MIT researchers and colleagues recently discovered an important — and unexpected — electronic property of graphene, a material discovered only about 17 years ago that continues to surprise scientists with its interesting physics. The work, which involves structures composed of atomically thin layers of materials that are also biocompatible, could usher in new, faster information-processing paradigms. One potential application is in neuromorphic computing, which aims to replicate the neuronal cells in the body responsible for everything from behavior to memories....

Findings by a team of academics, including physicists Professor Carlos Frenk and Dr. Alis Deason from the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) at Durham University and Dr. Sownak Bose from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in America, suggest that galaxies including Segue-1, Bootes I, Tucana II and Ursa Major I are over 13 billion years old. Their findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal. Professor Carlos Frenk, Director of Durham University’s ICC, said: “Finding some of the very first galaxies that formed in our Universe orbiting in the Milky Way’s own backyard is the astronomical equivalent of finding the remains of the first humans that inhabited the Earth....

Coughing, fever and difficulty breathing are common symptoms of the illness, but a recent case study involving an Edmonton woman and published in the Canadian Journal of Ophthalmology has determined that conjunctivitis and keratoconjunctivitis can also be primary symptoms. In March, a 29-year-old woman arrived at the Royal Alexandra Hospital’s Eye Institute of Alberta with a severe case of conjunctivitis and minimal respiratory symptoms. After the patient had undergone several days of treatment with little improvement—and after it had been determined that the woman had recently returned home from Asia—a resident ordered a COVID-19 test....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports¹. The dye comes from the roots of a climbing herb known as the madder plant (Rubia tinctorum). The first madder roots were boiled more than 3,500 years ago to extract purpurin. It’s never been thought that this dye could be used to store energy. Most rechargeable lithium-ion batteries require cobalt. 30% of the cobalt produced in the world is used in battery technology....

This team has been able to stably express a plant protein in cancer cells, altering the expression of genes that cause tumor growth. This project, published in the journal Epigenetics, was headed by researchers Teresa Morales Ruiz and Maria Victoria García Ortiz, who have done laboratory work with colon tumor cells and used genomic analyses on a large scale. According to the authors, this is “a protein which could be used as a tool to erase molecular tags that silence genes....

The team carried out experiments with a human breast cancer tumor that developed in the lab. As the tumor grew and amassed more cells over a period of about two weeks, the researchers observed that cells in the interior of the tumor were small and stiff, while the cells on the periphery were soft and more swollen. These softer, peripheral cells were more apt to stretch beyond the tumor body, forming “invasive tips” that eventually broke away to spread elsewhere....

The World Economic Forum published its 2013 global risks report this week, including a section on low-probability, high-impact risks resulting from human activity. This section was produced in collaboration with the journal Nature. There is plenty of evidence of natural disasters in the geological record, ranging from asteroid impacts to supervolcanoes and Earth is now in the middle of a flare-up of supervolcanic activity. Over the past 13.5 million years, there have been 19 giant eruptions that spewed forth 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock....

Pulsars are the compact remnants of stellar explosions which have strong magnetic fields and are rapidly rotating. They emit radiation like a cosmic lighthouse and can be observable as radio pulsars and/or gamma-ray pulsars depending on their orientation towards Earth. The fastest pulsar outside globular clusters PSR J0952-0607 (the name denotes the position in the sky) was first discovered in 2017 by radio observations of a source identified by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope as possibly being a pulsar....

However, it only works if models represent everyone, and past research has shown they do not. For every model, there are certain individuals who just do not fit. Researchers from Yale University have analyzed who these models tend to fail in, why that occurs, and what can be done to fix it in a study that was recently published in the journal Nature. According to the lead author of the research and M....

Lessons from the pandemic could inform how to deal with other global crises that require collective action, like climate change. Superspreading events have proven to be the primary mode of infection driving the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to an inaccurate perception of risk. While more than half a million people in the United States died from COVID-19 during the past year, the public’s perception of infection and mortality remain variable....

