““Green tea has five tested chemical compounds that bind to different sites in the pocket on Mpro, essentially overwhelming it to inhibit its function,” Xie said. “Muscadine grapes contain these inhibitory chemicals in their skins and seeds. Plants use these compounds to protect themselves, so it is not surprising that plant leaves and skins contain these beneficial compounds.””
Glad I picked up a refill on my resveratrol this week!
Green tea, muscadine grape and dark chocolate chemical compounds inhibit an important SARS-CoV-2 enzyme.
An epidemiologist who helped to tie the 2012 outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) to camels; a food-safety officer who studies how pathogens spread in markets; and a veterinarian who found evidence linking the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak to bats roosting in a hollow tree. These researchers are among the team that the World Health Organization (WHO) has assembled to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Ten researchers with expertise in virology, public health and animals will seek to answer this key question.
As awe-inspiring as they may be, no one would ever call a supercar practical. But there are certain driving tasks for which only an ultra-high-performance vehicle will do. And, apparently, one of them is transporting a donor organ a long distance in a very short period of time.
That’s the conundrum Italian Police faced earlier this month, reports The Drive. Luckily for all involved, the department happened to have a Lamborghini Huracán on hand to drive the donor kidney 300 miles in just over two hours.
The supercar drove the organ from Rome to Padua in less than half the time it would normally take.
Electric cars and trucks may be the hottest topic in e-mobility, but quiet, clean-running electric drives have the ability to revolutionize all kinds of vehicles and machinery. We’ve seen it with the popularization and evolution of ebikes, and electric tech is slowly finding its way into more demanding powersports applications, like electric dirt bikes and snowmobiles. French startup MoonBikes Motors is carving some space between the e-snowmobile and e-dirt bike categories, creating a full-throttle electric snow bike meant to travel lightly and deliver sharp, explosive exhilaration on the snow.
It’s that time of year when experimental all-electric snow machines start rolling out from their high-altitude garages to carve their signatures into the Alpine snow and public consciousness. Last year it was the Austrian-built BobSla snow-kart motoring around its home turf at the Obergurgl-Hochgurgl ski area, and this year it’s the French-crafted MoonBike all-electric snow bike spraying snow in its own corner of the Alps.
Designed for both all-out snowy thrills and dutiful utility, the MoonBike features a snowmobile-like combination of rear track drive and front ski. A motor with 3 kW of continuous power pushes the bike to speeds up to 28 mph (45 km/h).
The first step is to understand qubits and superposition. The next one is to get a handle on the business advantage that this technology represents.
If “figure out quantum computing” is still in your future file, it’s time to update your timeline. The industry is nearing the end of the early adopter phase, according to one expert, and the time is now to get up to speed.
Denise Ruffner, the vice president of business development at IonQ, said that quantum computing is evolving much faster than many people realize.
JILA physicists have boosted the signal power of their atomic “tweezer clock” and measured its performance in part for the first time, demonstrating high stability close to the best of the latest generation of atomic clocks.
The unusual clock, which uses laser tweezers to trap, control and isolate atoms, offers unique possibilities for enhancing clock performance using the tricks of quantum physics as well as future applications in quantum information processing, quantum simulation, and measurement science.
Described in a Nature paper published online Dec. 16, the clock platform is a rectangular grid of about 150 strontium atoms confined individually by optical tweezers, which are created by a laser beam aimed through a microscope and deflected into 320 spots. This upgraded version of the clock has up to 30 times as many atoms as the preliminary design unveiled last year, due mainly to the use of several different lasers, including a green one for trapping the atoms and two red ones to make them “tick.”
The current scheme, Horizon 2020, is the world’s biggest multinational research programme, having distributed €74 billion (US$90 billion) to more than 150, 000 scientists participating in 31, 000 projects or grants. When it ends this year, how will it be judged?
Although imperfect, the world’s biggest funding scheme got a lot right.
Scientists have new evidence that Earth’s many periodic mass extinctions follow a cycle of about 27 million years, connecting the five major mass extinctions with more minor ones occurring throughout Earth’s life-fostering timespan. The artificial intelligence analysis could also shift how evolutionary scientists think about the aftermath of mass extinctions.
