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Blog – Page 15

An international team including astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) has announced the discovery of a planet about twice the size of Earth orbiting its star farther out than Saturn is to the sun.

These results are another example of how planetary systems can be different from our solar system.

“We found a ‘super-Earth’—meaning it’s bigger than our home planet but smaller than Neptune—in a place where only planets thousands or hundreds of times more massive than Earth were found before,” said Weicheng Zang, a CfA Fellow. He is the lead author of a paper describing these results in the latest issue of the journal Science.

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A new bacteria-killing paint shows powerful promise in eliminating dangerous pathogens like MRSA and COVID-19 from hard surfaces. Infused with chlorhexidine, a trusted dental disinfectant, the coating works on plastics and metals and activates once dry. Collaborating with industrial paint maker I

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Four decades ago, researchers raced to image proteins with electron microscopes cooled with liquid helium to near absolute zero. They hoped the extreme cold would reduce the radiation damage produced by the microscopes’ electron beams, resulting in sharper views. But inexplicably the images invariably came back fuzzier than when the machines ran at warmer liquid nitrogen temperatures. After years of frustration, helium cooling was all but abandoned. Now, researchers in the United Kingdom have finally figured out the problem: The lower temperature causes ice surrounding the proteins to buckle, distorting the images. And they’ve come up with a workaround to prevent the buckling and sharpen the resolution.

“It’s great they managed to get this to work,” says Peter Denes, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Elspeth Garman, a structural biologist at the University of Oxford, adds that the resolution improvement “will feed into getting better detail of bigger protein complexes and smaller protein components within these complexes,” she says.

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A new study offers insight into what is happening in our brains when our working memory must use its limited resources to remember multiple things.

Researchers found that two parts of the brain work together to ensure that more brain resources are given to remember a priority item when a person is juggling more than one item in memory.

The study involved people remembering spatial locations. Imagine seeing two books on different shelves of a cluttered bookcase that was not arranged in any order. How could you remember where they were if you came back a few seconds later?

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