Such superbugs may also be contributing to the tens of thousands of excess deaths occurring during the COVID-19 era. Hence why doctors around the world are sounding the alarm.
Doctors worry that a dangerous yeast, which can colonize a person’s skin without generating symptoms, is rising due to medical centers being overrun.
A team of researchers at Duke University have developed an imaging technology for tagging structures at a cellular level that overcomes the shortcomings of existing antibody-based techniques. Immunofluorescence imaging is a key part of the cell biologist’s toolbox, in which a fluorescent ‘flare’ attached to an antibody allows them to visualize the presence of specific target proteins in cell or tissue samples. The issue is that this specificity isn’t always 100 percent — sometimes the antibodies bind to other closely related proteins as well, making it difficult to interpret the results.
Duke’s cell biology chair Scott Soderling has led a team that developed Homology-independent Universal Genome Engineering (HiUGE), an innovation that uses gene-editing technology to rise above the shortcomings of traditional commercial antibodies for imaging.
Continue reading “New CRISPR-Based Imaging Tool Is Going to Be HiUGE” »
We know that our understanding of reality is pretty biased. Our senses, our cultures, and our knowledge shape how we see the world. And if you think that science will always give you objective reality, you might want to reconsider.
Physicists have finally been able to test a thought experiment first proposed in 1961 by Nobel Prize winner Eugen Wigner. The experiment is known as “Wigner’s Friend” and the setup is not too complicated. You start with a quantum system that has two states in superposition, which means that until you measure it, both states exist at the same time. For this example, a photon’s polarisation (the axis it spins on) is both horizontal and vertical.
Wigner’s friend is in the lab performing the experiment and once they measure it, the system will collapse and the photon will be fixed into one of those two states. But for Wigner, who is outside the lab unaware of the result of the measurement, the quantum system (which, importantly, also includes the lab) is still in superposition. Despite contradictory results, they are both correct. (This is similar to Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment also about superposition, if Schrödinger and his cat-in-a-box were also in a box.) So, two objective realities, Wigner’s and Wigner’s friend’s, appear to coexist. And this is a problem.
Attention readers, if you are using Google Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today.
Google released Chrome version 86.0.4240.111 today to patch several security high-severity issues, including a zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild by attackers to hijack targeted computers.
Tracked as CVE-2020–15999, the actively exploited vulnerability is a type of memory-corruption flaw called heap buffer overflow in Freetype, a popular open source software development library for rendering fonts that comes packaged with Chrome.
The bags are an answer to the trail of potentially deadly plastic left by tourists each year.
It’s all coming together.
SpaceX is deploying a megaconstellation of internet-beaming Starlink satellites to provide internet service to rural areas around Earth where service is unreliable and not available. The Starlink network could provide SpaceX with additional funding to develop a fleet of Starships to colonize Mars.
Continue reading “SpaceX plans to provide Starlink internet on Mars one day” »
Nice! 😃
The mindblowing “La Moto Volante” motorbike can transform itself into a hoverbike! 🤯 🏍.
Oreo seems determined to save its cookies from all future threats and has built a doomsday vault in Norway to do so. Check out the video.
“Whenever we have developed better clocks, we’ve learned something new about the world,” said Alexander Smith, an assistant professor of physics at Saint Anselm College and adjunct assistant professor at Dartmouth College, who led the research as a junior fellow in Dartmouth’s Society of Fellows. “Quantum time dilation is a consequence of both quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity, and thus offers a new possibility to test fundamental physics at their intersection.”
A phenomenon of quantum mechanics known as superposition can impact timekeeping in high-precision clocks, according to a theoretical study from Dartmouth College, Saint Anselm College and Santa Clara University.
Research describing the effect shows that superposition — the ability of an atom to exist in more than one state at the same time — leads to a correction in atomic clocks known as “quantum time dilation.”
See ya later 👋! The nest was the first discovered in the U.S.
Crews with the WSDA Pest Program vacuumed the hornets from the tree cavity into large canisters Saturday. The nest was about the size of a basketball and contained an estimated 100 to 200 hornets.
The specimens will be used for research purposes, said Sven Spichiger, an entomologist with WSDA, during a press conference Friday afternoon.
