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Blog – Page 5

A team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed an artificial ‘worm gut’ to break down plastics, offering hope for a nature-inspired method to tackle the global plastic pollution problem.

By feeding worms with plastics and cultivating microbes found in their guts, researchers from NTU’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) have demonstrated a new method to accelerate plastic biodegradation.

Previous studies have shown that Zophobas atratus worms – the larvae of the darkling beetle commonly sold as pet food and known as ‘superworms’ for their nutritional value – can survive on a diet of plastic because its gut contains bacteria capable of breaking down common types of plastic. However, their use in plastics processing has been impractical due to the slow rate of feeding and worm maintenance.

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Life on Earth has always existed in the flux of ionizing radiation. However, fungi seem to interact with the ionizing radiation differently from other Earth’s inhabitants. Recent data show that melanized fungal species like those from Chernobyl’s reactor respond to ionizing radiation with enhanced growth. Fungi colonize space stations and adapt morphologically to extreme conditions. Radiation exposure causes upregulation of many key genes, and an inducible microhomology-mediated recombination pathway could be a potential mechanism of adaptive evolution in eukaryotes. The discovery of melanized organisms in high radiation environments, the space stations, Antarctic mountains, and in the reactor cooling water combined with phenomenon of ‘radiotropism’ raises the tantalizing possibility that melanins have functions analogous to other energy harvesting pigments such as chlorophylls.

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Incyte will partner with Genesis Therapeutics to research, discover, and develop small molecule treatments through a collaboration that could generate at least up to $620 million for Genesis, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based drug developer.

The companies have agreed to discover and optimize at least two initial small molecule programs through Genesis’s AI platform, Genesis Exploration of Molecular Space (GEMS). GEMS is designed to generate and optimize molecules for complex targets by integrating proprietary AI methods that include language models, diffusion models, and physical machine learning (ML) simulations.

Incyte has been granted exclusive rights for potential clinical development and commercialization of the products to be developed through the collaboration.

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EMBL tech developers have made an important leap forward with a novel methodology that adds an important microscopy capability to life scientists’ toolbox. The advance represents a 1,000-fold improvement in speed and throughput in Brillouin microscopy and provides a way to view light-sensitive organisms more efficiently.

“We were on a quest to speed up ,” said Carlo Bevilacqua, optical engineer in EMBL’s Prevedel team and lead author on a paper published about this in Nature Photonics.

“Over the years, we have progressed from being able to see just a pixel at a time to a line of 100 pixels, to now a full plane that offers a view of approximately 10,000 pixels.”

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The pioneering scifi film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1927, depicts a dystopian future in 2026 with society sharply divided between wealthy elitists and the working poor. Gustav Fröhlich is Freder, the wealthy son of city ruler who discovers the grim conditions of the workers when he ventures into the city’s depths. After meeting Maria and her robotic double, both played by Brigitte Helm, he becomes determined to bridge the social divide. The story unfolds with dramatic visuals of towering skyscrapers and massive factories. The world of Metropolis is full of technological wonder and social turmoil. The film’s depiction of large-scale automation and robotics aligns with current trends in manufacturing, though fully sentient robots are unlikely to materialize by 2026. #silentfilm #silentfilms #manufacturing #industry40 #metropolis #fritzlang #sciencefiction #scifi #movies #filmanalysis #robotics #robots #industrialautomation …

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Astronomers might find life in the unlikeliest of places.

Could white dwarf stars host habitable exoplanets that might support life as we know it? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the surface temperatures of exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs and compared them to exoplanets orbiting Sun-like stars. White dwarfs are smaller, denser remnants after a Sun-like star dies, stops nuclear fusion (converting hydrogen to helium), and sheds its outer layers, thus implying they could be inhospitable for life-giving exoplanets.

For the study, the researchers used computer models to compare Earth-like exoplanets each orbiting a white dwarf star and the main-sequence K-dwarf star, Kepler-62, both of which exhibit temperatures of approximately 5,000 Kelvin (8,540 degrees Fahrenheit/4,727 degrees Celsius). For context, our Sun’s temperature is 5,772 Kelvin (9,930 degrees Fahrenheit/5,499 degrees Celsius).

Kepler-62 currently hosts five known exoplanets, with two of them orbiting within its star’s habitable zone. Additionally, while Kepler-62 is still demonstrating nuclear fusion, like our Sun, white dwarfs don’t, as noted above. In the end, the computer models made some remarkable findings regarding the habitable potential for exoplanets orbiting white dwarf stars. The models revealed the white dwarf exoplanet’s surface temperature was approximately 25 Kelvin hotter than the exoplanet orbiting Kepler-62, which the team attributes to the former’s faster rotation and orbital period, resulting in reduced cloud cover and higher surface temperatures.

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How can programmed failure protocols help improve sheet-based fluidic devices, the latter of which have become a cornerstone in enhancing soft robotics worldwide? This is what a recent study published in Cell Reports Physical Science hopes to address as an international team of researchers have developed a method for overcoming common failures of sheet-based systems, specifically due to their lightweight and flexible characteristics. This study has the potential to help engineers develop more efficient sheet-based devices, resulting in improved soft robotics designs.

For the study, the researchers examined how pressure changes could damage heat-sealable textiles that are used in sheet-based devices. Once they determined specific failure thresholds, the team incorporated programmed failures into the design, enabling the device to determine specific failure points and prevent further damage.

“Put simply, we are making soft, flexible machines smarter by designing their internal components to fail intentionally in a well-understood manner,” said Dr. Daniel J. Preston, who is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University and a co-author on the study. “In doing so, the resulting systems can recover from pressure surges and even complete multiple tasks using a single control input.” Going forward, the team hopes their research will lead to improved sheet-based fluidic systems, which, as noted, have become a cornerstone of soft robotics.

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