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A parasite carried by one-third of humanity can’t reproduce if one key protein is disabled

A protein discovered in a Virginia Tech–led study may open a gateway to treatments for a parasite responsible for a deadly disease in immunocompromised people. The team led by Raj Gaji, assistant professor of parasitology at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine working in the Center for One Health Research, identified a protein the team named DDP that helps Toxoplasma gondii build its offspring. When researchers switched it off, the parasites stopped multiplying entirely.

Because cells elsewhere throughout the human body do not contain the protein, DDP offers a promising target for drugs that could attack the parasite while leaving the patient’s own cells alone. The study is published in mBio.

“This is the first time this protein has been identified,” said Gaji, who worked with collaborators across Virginia Tech and one at Johns Hopkins in the study. “And we now have a clue about what its function could be.”

Strand AI on a desert island, and it starts playing and inventing games

AI agents tend to do things when we give them specific commands, such as analyzing data and answering questions. But what would they do if left to their own devices?

That’s what researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) wanted to find out when they stranded several agents on a virtual desert island and left them without any specific tasks to complete.

Researchers thread the world’s first touchscreen into a garment

Researchers at the National University of Singapore’s College of Design and Engineering (CDE) have developed a fiber that functions as pixels and senses touch at the same time, integrating 54 of them into a sleeve to create the world’s first touchscreen built into a garment.

The sleeve displays images and video, responds to finger presses and connects wirelessly to other devices, yet stays as washable, breathable and flexible as ordinary clothing. The team’s invention enables the creation of garments that act as a direct interface to a wearer’s health data and their digital devices, with no rigid screen involved.

The screens that we are familiar with, such as those on phones and laptops, typically present graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on flat, rigid panels that display information and enable interaction. Textiles, woven from one-dimensional fibers, have never matched this capability. A full-color, touch-sensitive display that can be threaded like yarn was, until now, out of reach.

Engineered porous material recovers valuable rare earth elements from industrial wastewater

The rare earth elements that help power electric vehicles, wind turbines, medical imaging machines and other advanced technologies may be hiding in an unlikely place: industrial wastewater.

Rice University researchers have developed an ultraporous material capable of pulling several valuable rare earth elements from complex waste streams, a potential step toward recovering critical minerals that might otherwise be discarded. The research was published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

The approach uses metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs—Nobel Prize–winning materials built from metals and organic molecules into extraordinarily porous structures—and modifies their internal surfaces so they preferentially grab rare earth elements. The researchers tested the material on neodymium, gadolinium and dysprosium, three rare earth elements important to magnets and other technologies.

Ultrafast light pulses track molecular motion with three-femtosecond resolution

Researchers have observed a molecule in the first instants after it has absorbed light and tracked the coordinated motion of electrons and nuclei with a temporal resolution of three femtoseconds. This is the result achieved by an international research group led by the Politecnico di Milano, which has developed a new apparatus for studying ultrafast photochemical processes.

The experimental platform achieves a temporal resolution of approximately 3 femtoseconds—one femtosecond is one millionth of one billionth of a second.

The result, published in Nature Communications, was obtained as part of the European ERC Synergy TOMATTO project.

Sapphire-grown semiconductor film sets bandgap record

Semiconductors with wider bandgaps could pave the way for smaller, more efficient electronics that can handle far higher voltages, but the wider this gap becomes, the harder it is to control how well a material conducts electricity. Now, a team led by Darrell Schlom at Cornell University has shown that adding silicon to thin films of aluminum gallium oxide can keep this control intact at bandgaps wider than any semiconductor before it. Their research has been published in Nature.

In a semiconductor, electrons occupy two distinct ranges of energy. In the lower “valence band,” they are bound tightly to their atoms and can’t carry a current. If they gain enough energy, however, they can jump into the higher “conduction band,” where they move freely.

A semiconductor’s bandgap describes the energy required for an electron to make this leap and allows semiconductors to be switched between insulating and conducting states. Since wider bandgaps let materials withstand stronger electric fields, wide-bandgap semiconductors like gallium nitride and silicon carbide are already used in everything from fast phone chargers to electric vehicles.

Public health programs can ‘rewire’ social networks, study finds

An educational program intended to improve maternal and child health fundamentally altered the social fabric of the rural Honduran villages where it was implemented, a new Yale-led study finds. The findings, researchers say, have implications for interventions anywhere that seek to improve people’s well-being by disseminating information or changing behaviors through social contagion.

A prior study involving the same program in Honduras showed that exploiting social networks can enhance the effectiveness of public health and other interventions. This new study suggests that such initiatives also rewire existing social connections within the communities that receive them.

The study, based on a randomized controlled trial involving 8,331 people in 110 remote Honduran villages, found that the educational intervention not only changed whom people engaged with for health-related advice but also affected their friend and financial networks.

Clustering changes how charged polymers separate in water, challenging old assumptions

A polymer science revelation about how liquid mixtures separate could have major implications for human health, metabolism and disease, new research indicates. In a brief report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) Professor Matthew Tirrell and Freie Universität Berlin Professor Matthias Ballauff revealed previously overlooked factors at play in the separation of charged polyelectrolyte polymers in water, challenging assumptions that have dominated the field since the 1950s.

Research into this liquid-liquid phase separation has been “given new urgency,” Tirrell said, by recent work highlighting the process’s role in creating biomolecular condensates. These membraneless cellular structures, straddling the gap between biomolecules and cells in both size and function, perform many tasks necessary for life.

“Biomolecular condensates play important roles in stress response, signal transduction, metabolism, gene regulation and many human diseases,” said Tirrell, director of UChicago PME’s Institute for Materials and Sustainability. “Understanding the mechanisms that help them form makes understanding phase separation as important to biology as it is to physics or chemistry.”

Quantum interference traps electron waves in metal for first time

Ever since quantum mechanics first described particles, like electrons, as rippling waves, researchers have wondered if those waves could be trapped in place. Writing today in Science a century later, a team of Columbia University researchers reports waves of electrons becoming trapped for the first time in a metal called Pd₅AlI₂

“Quantum mechanics predicts that an electron wave can, theoretically, remain trapped even when there are infinitely many paths for it to escape. This effect is known from light waves, but it has never been seen before for electrons,” said Raquel Queiroz, a theoretical physicist at Columbia. It was a surprising discovery, and one that opens new possibilities for manipulating quantum states in metals.

Diamond laser system achieves 100% optical contrast in magnetic-field readout

Researchers at Fraunhofer IAF have developed a laser-enhanced quantum sensor that combines high magnetic-field sensitivity with a large dynamic range. Using laser threshold magnetometry, they improved the ratio of sensitivity and dynamic range by a factor of up to 590 compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The breakthrough is enabled by the first demonstration of 100% optical contrast, combined with strong laser readout signals. The results, published in Nature Communications, open up new prospects for medical diagnostics, navigation, and resource exploration.

Magnetic-field sensors based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are among the leading solid-state quantum sensors. They operate at room temperature, can be integrated into compact devices and enable vector magnetometry—the measurement of both the magnitude and direction of a magnetic field. Recent advances have improved their sensitivity into the sub-pT/√Hz range, a regime relevant for detecting cardiac signals.

Until now, however, researchers have had to make a trade-off: sensors with very high sensitivity offer only a very limited dynamic range, while more robust variants with a large dynamic range were considerably less sensitive.