Posted: 12/6/2015
- Shaking bosons into fermions (“This transmutation is an example of emergent behavior, specifically what's known as quasiparticle excitations—one of the concepts that make condensed matter systems so interesting. Particles by themselves have mostly well-defined characteristics, but en masse, can work together such that completely distinctive, even exotic phenomena appear.”)
- How a 5-Ounce Bird Stores 10,000 Maps in Its Head (“Around now, as we begin December, the Clark’s nutcracker has, conservatively, 5,000 (and up to 20,000) treasure maps in its head. They’re accurate, detailed, and instantly retrievable.” “What they’re doing is triangulating. They’re kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects” using reference points.” or “the birds note the landmarks and remember not so much the distances, but the angles—where one object is in relation to the others ... nutcrackers are doing geometry more than measuring.”)
- Breakthrough Israeli Research Improves HIV/AIDS Treatment, Could Lead To Cure (This is actually a synopsis of several breakthroughs)
- Maths model could help put organs on ice (“US researchers have improved an ice-free cryopreservation technique by using mathematical models to minimise toxicity and damage caused to cells during the procedure. The approach could improve long-term storage and availability of cells for drug screening and biosensors and possibly allow for extended storage of tissues and organs.”)
- Researchers find new phase of carbon, make diamond at room temperature (“Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, which is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond. They have also developed a technique for using Q-carbon to make diamond-related structures at room temperature and at ambient atmospheric pressure in air. ... Q-carbon has some unusual characteristics. For one thing, it is ferromagnetic – which other solid forms of carbon are not. ... In addition, Q-carbon is harder than diamond, and glows when exposed to even low levels of energy.”)
- This Gross-looking Worm Gives Clues About Humans' Ability to Breathe and Talk/Humans share about 70 percent of their genome with the lowly acorn worm, according to recent research (“Acorn worms are humans’ closest invertebrate relatives. The last common ancestor between our two lineages lived about 570 million years ago. ... the same genes that give rise to those gill slits are involved in shaping the human pharynx, the passageway leading to the esophagus and larynx that gives us the ability to chew, swallow and speak, writes Robert Sanders in a press release. Now, new research from a team of international researchers shows that humans share about 70 percent of their genome with acorn worms, … “)
- Phenomenon could lead to more compact, tunable X-ray devices made of graphene (This could be big! “The finding, based on a new theory backed by exact simulations, shows that a sheet of graphene ... could be used to generate surface waves called plasmons when the sheet is struck by photons from a laser beam. These plasmons in turn could be triggered to generate a sharp pulse of radiation, tuned to wavelengths anywhere from infrared light to X-rays.”)
- Atom-sized craters make a catalyst much more active (“In the new approach, … an instrument in the Stanford Nanocharacterization Laboratory to bombard a sheet of MoS2 with argon atoms. This knocked about 1 out of 10 sulfur atoms out of the surface of the sheet, leaving holes surrounded by dangling bonds. Then he stretched the holey sheet over microscopic bumps made of silicon dioxide coated with gold. He wet the sheet with a solvent, and when it dried the sheet was permanently deformed: The spacing of the atoms had changed in a way that made the holes much more chemically reactive.”)
- 'Material universe' yields surprising new particle (“An international team of researchers has predicted the existence of a new type of particle called the type-II Weyl fermion in metallic materials. When subjected to a magnetic field, the materials containing the particle act as insulators for current applied in some directions and as conductors for current applied in other directions. This behavior suggests a range of potential applications, from low-energy devices to efficient transistors.”)
- Betrayals of trust helped the rapid spread of human species around the world (“Dr Penny Spikins, of the University's Department of Archaeology, says that the speed and character of human dispersals changed significantly around 100,000 years ago. Before then, movement of archaic humans were slow and largely governed by environmental events due to population increases or ecological changes. Afterwards populations spread with remarkable speed and across major environmental barriers.”)
- New "Superbug" Gene Found in Animals and People in China Scientists alarmed by potential spread of gene that makes bacteria highly resistant to last-resort antibiotics (Good news! Goodbye antibiotic resistance!)
