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Blog – Page 2079

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious radio signal at the heart of an ancient, tightly packed ball of stars, and it may be coming from a long-hidden black hole.

The radio signal was picked up by the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) radio telescope as it created the most sensitive image of a globular cluster — a clump of ancient stars like these — ever taken. The ball of stars in question, named 47 Tucanae, is the second-brightest globular cluster in the sky over Earth and is located around 13,000 light-years from our planet.

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Psychologists from Edith Cowan University (ECU) have used virtual reality (VR) technology in a new study that aims to better understand criminals and how they respond when questioned. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“You will often hear police say, to catch a criminal, you have to think like a criminal—well that is effectively what we are trying to do here,” said Dr. Shane Rogers, who led the project alongside ECU Ph.D. candidate Isabella Branson.

The forensic psychology research project involved 101 participants, who role-played committing a burglary in two similar virtual mock– scenarios.

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Stepping inside Erin Adams’ lab at the University of Chicago is a bit overstimulating.

Adams’ work centers on molecular immunology. As the Joseph Regenstein Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and vice provost for research, she researches the molecular signals that the immune system uses to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy tissue.

And her lab is expansive. It includes a tissue culture lab space—where she and her team of postdoctoral fellows work with cells to try to recapitulate things. Then there’s the crystal room where one can find hundreds of labeled wells filled with proteins that are being watched to see if three-dimensional crystals materialize.

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The mysterious Lycurgus Cup is convincing evidence that ancient Romans used nanotechnology, or at least knew how to get the desired effects, long before the availability of modern technology.

The cup is made of a special type of glass known as dichroic, meaning “two-colored” in Greek, which changes hue when held up to the light. It is opaque green but turns to glowing translucent red when light shines through it.

The Lycurgus Cup owes its unusual properties to the use of tiny quantities of colloidal gold and silver. The rim of the cup is mounted with a silver-gilt band of leaf ornament. Its type is known as a “cage cup,” as it consists of a cage around the glass.

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Using various ground-based telescopes, astronomers have performed photometric and spectroscopic observations of a nearby Type Ia supernova known as SN 2020nlb. Results of the observations campaign, presented January 16 on the pre-print server arXiv, deliver important insights regarding the evolution of this stellar explosion.

Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) are found in binary systems in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. Stellar explosions of this type are important for the scientific community, as they offer essential clues into the evolution of stars and galaxies.

SN 2020nlb was detected on June 25, 2020 with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), shortly after its explosion in the lenticular galaxy Messier 85 (or M85 for short), located some 60 million away. Spectroscopic observations of SN 2020nlb, commenced shortly after its detection, confirmed that it is a Type Ia .

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The humble membranes that enclose our cells have a surprising superpower: They can push away nano-sized molecules that happen to approach them. A team including scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has figured out why, by using artificial membranes that mimic the behavior of natural ones. Their discovery could make a difference in how we design the many drug treatments that target our cells.

The team’s findings, which appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, confirm that the powerful electrical fields that cell membranes generate are largely responsible for repelling nanoscale particles from the surface of the cell.

This repulsion notably affects neutral, uncharged nanoparticles, in part because the smaller, charged the attracts crowd the membrane and push away the larger particles. Since many drug treatments are built around proteins and other nanoscale particles that target the membrane, the repulsion could play a role in the treatments’ effectiveness.

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