Newfound genetic material may rev up methane cycling by soil microbes.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,442
Scientists on the hunt for an unconventional kind of superconductor have produced the most compelling evidence to date that they’ve found one. In a pair of papers, researchers at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Quantum Materials Center (QMC) and colleagues have shown that uranium ditelluride (or UTe2 for short) displays many of the hallmarks of a topological superconductor—a material that may unlock new ways to build quantum computers and other futuristic devices.
“Nature can be wicked,” says Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD, the director of QMC and senior author on one of the papers. “There could be other reasons we’re seeing all this wacky stuff, but honestly, in my career, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
All superconductors carry electrical currents without any resistance. It’s kind of their thing. The wiring behind your walls can’t rival this feat, which is one of many reasons that large coils of superconducting wires and not normal copper wires have been used in MRI machines and other scientific equipment for decades.
Universe Today.
Space may be pretty, but it’s dangerous. Astronauts face a much higher dose of ionizing radiation than us Earth-bound folks, and a new report says that NASA’s current guidelines and risk assessment methods are in serious need of an update.
On the surface of the Earth, protected by our extensive magnetic field and layers of thick atmosphere, we experience about 2–3 milliSieverts (mSv) of radiation exposure every year. Even that background level is enough to trigger the occasional cancer growth.
But astronauts, especially those hoping to go on upcoming long-term missions to the Moon and Mars, face a much greater risk due to the high-energy, ionizing radiation constantly soaking every cubic centimeter of space. To mitigate that risk, NASA currently implements a system based on “risk of exposure-induced death” (REID). The space agency estimates the exposure for each astronaut based on their sex, and if the REID exceeds 3%, their spacefaring careers are over.
Fluorescent sensors glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in. Researchers have developed smart wound dressings with built-in nanosensors that glow to alert patients when a wound is not healing properly.
The multifunctional, antimicrobial dressings feature fluorescent sensors that glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in and can be used to monitor healing progress.
The smart dressings, developed by a team of scientists and engineers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, harness the powerful antibacterial and antifungal properties of magnesium hydroxide.
A potentially life-saving treatment for heart attack victims has been discovered from a very unlikely source — the venom of one of the world’s deadliest spiders.
A drug candidate developed from a molecule found in the venom of the Fraser Island (K’gari) funnel web spider can prevent damage caused by a heart attack and extend the life of donor hearts used for organ transplants. The discovery was made by a team led by Dr Nathan Palpant and Professor Glenn King from The University of Queensland (UQ) and Professor Peter Macdonald from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.
Dr Palpant, from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), said the drug candidate worked by stopping a ‘death signal’ sent from the heart in the wake of an attack.
Scientists have waited months for access to highly accurate protein structure prediction since DeepMind presented remarkable progress in this area at the 2020 Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, or CASP14, conference. The wait is now over.
Researchers at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle have largely recreated the performance achieved by DeepMind on this important task. These results will be published online by the journal Science on Thursday, July 15.
Unlike DeepMind, the UW Medicine team’s method, which they dubbed RoseTTAFold, is freely available. Scientists from around the world are now using it to build protein models to accelerate their own research. Since July, the program has been downloaded from GitHub by over 140 independent research teams.
Today, in a peer-reviewed paper published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, DeepMind offered further details of how exactly its A.I. software was able to perform so well. It has also open-sourced the code it used to create AlphaFold 2 for other researchers to use.
But it’s still not clear when researchers and drug companies will have easy access to AlphaFold’s structure predictions.
Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen.
The achievement, which was developed in collaboration with the first participant of a clinical research trial, builds on more than a decade of effort by UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, to develop a technology that allows people with paralysis to communicate even if they are unable to speak on their own. The study appears July 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
That said, the Borgs do clearly contain metabolic genes, which might be able to boost the energy metabolisms of Methanoperedens that host them. If so, these unique genetic elements could provide new insights into reducing methane emissions, which is a major aim for climate change mitigation plans.
These ‘Borg’ elements assimilated genes from other organisms, and could be used to help fight climate change.