“Reconstructing extinct members of the Hominidae, or hominids, including their facial soft tissue, has become increasingly popular with many approximations of their faces presented in museum exhibitions, popular science publications and at conference presentations worldwide,” said lead author PhD student Ryan M. Campbell from the University of Adelaide. “It is essential that accurate facial soft tissue thickness measurements are used when reconstructing the faces of hominids to reduce the variability exhibited in reconstructions of the same individuals....

Protections were put in place in the 1960s as scientists noticed worldwide that populations were declining. In the mid-1980s, the International Whaling Commission issued a moratorium on all commercial whaling, offering further safeguards for the struggling population. A new study co-authored by Grant Adams, John Best, and André Punt from the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences shows the western South Atlantic humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) population has grown to 25,000....

The .HEAT (Helicobacter pylori Eradication Aspirin) trial, was led by Professor Chris Hawkey from the University of Nottingham’s School of Medicine and Nottingham Digestive Diseases Centre, and funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Health Technology Assessment program. The findings may improve the safety of aspirin when used to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and possibly some cancers. Aspirin in low doses is a very useful preventative drug in people at high risk of strokes or heart attacks....

In a new paper published in Environmental Science and Technology, the researchers examined a number of different cellulosic biofuel crops to test their potential as a petroleum alternative in ethanol fuel and electric light-duty vehicles which includes passenger cars and small trucks. Climate change mitigation scenarios limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) rely on decarbonizing vehicle fuel with bioenergy production together with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)....

Proteins are the molecular machines of cells, in which they perform a range of functions. They are produced by the cells based on blueprints stored in their DNA. Changes occurring at the DNA or protein level can lead to disorders. For such changes to be recognized as underlying causes of heart disease, it is important to know precisely which proteins are present in a healthy heart and in what quantities....

The key principle behind this new work is quantum teleportation, a unique feature of quantum mechanics that has previously been used to transmit unknown quantum states between two parties without physically sending the state itself. Using a theoretical protocol developed in the 1990s, Yale researchers experimentally demonstrated a quantum operation, or “gate,” without relying on any direct interaction. Such gates are necessary for quantum computation that relies on networks of separate quantum systems — an architecture that many researchers say can offset the errors that are inherent in quantum computing processors....

ESA’s Herschel space observatory has detected a cool layer in the atmosphere of Alpha Centauri A, the first time this has been seen in a star beyond our own Sun. The finding is not only important for understanding the Sun’s activity, but could also help in the quest to discover proto-planetary systems around other stars. The Sun’s nearest neighbors are the three stars of the Alpha Centauri system. The faint red dwarf, Proxima Centauri, is nearest at just 4....

But conventional reporting schemes that rely on fluorescence and other optical approaches come with practical limitations that could cast a shadow over the field’s future progress. Now, researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft have created a “nanopore-tal” into what is happening inside these complex biological systems, allowing scientists to see reporter proteins in a whole new light. The team introduced a new class of reporter proteins that can be directly read by a commercially available nanopore sensing device....

Over the past decades, nanoactuators for detection or probing of different biomolecules have attracted vast interest for example in the fields of biomedical, food, and environmental industry. To provide more versatile tools for active molecular control in nanometer scale, researchers at the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Tampere have devised a nanoactuator scheme, where gold nanoparticle (AuNP) tethered on a conducting surface is moved reversibly using electric fields, while monitoring its position optically via changes of its plasmon resonance....

A healthy immune system strikes a delicate balance between eradicating infections and cancers and not overreacting to damage one’s own tissue. Immune checkpoints help control the immune response, but tumors exploit these checkpoint pathways by expressing special proteins that evade antitumor immune responses. One major checkpoint inhibitor pathway is the PD-1 pathway, and its ligand is PD-L1. In this study, the PD-L1 ligand, which enables cancer to evade a person’s immune system, has been successfully targeted for the first time with a fluorine-18 (18F)-labeled PD-L1 radioligand....