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Apr 17, 2020

Molecular networks serve as cellular blueprints

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics, health

Networks are at the heart of everything from communications systems to pandemics. Now researchers have found that a unique type of network also underlies the structures of critical cellular compartments known as membraneless organelles. These findings may provide key insights into the role of these structures in both disease and cellular operations.

“Prior to this study, we knew the basic physical principle by which these protein-rich compartments form — they condense from the cytoplasm into liquid droplets like dew on a blade of grass,” said David Sanders, a post-doctoral researcher in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University. “But unlike dew drops, which are composed of a single component (water), cellular droplets are intimidatingly complex. Our work uncovers surprisingly simple principles that we think are universal to the assembly of liquid organelles, and opens new frontiers into studying their role in health and disease.”

Sanders is the lead author in an article in the journal Cell describing a blueprint for the assembly of these liquid structures, also called condensates. The researchers looked closely at two types of condensates, stress granules and processing bodies (“P-bodies”). In the Cell paper, researchers directed by Clifford Brangwynne, a professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, combined genetic engineering and live cell microscopy approaches to reveal the rules underlying the assembly and structure of stress granules, and why they remain distinct from their close relatives, P-bodies.

Apr 17, 2020

Google will add Zoom-like gallery view to Meet and will let Meet users take calls from Gmail

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, computing, education

Google plans to add a Zoom-like gallery view to its business- and education-focused Meet videoconferencing service and let users start calls and join meetings right from Gmail, Google’s GM and VP of G Suite Javier Soltero told Reuters in an interview. The additions come amid huge growth for Meet as families, students, and workers use the service while at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The upcoming gallery view will let users display up to 16 meeting participants in one frame, according to Reuters. That functionality is coming later this month, said Soltero. Zoom’s gallery view, by contrast, lets you see the thumbnails of up to 49 people in one screen, if you have a powerful enough CPU to display them all.

Apr 17, 2020

Why scientists say we may be “intermittent social distancing” until 2022

Posted by in category: futurism

State and federal governments are working on plans to “reopen” the country. But new models suggest that we will may not live normally for years.

Apr 17, 2020

The Challenges of Developing Aging Biomarkers

Posted by in categories: biological, education, life extension

A new study reviews the state of the art of aging biomarkers and explores the future development of even better ways of measuring biological age.

The need for better aging biomarkers

Human life expectancy has been increasing throughout the 20th and 21st centuries due to improvements such as better access to healthcare and sanitation, lower child mortality, reduction of poverty, and better education access.

Apr 17, 2020

Nanosize Tin ‘Bubbles’ Could Provide Low-Cost Way to Generate EUV Light

Posted by in categories: computing, nanotechnology

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have generated low-cost extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light by creating tin thin-film spheres using a polymer electrolyte “soap bubble” as a template and irradiating it with a laser.

#EUV #photonics


The team from Tokyo Tech, working with colleagues from University College Dublin, set out to find efficient, scalable, low-cost laser targets that could be used to generate EUV. The scientists created a tin-coated microcapsule or “bubble” — a low-density structure weighing as little as 4.2 nanograms and with a high level of controllability. For the bubble, they used polymer electrolytes, which are a dissolution of salts in a polymer matrix. The salts act as surfactants to stabilize the bubble.

Continue reading “Nanosize Tin ‘Bubbles’ Could Provide Low-Cost Way to Generate EUV Light” »

Apr 17, 2020

UK scientists to make a million potential COVID-19 vaccines before proof

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

LONDON (Reuters) — A million doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by British scientists are already being manufactured and will be available by September, even before trials prove whether the shot is effective, the team said on Friday.

Apr 17, 2020

She tested a coronavirus vaccine a month ago. Here’s what the last 4 weeks have been like

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The Seattle woman was the first to receive this vaccine.

Apr 17, 2020

Coronavirus test using CRISPR detects disease in under 40 minutes

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The new diagnostic tool, Detectr, shows promise in rapidly detecting COVID-19.

Apr 17, 2020

US patent 1119732 Nikola Tesla 1907 Apparatus for transmitting electrical energy.png

Posted by in categories: electronics, energy

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Apr 17, 2020

Physicists close in on a simpler route to quantum degenerate molecules

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

Cooling atoms to ultracold temperatures is a routine task in atomic physics labs, but molecules are a trickier proposition. Researchers in the US have now used a widely-applicable combination of methods to make molecules colder than ever before – a feat that could pave the way for applications in areas as diverse as high-temperature superconductivity and quantum computing.

In everyday life, we do not see the bizarre effects of quantum mechanics because the quantum states of the particles around us are constantly collapsing, or decohering, as they interact. At temperatures near absolute zero, however, some identical particles will simultaneously occupy the lowest energy quantum state available. This phenomenon is known as quantum degeneracy, and it was experimentally demonstrated in 1995, when groups led by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman (then at the University of Colorado, Boulder) and Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created the first Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) with rubidium and sodium atoms, respectively.

Other groups have subsequently made condensates using other atomic species, and various techniques have been developed to cool atoms to quantum degeneracy. In one of the simplest methods, a sample of atoms is confined in a magnetic or optical trap. Hotter atoms with more kinetic energy are more readily able to escape, or evaporate, from this trap, so the remaining atoms become cooler. In another method, known as sympathetic cooling, one type of atom is cooled directly and allowed to thermalize with atoms of another type, thereby cooling them by extracting their kinetic energy.