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Biophysicists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have used a new variant of super-resolution microscopy to visualize all the strands of a DNA-based nanostructure for the first time. The method promises to optimize the design of such structures for specific applications.

The term ‘DNA origami’ refers to a method for the design and self-assembly of complex molecular structures with nanometer precision. The technique exploits the base-pairing interactions between single-stranded DNA molecules of known sequence to generate intricate three-dimensional nanostructures with predefined shapes in arbitrarily large numbers. The method has great potential for a wide range of applications in basic biological and biophysical research. Thus researchers are already using DNA origami to develop functional nanomachines. In this context, the ability to characterize the quality of the assembly process is vital. Now a team led by Ralf Jungmann, Professor of Experimental Physics at LMU Munich and Head of the Molecular Imaging and Bionanotechnology lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry (Martinsried), reports an important advance in this regard.

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UCLA researchers and colleagues have designed a new device that creates electricity from falling snow. The first of its kind, this device is inexpensive, small, thin and flexible like a sheet of plastic.

“The can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries,” said senior author Richard Kaner, who holds UCLA’s Dr. Myung Ki Hong Endowed Chair in Materials Innovation. “It’s a very clever device—a that can tell you how much snow is falling, the direction the snow is falling, and the direction and speed of the wind.”

The researchers call it a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or snow TENG. A triboelectric nanogenerator, which generates charge through , produces energy from the exchange of electrons.

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The news we had finally found ripples in space-time reverberated around the world in 2015. Now it seems they might have been an illusion.

LIGO’s detectorsEnrico Sacchetti

THERE was never much doubt that we would observe gravitational waves sooner or later. This rhythmic squeezing and stretching of space and time is a natural consequence of one of science’s most well-established theories, Einstein’s general relativity. So when we built a machine capable of observing the waves, it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before a detection.

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High-performance computing (HPC)—the use of supercomputers and parallel processing techniques to solve large computational problems—is of great use in the scientific community. For example, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory rely on HPC to analyze the data they collect at the large-scale experimental facilities on site and to model complex processes that would be too expensive or impossible to demonstrate experimentally.

Modern science applications, such as simulating , often require a combination of aggregated computing power, high-speed networks for data transfer, large amounts of memory, and high-capacity storage capabilities. Advances in HPC hardware and software are needed to meet these requirements. Computer and computational scientists and mathematicians in Brookhaven Lab’s Computational Science Initiative (CSI) are collaborating with physicists, biologists, and other domain scientists to understand their data analysis needs and provide solutions to accelerate the scientific discovery process.

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Step aside, reindeer — robot dogs are hauling this load.

In an ominous video titled “Mush, Spot Mush!” posted on YouTube Tuesday, robot maker Boston Dynamics showed off the sheer strength of its SpotMini quadripedal robot dog. The clip shows 10 specialized Spotmini derivatives called Spotpower hauling a box truck across a parking lot — and at a one degree incline.

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A drug that’s used to help control blood sugar in people with diabetes has now been shown to help prevent or slow kidney disease, which causes millions of deaths each year and requires hundreds of thousands of people to use dialysis to stay alive.

Doctors say it’s hard to overstate the importance of this study, and what it means for curbing this problem, which is growing because of the obesity epidemic.

The study tested Janssen Pharmaceuticals’ drug Invokana. Results were discussed Sunday at a medical meeting in Australia and published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Liquid democracy is a technologically enabled and scalable hybrid of direct and representative democracy.[2] Liquid Democracy, a subset of Delegative Democracy, is a powerful voting model for collective decision making in large communities. Liquid Democracy combines the advantages of Direct Democracy and Representative Democracy and creates a truly democratic voting system that empowers voters to either vote on issues directly, or to delegate ones voting power to a trusted party.[3]

“Superdemocracy upholds the concept of delegated voting, via systems such as “liquid democracy”. This enables citizens to delegate their votes in specified areas of debate to people whom they trust in these areas. In case someone changes their mind, delegations can be revoked or reassigned at any time.

Liquid democracy is a tech-enabled improvement to those parliamentary systems in which a single elected member of parliament is meant to represent the voter in all areas of debate. With liquid democracy, representation is no longer an all-or-nothing affair. Accordingly, liquid democracy moves away from the unhelpful fiction that politicians are supposed to have been elected to carry out every nook and cranny of their election manifesto. It enables a set of approvals and affirmations that is much more fine-grained — an ongoing dynamic conversation with nuance and inventiveness.”

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