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Researchers from Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Weill Cornell Medicine, and the New York Genome Center have created a new technique to evaluate the three-dimensional structure of the human DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

Stellar mass black holes, like elementary particles, are remarkably simple objects. They have three primary observable properties: mass, spin, and electric charge. The similarities with elementary particles, like the proton, doesn’t stop there, as stellar mass black holes in binary systems can also form bound and unbound states due to interaction of orbital clouds (from boson condensates), uncannily analogous to the behavior and properties of atoms.

The spin of stellar mass black holes is a particularly significant property, as black holes have rapid rotations that generate a region of space called the ergosphere around the event horizon, where the torque on spacetime is so great that an object would have to travel at a velocity exceeding the speed of light just to stay in a stationary orbit. Analysis of this region has resulted in some interesting physics predictions, one being the phenomenon of superradiance. When a wave (whether of electromagnetic radiation or matter) enters the ergosphere with a specific trajectory, it can exit the black hole environment with a larger amplitude than the one with which it came in— this amplification process is called black hole superradiance. It was an effect first described by Roger Penrose nearly 50 years ago and describes how work can be extracted from the ergosphere of a black hole [1].

Medical microrobots could aid doctors in providing better illness prevention and treatment. However, the majority of these gadgets are created from synthetic materials that incite in vivo immunological reactions.

Scientists have now successfully utilized lasers to precisely manipulate neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, in living fish as a natural, biocompatible microrobot for the first time, as reported in ACS Central Science.

Microrobots that are now being developed for medical use need to be injected into an animal or ingested as capsules. However, scientists have discovered that these tiny items frequently cause immunological reactions in small animals, which prevents the elimination of microrobots from the body before they can carry out their functions.

A newborn giraffe or foal must learn to walk on its legs as fast as possible to avoid predators. Animals are born with muscle coordination networks located in their spinal cord. However, learning the precise coordination of leg muscles and tendons takes some time. Initially, baby animals rely heavily on hard-wired spinal cord reflexes. While somewhat more basic, motor control reflexes help the animal to avoid falling and hurting themselves during their first walking attempts. The following, more advanced and precise muscle control must be practiced, until eventually the nervous system is well adapted to the young animal’s leg muscles and tendons. No more uncontrolled stumbling—the young animal can now keep up with the adults.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart conducted a research study to find out how learn to walk and learn from stumbling. They built a four-legged, dog-sized robot, that helped them figure out the details.

“As engineers and roboticists, we sought the answer by building a robot that features reflexes just like an animal and learns from mistakes,” says Felix Ruppert, a former doctoral student in the Dynamic Locomotion research group at MPI-IS. “If an animal stumbles, is that a mistake? Not if it happens once. But if it stumbles frequently, it gives us a measure of how well the robot walks.”