Simple trash can be turned into the quantum material graphene which could make future cities or even new computers and so much more.
Flash Joule heating of inexpensive carbon sources is used to produce gram-scale quantities of high-quality graphene in under a second, without the need for a furnace, solvents or reactive gases.
Roger Penrose argued that human thought does things no computer can, so the mind must make use of non-computable quantum mechanics. The idea remains fringe. Most scientists think that in warm, wet environments like the brain, quantum states collapse into classical states far faster than neurons fire, and so cognition must be governed by classical physics. But neuroscientist Mike Wiest argues that new evidence challenges this assumption: stable quantum states are now being observed at far higher temperatures than previously thought possible. And consciousness, he suggests, has structural features that make quantum mechanics a natural place to look for an explanation, so critics should stop accusing Penrose of simply piling one mystery on top of another. The time has come to give this neglected proposal another look. I.
In a recent study published in Nature, scientists from the Shanghai Academy of Natural Sciences (SANS) in China developed an oral living drug, GIFT, made from engineered probiotic bacteria. The bacteria carry a built-in molecular glucose sensor, created using a gene circuit controlled by a sensor protein called HexR.
Zimmerman et al. show loss of behavioral inhibition correlated with attenuated theta activity in the primary visual cortex, hippocampus, and deficient top-down control from the prefrontal cortex in the Fmr1 KO mice. These findings shed light on circuit-level impairments underlying behavioral deficits in Fragile X syndrome for potential therapeutic interventions.
The universe has been having fewer and fewer stellar “babies.” Over the past 4.5 billion years, the rate of star birth has crashed to less than half of what it once was. But here’s the twist: the most essential “fuel” for making stars has barely decreased.
This finding comes from an international team led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. They used China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) to make high-precision measurements of cosmic neutral atomic hydrogen over the past 4.5 billion years.
The study reveals that while cosmic star formation has declined dramatically over this period, neutral atomic hydrogen (HI)—a vital gas reservoir for galaxies—has decreased only slightly.
Antigen-specific T cells underpin immunity, cancer surveillance and autoimmunity, yet remain difficult to study. This Review describes the technologies and computational approaches that are helping to link T cell receptor specificity with function, revealing how intrinsic T cell properties shape immune outcomes across infection, vaccination and disease.