During development, cells seem to use statistics to figure out what identities they should take on.
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Many stars sedately tread the measure of the galaxies they inhabit, slowly orbiting the galactic core. Not a star called PSR J0002+6216, though. PSR J0002+6216, astronomers have discovered, is rocketing through the Milky Way at absolutely breakneck speeds.
To be precise, it’s travelling at 1,130 kilometres per second (700 miles per second). That could take it from Earth to the Moon in 6 minutes. It’s one of the fastest stars we’ve ever seen.
And boy, is it spectacular — zooming away from the expanding cloud of a recent supernova explosion, leaving a trail behind after it punched through the explosion’s outer shell of debris.
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What The Health
Posted in biotech/medical, health
Researchers identify a major risk factor for pernicious effects of misinformation.
- By David Z. Hambrick, Madeline Marquardt on February 6, 2018
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New research from Washington University in St. Louis explains the cellular processes that allow a sun-loving microbe to “eat” electricity—transferring electrons to fix carbon dioxide to fuel its growth.
Led by Arpita Bose, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and Michael Guzman, a Ph.D. candidate in her laboratory, a Washington University team showed how a naturally occurring strain of Rhodopseudomonas palustris takes up electrons from conductive substances like metal oxides or rust. The work is described in a March 22 paper in the journal Nature Communications.
The study builds on Bose’s previous discovery that R. palustris TIE-1 can consume electrons from rust proxies like poised electrodes, a process called extracellular electron uptake. R. palustris is phototrophic, which means that it uses energy from light to carry out certain metabolic processes. The new research explains the cellular sinks where this microbe dumps the electrons it eats from electricity.
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Software engineer Zhang Yiming started out producing apps for sharing jokes before focusing on news aggregation. That pivot proved lucrative.
The 35-year-old founder of Bytedance Ltd. is worth about $13 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him China’s 9th-richest person and one of the fastest in modern times to amass a mega-fortune. The business, founded in 2012, has more than 1 billion active monthly users across eight mobile apps, including a news aggregator powered by artificial intelligence and a video-sharing platform.
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CHICAGO — Four stories underground — encased in several feet of concrete — is the University of Chicago’s new nanofabrication facility, where researchers apply the principles of quantum physics to real-world problems and technologies.
A small cadre of faculty and graduate students in a clean room bathed in yellow light wear protective clothing to ensure the integrity of the experiments they are conducting, which involves the very matter that comprise the universe: electrons, photons, neutrons and protons.
The William Eckhardt Research Center where they are working is located across the street from where a team led by Enrico Fermi, the architect of the nuclear age, carried out the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction.
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