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A single drop of blood from a finger prick. A simple electronic chip. And a smartphone readout of test results that could diagnose a Covid-19 infections or others like HIV or Lyme disease.

It sounds a bit like science fiction, like the beginnings of the medical tricorder used by doctors on Star Trek. Yet researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have taken the first step to showing it can be done, and they’ve published their results in the journal Small.

Postdoctoral fellow Neda Rafat and Assistant Professor Aniruddh Sarkar created a small chip that harnesses the fundamental chemistry of the gold-standard lab method but uses electrical conductivity instead of optics to detect antibodies and indicate infection.

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In a forward-looking article, George Church, PhD, from Harvard University and the Wyss Institute, proposes the use of picogram to nanogram-scale probes that can land, replicate, and produce a communications module at the destination to explore nearby stars.

The fascinating new article is published in a special issue on “Interstellar Objects in Astrobiology” of the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology.

“One design is a highly reflective light sail, traveling a long straight line toward the gravitational well of a destination star, and the photo-deflected to the closest non-luminous mass – ideally a planet or moon with exposed liquid water,” states Dr. Church.

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National Institutes of Health researchers have developed and released an innovative software tool to assemble truly complete (i.e., gapless) genome sequences from a variety of species.

This software, called Verkko, which means “network” in Finnish, makes the process of assembling complete genome sequences more affordable and accessible. A description of the new software was published today in Nature Biotechnology.

Verkko grew from assembling the first gapless human genome sequence, which was finished last year by the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium, a collaborative project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH.

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The COgITOR project is aimed at formulating a new concept of artificial cybernetic system, taking its name from Descartes’s maxim “Cogito, ergo sum” and drawing inspiration from the new frontier of robotics that aims to reduce, if not completely cancel, system rigidity.

The goal of COgITOR, in fact, is to create a liquid cybernetic system inspired by the cellular world and suited to the exploration of extreme environments or other planets. It will be spherical in shape, covered by a sensitive skin, similar to a touch screen, allowing interaction with the environment, and will be fitted with a power generation system based on thermal gradients.

COgITOR is a project funded by the European Union as part of the Horizon2020 research programme, with a budget of approximately 3.5 million euros for the next 4 years. The project has been conceived – and is coordinated – by Alessandro Chiolerio, a researcher from the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), who has had experience working at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Germany and at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States. The consortium includes Prof. Andrew Adamatzky (University of Bristol), Dr. Artur Braun (EMPA, Dübendorf), Dr. Carsten Jost (Plasmachem GmbH, Berlin) and Dr. Chiara Zocchi (Ciaotech Srl, Milano).

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The origin of life is one of the great questions of mankind. One of the prerequisites for the emergence of life is the abiotic – not by living beings caused chemical – production and polymerization of amino acids, the building blocks of life.

“Two scenarios are being discussed for the emergence of life on Earth: On the one hand, the first-time creation of such amino acid chains on Earth, and on the other hand, the influx from space,” explains Tilmann Märk of the University of Innsbruck. “For the latter, such amino acid chains would have to be generated in the very unfavorable and inhospitable conditions in space.”

A team of researchers led by Michel Farizon of the University of Lyon and Tilmann Märk of the University of Innsbruck has now made a significant discovery in the field of abiotic peptide chain formation from amino acids for the smallest occurring amino acid, glycine, a molecule that has been observed several times extraterrestrially in recent years.

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It acted with rudimentary intelligence, learning, evolving and communicating with itself to grow more powerful.

A new model by a team of researchers led by Penn State and inspired by Crichton’s novel describes how biological or technical systems form complex structures equipped with signal-processing capabilities that allow the systems to respond to stimulus and perform functional tasks without external guidance.

“Basically, these little nanobots become self-organized and self-aware,” said Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Penn State, explaining the plot of Crichton’s book. The novel inspired Aronson to study the emergence of collective motion among interacting, self-propelled agents. The research was recently published in Nature Communications.

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Interstellar dust captures a significant fraction of elements heavier than helium in the solid state and is an indispensable component both in theory and observations of galaxy evolution.

Dust emission is generally the primary coolant of the interstellar medium (ISM) and facilitates the gravitational collapse and fragmentation of gas clouds from which stars form, while altering the emission spectrum of galaxies from ultraviolet (UV) to far-infrared wavelengths through the reprocessing of starlight. However, the astrophysical origin of various types of dust grains remains an open question, especially in the early Universe.

Here we report direct evidence for the presence of carbonaceous grains from the detection of the broad UV absorption feature around 2175A˚ in deep near-infrared spectra of galaxies up to the first billion years of cosmic time, at a redshift (z) of ∼7. This dust attenuation feature has previously only been observed spectroscopically in older, more evolved galaxies at redshifts of z3. The carbonaceous grains giving rise to this feature are often thought to be produced on timescales of hundreds of millions of years by asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. Our results suggest a more rapid production scenario, likely in supernova (SN) ejecta.

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