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Summary: Researchers have identified a new type of synaptic plasticity they call behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP). The study reveals how the entorhinal cortex sends instructive signals to the hippocampus and directs it to specifically reorganize the specific location and activity of a neural subset to achieve altered behavior in response to changes in environment and spatial cues.

Source: Texas Children’s Hospital.

A longstanding question in neuroscience is how mammalian brains (including ours) adapt to external environments, information, and experiences.

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Rotary molecular motors were first created in 1999, in the laboratory of Ben Feringa, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Groningen. These motors are driven by light. For many reasons, it would be good to be able to make these motor molecules visible. The best way to do this is to make them fluoresce. However, combining two light-mediated functions in a single molecule is quite challenging. The Feringa laboratory has now succeeded in doing just that, in two different ways. These two types of fluorescing light-driven rotary motors were described in Nature Communications (September 30) and Science Advances (November 4).

“After the successful design of molecular motors in the past decades, an important next goal was to control various functions and properties using such motors,” explains Feringa, who shared in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2016. “As these are light-powered rotary motors, it is particularly challenging to design a system that would have another function that is controlled by , in addition to the rotary motion.”

Feringa and his team were particularly interested in since this is a prime technique that is widely used for detection, for example in biomedical imaging. Usually, two such photochemical events are incompatible in the same molecule; either the light-driven motor operates and there is no fluorescence or there is fluorescence and the motor does not operate. Feringa says, “We have now demonstrated that both functions can exist in parallel in the same molecular system, which is rather unique.”

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A new study from the University of Central Florida has found strong support that the outgassing of molecules from comets could be the result of the composition from the beginning of our solar system.

The results were published today in The Planetary Science Journal.

The study was led by Olga Harrington Pinto, a doctoral candidate in UCF’s Department of Physics, part of the College of Sciences.

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The gene-silencing complex HUSH might be involved in complex disorders affecting the brain and neurons. However, its mechanism of action remains unclear. Researchers from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) now uncover the in vivo targets and physiological functions of a component of the HUSH gene-silencing complex and one of its associated proteins.

The work, conducted in laboratory mouse models and human organoids, links the HUSH complex to normal , neuronal individuality and connectivity, as well as mouse behavior. The findings are published in Science Advances.

The human silencing hub (HUSH) complex was recently identified to be of key importance for silencing repetitive genetic elements including transposons in mammals. The HUSH complex contains MPP8, a protein that binds the histone modification mark H3K9me3. Additionally, HUSH is known to recruit other proteins including the zinc finger protein MORC2.

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Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered 29 packages in Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language, that aim to infect developers’ machines with a malware called W4SP Stealer.

“The main attack seems to have started around October 12, 2022, slowly picking up steam to a concentrated effort around October 22,” software supply chain security company Phylum said in a report published this week.

The list of offending packages is as follows: typesutil, typestring, sutiltype, duonet, fatnoob, strinfer, pydprotect, incrivelsim, twyne, pyptext, installpy, faq, colorwin, requests-httpx, colorsama, shaasigma, stringe, felpesviadinho, cypress, pystyte, pyslyte, pystyle, pyurllib, algorithmic, oiu, iao, curlapi, type-color, and pyhints.

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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published three Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories about multiple vulnerabilities in software from ETIC Telecom, Nokia, and Delta Industrial Automation.

Prominent among them is a set of three flaws affecting ETIC Telecom’s Remote Access Server (RAS), which “could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information and compromise the vulnerable device and other connected machines,” CISA said.

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A 3D-printed device in a tank of water braids nanowires and moves microparticles.

New antennae to access higher and higher frequency ranges will be needed for the next generation of phones and wireless devices. One way to make antennae that work at tens of gigahertz — the frequencies needed for 5G and higher devices — is to braid filaments about 1 micrometer in diameter. However, today’s industrial fabrication techniques won’t work on fibers that small.

“It was a shout-out-loud-in-joy moment when — on our first try — we crossed two fibers using only a piece of plastic, a water tank, and a stage that moves up and down.” —

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Other proteins work as well meaning the process can be scaled without interfering with food supplies.

Researchers at Princeton Engineering have found that egg whites can be used to cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater, according to a press release by the institution published on Thursday.

The scientists used the food substance to create an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many types of applications, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation.

Princeton scientists discovered that egg whites can create a filtration process that requires only gravity to operate and wastes no water. They are now looking for other uses for the substance.

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