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For ‘deeper reading’ among children aged 10–12, paper trumps screens. What does it mean when schools are going digital?

Rocky89 / E+ via getty images.

The Department of Education’s most recent study, declared in June, was surely sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had denied an average of four points since the Covid-affected schools in the academic year 2019–2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.

Hunting for a neutron star

To discover what lies at the center of SN 1987A, astronomers needed a telescope big enough and advanced enough to detect evidence of radiation from a hidden neutron star.

Enter the James Webb Space Telescope: the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space that is already revolutionizing our understanding of the universe within its first two years of operation.

Lung cancer is not the most common form of cancer, but it is by far among the deadliest. Despite treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, only about a quarter of all people with the disease will live more than five years after diagnosis, and lung cancer kills more than 1.8 million people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization.

To improve the odds for patients with lung cancer, researchers from The University of Texas at Arlington and UT Southwestern Medical Center have pioneered a novel approach to deliver cancer-killing drugs directly into cancer cells.

“Our method uses the patient’s own cellular material as a to transport a targeted drug payload directly to the cells,” said Kytai T. Nguyen, lead author of a new study on the technique in the journal Bioactive Materials and the Alfred R. and Janet H. Potvin Distinguished Professor in Bioengineering at UTA.

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We all travel through space time at speed of light. But, what does it really mean? How does it explain the consequences of special relativity — time dilation, length contraction, relativity of simultaneity, and more.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro.
01:25 A 2D analogy.
04:15 How to validate?
07:08 How Pythagorus helps.
08:40 How to piece a website (Ad)
10:15 Speed in 4D spacetime.
13:30 Why length contracts along motion.
16:30 Simultaneity \& clock desynchronisation.
18:17 Revising the Twin’s ‘paradox’
19:36 Why 3 spacial dimensions \& 1 time dimension?

Nucleases present a formidable barrier to the application of nucleic acids in biology, significantly reducing the lifetime of nucleic acid-based drugs. Here, we develop a novel methodology to protect DNA and RNA from nucleases by reconfiguring their supramolecular structure through the addition of a nucleobase mimic, cyanuric acid. In the presence of cyanuric acid, polyadenine strands assemble into triple helical fibers known as the polyA/CA motif. We report that this motif is exceptionally resistant to nucleases, with the constituent strands surviving for up to 1 month in the presence of serum. The conferred stability extends to adjacent non-polyA sequences, albeit with diminishing returns relative to their polyA sections due to hypothesized steric clashes. We introduce a strategy to regenerate stability through the introduction of free polyA strands or positively charged amino side chains, enhancing the stability of sequences of varied lengths. The proposed protection mechanism involves enzyme failure to recognize the unnatural polyA/CA motif, coupled with the motif’s propensity to form long, bundling supramolecular fibers. The methodology provides a fundamentally new mechanism to protect nucleic acids from degradation using a supramolecular approach and increases lifetime in serum to days, weeks, or months.