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Engineered enzymes are poised to have transformative impacts across applications in energy, materials, biotechnology, and medicine. Recently, machine learning has emerged as a useful tool for enzyme engineering. Now, a team of bioengineers and synthetic biologists says they have developed a machine-learning guided platform that can design thousands of new enzymes, predict how they will behave in the real world, and test their performance across multiple chemical reactions.

Their results are published in Nature Communications in an article titled, “Accelerated enzyme engineering by machine-learning guided cell-free expression,” and led by researchers at Stanford University and Northwestern University.

“Enzyme engineering is limited by the challenge of rapidly generating and using large datasets of sequence-function relationships for predictive design,” the researchers wrote. “To address this challenge, we develop a machine learning (ML)-guided platform that integrates cell-free DNA assembly, cell-free gene expression, and functional assays to rapidly map fitness landscapes across protein sequence space and optimize enzymes for multiple, distinct chemical reactions.”

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Seagate started shipping hard drives with HAMR tech in December 2024, turning a long-awaited technological advancement into a commercial reality. Now, the storage specialist is announcing that even more advanced HAMR drives, with capacities of up to 36 terabytes, are on the way.

The 36TB HAMR drives are being shipped to a select group of customers for testing and validation. Like the earlier HAMR units, these new Exos M drives are built on the Mozaic 3+ technology platform to deliver “unprecedented” areal density. The drives utilize a complex 10-platter design, achieving an areal density of 3.6TB per platter.

According to Seagate CEO Dave Mosley, the company has already reached an areal density of over 6TB per disk in its test environments. The goal, he says, is to further increase the data density to 10TB per platter. Seagate also states that Mozaic 3+ is a highly efficient storage platform, enabling the new Exos M drives to lower the total cost of ownership and reduce energy consumption.

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Ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors—such as diamond—are promising for next-generation electronics due to a larger energy gap between the valence and conduction bands, allowing them to handle higher voltages, operate at higher frequencies, and provide greater efficiency compared to traditional materials like silicon.

However, their make it challenging to probe and understand how charge and heat move on nanometer-to-micron scales. Visible light has a very limited ability to probe nanoscale properties, and moreover, it is not absorbed by diamond, so it cannot be used to launch currents or rapid heating.

Now, researchers at JILA, led by JILA Fellows and University of Colorado physics professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, along with graduate students Emma Nelson, Theodore Culman, Brendan McBennett, and former JILA postdoctoral researchers Albert Beardo and Joshua Knobloch, have developed a novel microscope that makes examining these materials possible on an unprecedented scale.

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A new technique involving terahertz light has enabled the creation of chiral states in non-chiral materials, offering exciting possibilities for future technological applications.

Chirality is a key property of matter that plays a crucial role in many biological, chemical, and physical processes. In chiral solids, this property enables unique interactions with chiral molecules and polarized light, making them valuable for applications in catalysis, sensing, and optical devices. However, chirality in these materials is typically fixed during their formation—once a crystal is grown, its left-and right-handed forms, or enantiomers, cannot be switched without melting and recrystallizing it.

Now, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of Oxford have discovered a way to induce chirality in a non-chiral crystal using terahertz light. This breakthrough allows them to create either left-or right-handed enantiomers on demand. Published in Science, this finding opens exciting new possibilities for studying and controlling complex materials in non-equilibrium conditions.

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“The floor is lava,” proclaimed Willaim W in the live chat as more than 400 people watched shortly after midnight Jan. 25 while lava once again fountained from the north vent in the southwest portion of Halema’uma’u Crater within Kaluapele, the summit caldera, of Kīlauea.

Episode 6 of the Big Island volcano’s latest eruption, which began the week of Christmas 2024, is underway as lava flows onto the crater floor from a geiser that started at about 11:28 p.m. Jan. 24.

Lava was fountaining to between 10 and 20 feet high within about 2 hours after Hawaiian Volcano Observatory reported spattering that kicked off at about 6 p.m. Jan. 24 increased to spatter fountaining and spiked in frequency and intensity.

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This groundbreaking 2D material boasts 100 trillion mechanical bonds per square centimeter, offering unmatched strength without the weight. Discover how this innovation could redefine military armor and keep our heroes safer than ever.

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The human brain is formed by a complex network of neural connections and most of them link neighboring brain regions, which are also the most studied to date. But a recent neuroscientific study by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the University of Oxford, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has revealed that connections between distant brain regions, though rarer and less frequent, play a fundamental role in explaining brain dynamics.

The role of these long-range connections could be likened to those of an airport hub, which—with long-haul flights—directly connects different parts of the world without the need for stopovers, which would make the trip far longer. In the case of the brain, long-range connections serve to transmit information more quickly and directly between distant regions (without the need to go through all the successive neighboring regions that separate them). This yields optimal and efficient information processing.

The connections between distant regions of the brain are activated both spontaneously in a resting state and when performing numerous cognitive functions in our daily lives, which allow us to carry out specific tasks. For example, for as simple a task as remembering an image we have just seen, the brain connects the (which deals with ) with the occipital lobe, which deals with image perception.

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