Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have found that treating seeds with ethylene gas increases both their growth and stress tolerance. This discovery, involving enhanced photosynthesis and carbohydrate production in plants, offers a potential breakthrough in improving crop yields and resilience against environmental stressors.

Just like any other organism, plants can get stressed. Usually, it’s conditions like heat and drought that lead to this stress, and when they’re stressed, plants might not grow as large or produce as much. This can be a problem for farmers, so many scientists have tried genetically modifying plants to be more resilient.

Continue reading “Accidental Discovery: How a Whiff of an Unusual Chemical Transforms Seedlings Into Super Plants” »

Carbon’s crystalline form works well with renewables’ high voltages and currents.

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a new method to improve the effectiveness of machine learning models. By pairing two machine learning models, one to gather data and one to analyze it, researchers can circumvent limitations of the technology without sacrificing accuracy.

This new technique could make it easier for researchers to use machine learning algorithms to identify and characterize molecules for use in potential new therapeutics or other materials.

The research is published in the journal Artificial Intelligence in the Life Sciences.

A team at HZB has developed a new measurement method that, for the first time, accurately detects tiny temperature differences in the range of 100 microKelvin in the thermal Hall effect. Previously, these temperature differences could not be measured quantitatively due to thermal noise.

Their study is published in Materials & Design.

Using the well-known terbium titanate as an example, the team demonstrated that the method delivers highly reliable results. The thermal Hall effect provides information about coherent multi-particle states in quantum materials based on their interaction with lattice vibrations (phonons).

The type I CRISPR protein Cas3 works like Pac-Man, chomping away at a continuous stream of nucleotides with intrinsic activity for introducing targeted large deletions from a few hundred base pairs to as large as 200 kb. However, without the molecular equivalent to the four colored ghosts who chase and capture Pac-Man, the broad and unidirectional genome editing activity of Cas3 is essentially unregulated.

Yan Zhang, PhD, assistant professor in the department of biological chemistry at the University of Michigan Medical School, and her collaborators at Cornell University identified two anti-CRISPR proteins that can “turn off” Cas3, paving the way toward safer and better-controlled CRISPR applications.

The research article, “Exploiting activation and inactivation mechanisms in type I-C CRISPR-Cas3 for genome-editing applications,” was published in Molecular Cell.

In a paradigm-shifting revelation, scientists at Heriot-Watt University have conducted experiments suggesting that two conflicting versions of reality can coexist simultaneously within the realm of quantum mechanics. This study challenges fundamental concepts in physics and raises questions about the existence of an objective reality.

The research delves into “Wigner’s friend,” a theoretical construct proposed by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner in 1961. This concept revolves around a photon existing in a superposition, where its polarization is both vertical and horizontal until measured. This theoretical dilemma becomes the focal point for the experimental exploration.

A tragedy in the making.

How Lake Kivu became a ticking time bomb

Lake Kivu sits along the East African Rift Valley, dotted with hot springs that feed carbon dioxide and methane into its depths.

Continue reading “This African lake may literally explode—and millions are at risk” »

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Learn how the latest research into viral and bacterial pathogens advances the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.