medical implants. In 2021, scientists discovered that sharks' spiral-shaped intestines work much the same way, favoring fluid flow in one direction--from head to pelvis ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - Approximately three million Americans suffer from opioid use disorder, and every year more than 80,000 Americans die from overdoses. Opioid drugs, such as heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone and morphine, activate opioid receptors. Activating mu-opioid receptors leads to pain relief and euphoria, but also physical dependence and decreased breathing, the latter leading to death in the case of drug overdose ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - The virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-CoV-2, uses its spike protein in order to stick to and infect our cells. The final step for the virus to enter our cells is for part of its spike protein to act like a twist tie, forcing the host cell's outer membrane to fuse with the virus. Kailu Yang, in the lab of Axel Brunger, colleagues at Stanford University, and collaborators at University of California Berkely, Harvard Medical School, and University of Finland have generated a molecule based on the twisted part of the spike protein (called HR2), which sticks itself onto the vi ..read more

ROCKVILLE, MD - Our current solar panels aren't very efficient; they are only able to convert up to about 20 percent of the sun's energy into electricity. As a result, to generate a lot of electricity, the panels require a lot of space--sometimes leading forests to be cut down or farms to be replaced by solar ..read more