- New supercomputer simulations enhance understanding of protein motion and function (“Supercomputing simulations at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory could change how researchers understand the internal motions of proteins that play functional, structural and regulatory roles in all living organisms. … "Proteins have never been seen this way before," said coauthor Jeremy Smith, director of ORNL's Center for Molecular Biophysics ... computer power to provide a unified conceptual picture of the motions in proteins over a huge range of timescales, from the very shortest lengths of time at which atoms move (picoseconds) right up to the lifetimes of proteins in cells (roughly 1000 seconds). Smith's team developed a complete picture of protein dynamics, revealing that the structural fluctuations within any two identical protein molecules, even if coded from the same gene, turn out to be different. "A gene is a code for a protein, producing different copies of the protein that should be the same, but the internal fluctuations of these individual protein molecules may never reach equilibrium, or converge," Smith said. "This is because the fluctuations themselves are continually aging and don't have enough time to settle down before the protein molecules are eaten up in the cell and replaced." Understanding the out-of-equilibrium phenomenon has biological implications because the function of a protein depends on its motions. Two individual protein molecules, even though they come from the same gene, will not function precisely the same way within the cell.”)
- Water Bears Are the Master DNA Thieves of the Animal World Foreign genes from bacteria, fungi and plants may have bestowed these animals with their ability to tolerate boiling, freezing and the vacuum of space (“All told, the tardigrade genes are made of 17.5 percent foreign material. Most of those strange genes have bacterial origins—thousands of species are represented within the tardigrade’s genetic makeup.”
- Biologists induce flatworms to grow heads and brains of other species (“Biologists at Tufts University have succeeded in inducing one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm without altering genomic sequence. The work reveals physiological circuits as a new kind of epigenetics - information existing outside of genomic sequence - that determines large-scale anatomy.”)
- Move over moonshine, here comes sunshine (“Researchers in the US have demonstrated a remarkably efficient new way to distil alcohol from water – using light. The method needs less energy than conventional thermal distillation and produces a more concentrated distillate. While the new method is unlikely to displace conventional distillation in industry, the researchers say, it could find niche applications in separation and purification processes.
Naomi Halas and co-workers at Rice University in Houston laced a mixture of water and ethanol with gold–silica nanoparticles and shone laser light on the suspension from above. When light hits a nanoparticle it both absorbs photons, becoming warmer, and scatters photons, which can be picked up by its neighbours, increasing their temperature. In this way light energy becomes trapped close to the surface, causing local heating and driving off the more volatile of the two components – in this case ethanol.
‘We are still applying heat, only in a different way,’ says Halas. ‘For the last 10,000 years we have been boiling water the wrong way – from the bottom. Here we are heating it from the top, which is much more energy efficient as we do not have to heat the entire volume of the liquid.’”) - Researchers Unveil Critical Mechanism of Memory Formation (“The study, which was published November 19, 2015 by the journal Cell, focuses on two receptors previously believed to be unrelated—one for the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is involved in learning and memory, reward-motivated behavior, motor control and other functions, and the other for the hormone ghrelin, which has been connected to appetite as well as the distribution and use of energy. … In addition, when the researchers blocked the ghrelin receptor, dopamine-dependent memory formation was inhibited in animal models ...”)
- Quantum computer coding in silicon now possible (“A team of Australian engineers has proven—with the highest score ever obtained—that a quantum version of computer code can be written, and manipulated, using two quantum bits in a silicon microchip. The advance removes lingering doubts that such operations can be made reliably enough to allow powerful quantum computers to become a reality. … In the UNSW experiment, the two quantum particles involved are an electron and the nucleus of a single phosphorus atom, placed inside a silicon microchip.”)
- Team Finds Long-Sought Protein Sensor for the ‘Sixth Sense’—Proprioception (“For decades, biologists have been trying to find the crucial sensor protein in nerve endings that translates muscle and tendon stretching into proprioceptive nerve signals. ... has identified this sensor protein in mice. IIt turns out to be a protein called Piezo2, which was found recently to mediate the sense of touch.”)
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