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Blog – Page 332

What’s the best way to precisely manipulate a material’s properties to the desired state? It may be straining the material’s atomic arrangement, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State. The team discovered that “atomic spray painting” of potassium niobate, a material used in advanced electronics, could tune the resulting thin films with exquisite control.

The finding, published in Advanced Materials (“Colossal Strain Tuning of Ferroelectric Transitions in KNbO 3 Thin Films”), could drive environmentally friendly advancements in consumer electronics, medical devices and quantum computing, the researchers said.

The process, called strain tuning, alters a material’s properties by stretching or compressing its atomic unit cell, which is the repeating motif of atoms that builds up its crystal structure. The researchers use molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), a technique that involves depositing a layer of atoms on a substrate to form a thin film. In this case, they produced a thin film of strain-tuned potassium niobate.

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Investigating how proteins interact is key to understanding how cells work and communicate. In a new study published in Nature Communications, FMI researchers have provided key insights into how protein interactions are governed and how mutations influence cellular functions.

Proteins are the molecular machines of life, performing tasks ranging from driving to orchestrating cell communication. For these tasks, proteins must bind to the right partners with precision, avoiding mispairings that could disrupt cellular processes and lead to disease.

Scientists have long been curious about how changes in the —the building blocks of proteins—can alter a protein’s binding capabilities. To investigate this question, researchers in the Diss lab analyzed the effects of all possible mutations in a single protein across its with an entire family of partner proteins. They focused on a protein called JUN, which plays a key role in DNA binding and cellular communication.

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A new way of mapping activity and connections between different regions of the brain has revealed fresh insights into how higher order functions like language, thought and attention, are organized.

Traditional models of activity represent interactions in pairs between two different brain regions. This is because modeling methods have not developed sufficiently to describe more between multiple regions.

A new approach, developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham is capable of taking signals measured through neuroimaging, and creating accurate models from these to show how different are contributing to specific functions and behaviors. The results are published in Nature Communications.

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An experiment more than 10 years in the making has delivered its first glimpse of the hurricane of particles whirring inside subatomic particles called neutrons, laying the groundwork to solve a mystery deep in the heart of matter.

Data from the Central Neutron Detector at the US Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) is already playing a role in describing the quantum map of the neutron’s engine.

“It’s a quite important result for the study of nucleons,” says Silvia Niccolai, a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

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We got a glimpse at what a new cross between a helicopter and a jet aircraft might look like after Bell released a new image. It’s of a model used in wind tunnel tests of its entry in DARPA’s Speed and Runway Independent Technology (SPRINT) program.

Rotorcraft like helicopters have the advantage of vertical takeoffs and landings in rough country but haven’t much in the way of speed. Jet planes have lots of speed but need runways and even the STOVL variety need a properly flat surface to land on. It was long accepted that these were two very different classes of aircraft without much in the way of overlap.

That is, until DARPA initiated its SPRINT program aimed at making the twain meet in an aircraft that could take off, land, and hover like a rotorcraft and then transition into a jet when in vertical flight.

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Using an innovative approach, EMBL scientists uncovered key interactions between molecular machines, potentially opening new avenues for drug development.

Choosing a film for a movie night is always a battle. Now imagine if you could pick one that provided a window into some of the most fundamental biological processes that keep us alive. For the first time ever, researchers have captured a real-time molecular movie to show how two essential cellular processes – transcription and translation – interact with each other in bacteria.

In all living organisms, DNA contains the code that defines cellular structures and functions. An enzyme called RNA polymerase deciphers this code and converts it into RNA, a molecule that closely resembles DNA. This transfer of life’s code from DNA to RNA is called transcription. Next, a molecular machine called ‘ribosome’ uses the message encoded in RNA to build proteins – the molecules performing most of the essential functions of our cells. This process is called translation.

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Cybersecurity firm McAfee says it’s identified a “significant global increase” in a smartphone hack that triggers extortion, harassment and drains bank accounts.

McAfee says hackers are increasingly deploying a group of malicious financial apps containing “SpyLoan” malware, posing a serious threat with more than eight million active installations around the world.

The apps are on Google Play and use the names, logos, brand colors and interfaces of well-known financial institutions.

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Scientists from the Longevity Research Institute (LRI), which was formed by the merger of SENS Research Foundation and Lifespan.io, have achieved expression of an essential mitochondrial gene in the nucleus and proper functioning of the protein. This could pave the way for curing diseases caused by mitochondrial mutations [1].

The fragile mitochondrial DNA

The prevailing scientific consensus is that mitochondria were once independent microorganisms that entered a symbiotic relationship with larger cells. This duo gave rise to eukaryotic cells: the building blocks of all multicellular life. Without that fateful “marriage,” complex life would not exist, as mitochondria provide cells with essential energy via oxidative phosphorylation.

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AWS and NVIDIA are teaming up to address one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing: integrating classical computing into the quantum stack, according to an AWS Quantum Technologies blog post. This partnership brings NVIDIA’s open-source CUDA-Q quantum development platform to Amazon Braket, enabling researchers to design, simulate and execute hybrid quantum-classical algorithms more efficiently.

Hybrid computing — where classical and quantum systems work together — is actually a facet of all quantum computing applications. Classical computers handle tasks like algorithm testing and error correction, while quantum computers tackle problems beyond classical reach. As quantum processors improve, the demand for classical computing power grows exponentially, especially for tasks like error mitigation and pre-processing.

The collaboration between AWS and NVIDIA is designed to ease this transition by providing researchers with seamless access to NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform directly within Amazon Braket. This integration allows users to test their programs using powerful GPUs, then execute the same programs on quantum hardware without extensive modifications.

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