Posted: 6/26/2016
- Contagious cancer found in clams and mussels (More evidence that some forms of cancer are transmissible)
- ‘Undead’ genes come alive days after life ends (“What they found instead was that hundreds of genes ramped up. Although most of these genes upped their activity in the first 24 hours after the animals expired and then tapered off, in the fish some genes remained active 4 days after death.”)
- Scientists glimpse why life can't happen without water (“... strong direct evidence that on ultrafast time scales (picoseconds, or trillionths of a second), water modulates protein fluctuations ... used ultrafast laser pulses to take snapshots of water molecules moving around a DNA polymerase ... to precisely locate optical probes on the protein surface ... The researchers inserted molecules of the amino acid tryptophan into the protein as a probe, and measured how water moved around it. Water molecules typically flow around each other at picosecond speeds, while proteins fold at nanosecond speeds 1,000 times slower. Previously, ... demonstrated that water molecules slow down when they encounter a protein. Water molecules are still moving 100 times faster than a protein when they connect with it, however. In the new study, the researchers were able to determine that the water molecules directly touched the protein's "side chains," the portions of the protein molecule that bind and unbind with each other to enable folding and function. The researchers were also able to note the timing of movement in the molecules.”)
- Important milestone reached on road to a redefined kilogram (The kilogram is the only SI base unit that is still measured using an old fashioned prototype. Soon to be replaced by “[a] measure a fundamental physical quantity called Planck's constant, or h. Planck's constant relates a quantum particle's frequency to its energy, which is turn can can be related to mass through Einstein's E=mc2.”
- Discovered: a New Protein Crucial to Normal Forgetting (““Understanding the process of forgetting could have an enormous impact on how we treat a whole range of diseases,” … “Certain memories are intrusive and, with sufficient knowledge of how the brain forgets, we should be able to remove selective memories.”)
- World's first 1,000-processor chip (“A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed … The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors. … The KiloCore chip was fabricated by IBM using their 32nm CMOS technology. Each processor core can run its own small program independently of the others … enabling high throughput with lower energy use … Because each processor is independently clocked, it can shut itself down to further save energy when not needed … Cores operate at an average maximum clock frequency of 1.78 GHz, and they transfer data directly to each other rather than using a pooled memory area that can become a bottleneck for data.”)
- Chemical synthesis injects new life into old antibiotics (This is one of the big stories! “The method produced over 300 structurally diverse macrolide antibiotic candidate molecules previously inaccessible via semi-synthesis. These included the approved drug telithromycin, and the clinical candidate solithromycin, which are effective against community-acquired pneumonia. What's more, gram quantities of macrolides were made which is ample for drug discovery purposes. Tests revealed that most of the compounds had antibiotic activity against an array of pathogenic bacteria, and some were active against bacterial strains that show resistance to macrolides in current use. These included the clinically relevant ‘superbug’ strains methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA, and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus.”)
- Tiny lasers enable next-gen microprocessors to run faster, less power-hungry (“Traditionally, the lasers used for commercial applications are quite large - typically 1 mm x 1 mm. Smaller lasers tend to suffer from large mirror loss. But the scientists were able to overcome this issue with "tiny whispering gallery mode lasers - only 1 micron in diameter - that are 1,000 times shorter in length, and 1 million times smaller in area than those currently used," said Lau.)
- Meta-lens works in the visible spectrum, sees smaller than a wavelength of light (This could be a huge advance! “Researchers ... have demonstrated the first planar lens that works with high efficiency within the visible spectrum of light - covering the whole range of colors from red to blue. The lens can resolve nanoscale features separated by distances smaller than the wavelength of light. It uses an ultrathin array of tiny waveguides, known as a metasurface, which bends light as it passes through, similar to a curved lens.”)
- Physicists discover a new form of light or Photons with half-integer angular momentum are the latest twist on light (“One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum. Until now, it was thought that in all forms of light the angular momentum would be a multiple of Planck's constant … have demonstrated a new form of light where the angular momentum of each photon … takes only half of this value.”)
- Galactic 'gold mine' explains the origin of nature's heaviest elements (“The origin of many of the most precious elements on the periodic table, such as gold, silver and platinum, has perplexed scientists for more than six decades. An analysis of the starlight from several of the brightest stars in a tiny galaxy called Reticulum II, located some 100,000 light years from Earth, suggests these stars contain whopping amounts of r-process elements. … The abundances of elements in the stars squarely implicates the collision of two neutron stars.”)
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