Exciting breakthrough at CERN’s AEgIS experiment! Scientists have successfully slowed down positronium using groundbreaking laser technology.
Explore the fascinating world of positronium research. Scientists at CERN have made an incredible breakthrough by slowing down positronium using broadband lasers. %.
For ‘deeper reading’ among children aged 10–12, paper trumps screens. What does it mean when schools are going digital?
Rocky89 / E+ via getty images.
The Department of Education’s most recent study, declared in June, was surely sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had denied an average of four points since the Covid-affected schools in the academic year 2019–2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.
Hunting for a neutron star
To discover what lies at the center of SN 1987A, astronomers needed a telescope big enough and advanced enough to detect evidence of radiation from a hidden neutron star.
Enter the James Webb Space Telescope: the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space that is already revolutionizing our understanding of the universe within its first two years of operation.
Experts from Michigan Medicine answer questions about brain health and how to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Learn more about the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center at University of Michigan Health: https://alzheimers.med.umich.edu/
Continue reading “What You Can Do Now to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease” »
Lung cancer is not the most common form of cancer, but it is by far among the deadliest. Despite treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, only about a quarter of all people with the disease will live more than five years after diagnosis, and lung cancer kills more than 1.8 million people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization.
To improve the odds for patients with lung cancer, researchers from The University of Texas at Arlington and UT Southwestern Medical Center have pioneered a novel approach to deliver cancer-killing drugs directly into cancer cells.
“Our method uses the patient’s own cellular material as a trojan horse to transport a targeted drug payload directly to the lung cancer cells,” said Kytai T. Nguyen, lead author of a new study on the technique in the journal Bioactive Materials and the Alfred R. and Janet H. Potvin Distinguished Professor in Bioengineering at UTA.
Certain gut bacteria reside in colorectal tumors, but the species differ depending on a patient’s age, offering hope that our gut tenants could serve as early warning signs of cancer in young people.
This past October, dozens of mathematicians gathered in Pasadena to create the third version of “Kirby’s list” — a compendium of the most important unsolved problems in the field.
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We all travel through space time at speed of light. But, what does it really mean? How does it explain the consequences of special relativity — time dilation, length contraction, relativity of simultaneity, and more.
Continue reading “‘We all move at speed of light through spacetime’… What does it really mean?” »
Musk said that the first human patient implanted with a Neuralink chip last month “is able to… move the mouse around the screen just by thinking.”
Nucleases present a formidable barrier to the application of nucleic acids in biology, significantly reducing the lifetime of nucleic acid-based drugs. Here, we develop a novel methodology to protect DNA and RNA from nucleases by reconfiguring their supramolecular structure through the addition of a nucleobase mimic, cyanuric acid. In the presence of cyanuric acid, polyadenine strands assemble into triple helical fibers known as the polyA/CA motif. We report that this motif is exceptionally resistant to nucleases, with the constituent strands surviving for up to 1 month in the presence of serum. The conferred stability extends to adjacent non-polyA sequences, albeit with diminishing returns relative to their polyA sections due to hypothesized steric clashes. We introduce a strategy to regenerate stability through the introduction of free polyA strands or positively charged amino side chains, enhancing the stability of sequences of varied lengths. The proposed protection mechanism involves enzyme failure to recognize the unnatural polyA/CA motif, coupled with the motif’s propensity to form long, bundling supramolecular fibers. The methodology provides a fundamentally new mechanism to protect nucleic acids from degradation using a supramolecular approach and increases lifetime in serum to days, weeks, or months.
