A research consortium has generated a catalog of mitochondrial proteins across eukaryotic organisms, capturing the organelle’s diversity across the tree of life and revealing clues to its origin and role in the evolution of complex-celled organisms.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
Radical New Tactic Would Stop Deadly Cancers Before They Start
Cancer interception clinical trials aim to prevent abnormal growths from developing into tumors by combining early detection and immunotherapy.
Gram-Negative Bacterial Resistance
The rapid worldwide spread of antimicrobial resistance among gram-negative bacteria is driven by a complex interplay of human, environmental, and health care–associated factors and accelerated by mobile genetic elements that facilitate the dissemination of resistance genes. Resistance in gram-negative bacteria arises primarily through reduced drug entry, active drug efflux, modification of antibiotic targets, and enzymatic drug inactivation, most notably through β-lactamase production. Clinically important resistant pathogens include extended-spectrum β-lactamase–producing Enterobacterales, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales, Pseudomonas aeruginosa with difficult-to-treat resistance, and carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii.
Customizable DNA labels can selectively guide drug carriers to cancer cells
Cells naturally send tiny packages to one another to share information. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a simple, low-cost way to turn those packages into drug carriers that can deliver treatments directly to cancer cells, potentially improving effectiveness while reducing side effects.
“Modern anticancer drugs are strong already. What we really need is precision. So, how do we deliver things to cells precisely? I believe that the best solution is the one that nature has already made for us,” said Christopher Blum, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry.
Blum developed a new platform that modifies naturally occurring cellular transport vesicles so they can deliver therapeutic cargo to specific cells while avoiding unintended targets. The research is published in ACS Applied Bio Materials.
Light from Disordered Media
Researchers have proposed that structural disorder can be harnessed to generate coherent, directional light from the passage of a charged particle.
Thought Experiment: Bright Visions of Future Energy
The same pursuit of greater efficiency motivates current research on artificial photosynthesis. Natural photosynthesis can already provide chemical fuel: In the US, for example, maize is grown and converted to ethanol. But it takes a plot of 9.6 hectares, or 24 acres, to produce enough ethanol to fill one gasoline truck. Maize must also be ground up and fermented to produce the ethanol. Artificial photosynthesis aims to bypass such efficiency-sapping steps by converting sunlight more directly into fuels and other useful chemicals.
Photosynthesis requires splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. However, the oxygen generated during this process is highly corrosive, attacking—or “rusting”—the catalysts responsible for lowering the reaction’s energy barrier. Natural photosynthesis mitigates this damage by continually resynthesizing the core protein complex of photosystem II whenever it degrades. Although finding a cheap, robust catalyst for artificial photosynthesis remains elusive, researchers are making steady progress. In fact, artificial systems have already surpassed natural plants in solar-to-fuel efficiency by a factor of 5. To close the remaining gaps, scientists are actively developing innovative hybrid nanomaterials to serve as next-generation catalysts.
Since artificial photosynthesis remains far from established more than a century after Ciamician offered his vision, one might have grounds for despondency. But I’m optimistic, in part because the path from basic research to practical technology can be long. Engineer and inventor George Cayley expounded the physics of flying machines in his treatise “On Aerial Navigation” (1809–1810). The Wright brothers acknowledged their debt to Cayley, but nearly a century passed before they demonstrated a motorized aircraft capable of sustained flight in 1903.
Scientists count more than 2 million eels on one underwater mountain
Patience Seamount is an underwater mountain in Australia’s Huon Marine Park off the coast of Tasmania. Every year, it is the site of an enormous gathering of basketwork eels (Diastobranchus capensis) for reasons unknown, although most likely to spawn. The numbers are huge, but they have never been quantified.
Now a team led by marine scientist Ben Scoulding of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has estimated how many are down there.
According to their study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the gatherings could contain as many as 2.8 million eels with a collective biomass of around 3,550 metric tons (about 3,900 U.S. tons).
Supersonic waves could explain the strange orbits of hot Jupiters and Neptunes
Using advanced new simulations, a team of astronomers in the U.S. has developed a promising new theory for how giant, gaseous exoplanets migrate into stiflingly close orbits around their host stars. Led by J. J. Zanazzi at The Pennsylvania State University, the team showed how both massive “hot Jupiters” and smaller, Neptune-sized planets could migrate from distant, elliptical orbits as they release energy via dramatic shock waves in their outer atmospheres. Their results have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets with masses comparable to the largest planet in our own solar system, but which orbit extremely close to their host stars—imparting them with temperatures that can exceed some 2,000 Kelvin. Not only are their orbital periods extremely short, they also cluster within a window between three and five days: a phenomenon dubbed the “hot Jupiter pileup.”
Similar clustering can also be seen in smaller gas giants, with masses between those of Neptune and Saturn, known as the “Neptune ridge.” Yet unlike hot Jupiters, these planets are strikingly scarce on orbits shorter than about three days, creating a stark observational gap named the “Neptune desert.”
The phantom lighthouse: New research explains one of Australia’s strangest illusions
There are two lighthouses on Lady Elliot Island, at the southernmost tip of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The first was built in 1873, but was decommissioned in 1995 when the second took over the job of warning ships off the reef. Visitors to the island, however, regularly report seeing signs of a third lighthouse. At night the beams of a nonexistent phantom lighthouse are seen far off, shining on the horizon.
This “phantom lighthouse illusion” is so well known it even gets a mention in the island’s guide for tourists. It’s not unique to Lady Elliot Island, either: the earliest known report of this phenomenon was published in 1937, and it documented the illusion off the coast of Brittany in France.
What’s going on here? One of us traveled to Lady Elliot Island to find out, then we recreated the illusion in a virtual reality environment to make sure we understood what was happening.
Ultrathin metal layer boosts spin-related signals, opening a door to ultralow-power electronics
Researchers at Kyushu University have found that an ultrathin layer of iridium manganese (IrMn) can improve two spin-related signals in a structure made of a magnetic insulator and a platinum film. By examining how spin currents are generated and absorbed, the team gained insights into how the intermediate layer improves spin transfer. The findings could inform the development of ultralow-power devices for computing and energy harvesting.
Spintronics is a more complex approach to conventional electronics that uses electron spin, in addition to electrical charge, to process and transmit information. For decades, researchers have been investigating various ways to use spin-related phenomena in computing, data storage and energy harvesting.
One such phenomenon is the spin Seebeck effect (SSE), in which a temperature difference across a magnetic material generates a spin current that can be converted into electricity. Another one is spin hall magnetoresistance (SMR), where a metal’s electrical resistance changes depending on the relative orientation of the electrical current and the magnetization of a neighboring magnetic layer. If harnessed effectively, the SSE could provide a way to recover energy from heat that would otherwise go unused, and SMR could prove useful for data storage and computing.