Quantum computers promise to efficiently predict the structure and behaviour of molecules. This Perspective explores how this could overcome existing challenges in computational drug discovery.
Category: computing – Page 181
For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to understand how we manage to make the best possible decisions. Due to technical limitations, researchers have so far had to rely on experiments in which monkeys perform tasks on computer screens while the activity of their brain cells is measured.
The animals are trained to sit still in a chair and are therefore restricted in their natural freedom of movement. Since it is now possible to wirelessly record the activity of several individual nerve cells, decision-making in scenarios with natural movement sequences can be investigated.
For the study, a team of researchers from Germany and the U.S. trained two rhesus monkeys to explore an experimental room with two button-controlled food boxes. Each time the monkeys pressed a button on one of the boxes, they had the chance to receive food pellets.
Spintronics is a field that deals with electronics that exploit the intrinsic spin of electrons and their associated magnetic moment for applications such as quantum computing and memory storage devices. Owing to its spin and magnetism exhibited in its insulator-metal phase transition, the strongly correlated electron systems of nickel oxide (NiO) have been thoroughly explored for more than eight decades. Interest in its unique antiferromagnetic (AF) and spin properties has seen a revival lately since NiO is a potential material for ultrafast spintronics devices.
Despite this rise in popularity, exploration of its surface magnetic properties using the low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) technique has not received much attention since the 1970s. To review the understanding of the surface properties, Professor Masamitsu Hoshino and Emeritus Professor Hiroshi Tanaka, both from the Department of Physics at Sophia University, Japan, revisited the surface LEED crystallography of NiO.
The results of their quantitative experimental study investigating the coherent exchange scattering in Ni2+ ions in AF single crystal NiO were reported in The European Physical Journal D.
A computational model of the more than 26 million atoms in a DNA-packed viral capsid expands our understanding of virus structure and DNA dynamics, insights that could provide new research avenues and drug targets, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers report in the journal Nature.
“To fight a virus, we want to know everything there is to know about it. We know what’s inside in terms of components, but we don’t know how they’re arranged,” said study leader Aleksei Aksimentiev, an Illinois professor of physics. “Knowledge of the internal structures gives us more targets for drugs, which tend to focus on receptors on the surface or replication proteins.”
Viruses keep their genetic material —either DNA or RNA—packaged in a hollow particle called a capsid. While the structures of many hollow capsids have been described, the structure of a full capsid and the genetic material inside it has remained elusive.
This year, Rockefeller scientists plumbed the depths of wound repair and tackled how songbirds solve problems; they used microchips to grow mini-lungs and proposed an environmental trigger for multiple sclerosis. Efforts to combat COVID, Hepatitis B, and other infections bore fruit, and countless papers shed light on basic research, answering questions that have long baffled biologists. Here are some of the intriguing discoveries that came out of Rockefeller in 2023.
As the male reproductive system ages, it becomes more and more susceptible to mutations. New research from the laboratory of Li Zhao explored this phenomenon in fruit flies, by focusing on how mutations arise during the formation of sperm. The team found that, while mutations are common in the testes of both young and old flies, the repair mechanisms that remove those mutations and maintain genomic integrity during spermatogenesis become less efficient in older individuals, leading to the accumulation and persistence of more mutations in older flies.
Unlike computers, cells in the brain use digital and analog signals at the same time to communicate with each other, researchers have found.
The finding contradicts the belief that nerve cells in the brain communicate with each other using digital code only.
In an analog system, signals can vary continuously, while digital systems represent signals by a series of pulses. The brain uses a mixture of the two to transmit signals among cells, researchers say.
The downscaling of electronic devices, such as transistors, has reached a plateau, posing challenges for semiconductor fabrication. However, a research team led by materials scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) recently discovered a new strategy for developing highly versatile electronics with outstanding performance using transistors made of mixed-dimensional nanowires and nanoflakes.
This innovation paves the way for simplified chip circuit design, offering versatility and low power dissipation in future electronics. The findings, titled “Multifunctional anti-ambipolar electronics enabled by mixed-dimensional 1D GaAsSb/2D MoS2 heterotransistors,” were published in the journal Device.
In recent decades, as the continuous scaling of transistors and integrated circuits has started to reach physical and economic limits, fabricating semiconductor devices in a controllable and cost-effective manner has become challenging. Further scaling of transistor size increases current leakage and thus power dissipation. Complex wiring networks also have an adverse impact on power consumption.
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Generating quantum correlations between light and microwaves.
Non-classical microwave–optical photon pair generation with a chip-scale transducer.
A transducer that generates microwave–optical photon pairs is demonstrated. This could provide an interface between optical communication networks and superconducting quantum devices that operate at microwave frequencies.
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