Lifeboat Foundation

New insights on how subunits of the influenza virus polymerase co-evolve to ensure efficient viral RNA replication are provided by a study published October 3 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Nadia Naffakh of the Institut Pasteur, and colleagues. As the authors note, the findings could lead to novel strategies for antiviral drug development.

Because of their yearly recurrence and the occasional emergence of pandemics, influenza viruses represent a worldwide major public health threat. Enhancing fundamental knowledge about the influenza RNA–polymerase, which is an enzyme that consists of three subunits (i.e., a heterotrimer) and ensures transcription and replication of the viral genome, is essential to reach the goal of better prevention and treatment of disease.

In the new study, Naffakh and colleagues gained new insights into viral polymerase function. They showed that the polymerase subunits co-evolve to ensure not only optimal inter-subunit cooperation within the heterotrimer, but also proper levels dimerization—the process by which pairs of heterotrimers attach together—which appears to be essential for efficient viral RNA replication. The findings point to influenza polymerase dimerization as a feature that can restrict genetic reassortment, a major evolutionary mechanism in which influenza viruses swap gene segments, and could become an attractive target for antiviral drug development.

Mushrooms are more closely related to animals than plants, said Matt Kasson, an associate professor of mycology at West Virginia University.

The first hypotheses about the relationship between fungi and animals emerged in the 1950s, he said. Scientists were able to test and confirm these suspicions years later.

By Gareth Worthington is a slim book that crams in lots of classic science fiction ideas. Singularities, first contact, and sentient spacecraft to name but three. Of my recent SF reads, Dark Dweller reminds me both of James Smythe and Gareth Powell

What is Dark Dweller?

The novel opens in a future dystopia. In order to run on clean energy, Earth requires Helium. This is acquired, at no small risk, from Jupiter. The companies that run the operations are fabulously wealthy; the people that do the harvesting, not so much. The 12-year journey to and from Jupiter is hard going. You’re in suspended animation for much of it, but that gap messes up your life. But hey, it’s a job.

Chaotic behavior is typically known from large systems: for example, from weather, from asteroids in space that are simultaneously attracted by several large celestial bodies, or from swinging pendulums that are coupled together. On the atomic scale, however, one does normally not encounter chaos—other effects predominate.

Now, for the first time, scientists at TU Wien have been able to detect clear indications of chaos on the nanometer scale—in chemical reactions on tiny rhodium crystals. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

The chemical reaction studied is actually quite simple: with the help of a precious metal catalyst, oxygen reacts with hydrogen to form water, which is also the basic principle of a fuel cell. The reaction rate depends on external conditions (pressure, temperature). Under certain conditions, however, this reaction shows oscillating behavior, even though the external conditions are constant.

A new form of heterostructure of layered two-dimensional (2D) materials may enable quantum computing to overcome key barriers to its widespread application, according to an international team of researchers.

The researchers were led by a team that is part of the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science (CNS), one of 19 Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) in the United States funded by the National Science Foundation. Their work was published Feb. 13 in Nature Materials.

A regular computer consists of billions of transistors, known as bits, and are governed by binary code (“0” = off and “1” = on). A quantum bit, also known as a qubit, is based on quantum mechanics and can be both a “0” and a “1” at the same time. This is known as superposition and can enable quantum computers to be more powerful than the regular, classical computers.

Prof. Ding Junfeng and his team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Science, together with Prof. Zhang Genqiang from the University of Science and Technology of China, have achieved band gap optimization and photoelectric response enhancement of carbon nitride in the nitrogen vacancy graphite phase under high pressure.

Their results were published in the journal Physical Review Applied.

Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C₃N₄) has performed well in many fields, such as high-efficiency photocatalytic hydrogen production and water oxidation. However, the wide band gap of 2.7 eV of the original g-C₃N₄ limits its light absorption in the visible region. High pressure technology is an effective strategy to change the properties while remaining composition. Therefore, band gap engineering of g-C₃N₄ by high-pressure technology can significantly enhance its photocatalytic activity and improve its application potential.

Hot gases composed of metal ions and electrons, called plasmas, are widely used in many manufacturing processes, chemical synthesis, and metal extraction from ores and welding. A collaborative research group from Tohoku University and the Toyohashi University of Technology has invented a new and efficient method to create metallic plasmas from solid metals under a strong magnetic field in a microwave resonator. They report their innovation in the journal AIP Advances.

In the most conventional methods for making plasmas, a strong electric field is applied to gases or liquids. This can require enormous amounts of energy. More recently, microwave radiation has also been harnessed to generate plasmas as it converts atoms into a form that can more effectively drive desired chemical processes, among other advantages. The plasmas generated by microwaves are now being used in commercial processes, including semiconductor manufacture, diamond deposition and to release metals from their ores.

Until now, however, this has involved multi-mode microwave generators, which generate a chaotic distribution of microwaves. One key advance achieved by the team is to apply a single-mode microwave generator to produce their metal plasmas. This creates more controlled and highly focused microwaves.

Atomic nuclei take a range of shapes, from spherical (like a basketball) to deformed (like an American football). Spherical nuclei are often described by the motion of a small fraction of the protons and neutrons, while deformed nuclei tend to rotate as a collective whole.

A third kind of motion has been proposed since the 1950s. In this motion, known as nuclear vibration, atomic nuclei fluctuate about an average shape. Scientists recently investigated cadmium-106 using a technique called Coulomb excitation to probe its nuclear shape. They found clear experimental evidence that the vibrational description fails for this isotope’s nucleus. This finding is counter to the expected results.

Research published in Physics Letters B builds on a long quest to understand the transition between spherical and deformed nuclei. This transition often includes vibrational motion as an intermediate step. The new result suggests that nuclear physicists may need to revise the long-standing paradigm describing how this transition occurs.

Physicists report new evidence that production of an exotic state of matter in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—an atom-smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—can be “turned off” by lowering the collision energy. The “off” signal shows up as a sign change—from negative to positive—in data that describe “higher order” characteristics of the distribution of protons produced in these collisions.

The findings, just published by RHIC’s STAR Collaboration in Physical Review Letters, will help physicists map out the conditions of temperature and density under which the exotic matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), can exist and identify key features of the phases of nuclear matter.

Generating and studying QGP has been a central goal of research at RHIC. Since the collider began operating in 2000, a wide range of measurements have shown that the most energetic smashups of atomic nuclei—at 200 billion electron volts (GeV)— melt the boundaries of protons and neutrons to set free, for a fleeting instant, the quarks and gluons that make up ordinary nuclear particles.