Classes of transcription clusters. Credit: Nature Communications (2022) Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law states that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Indika Rajapakse, Ph.D., is a believer. The engineer and mathematician now discovers himself a biologist. And he believes the charm of blending these 3 disciplines is crucial to unraveling how cells...
The main factor is how hardware chips are now set up. Based on the common Von Neumann architecture, the chip isolates memory storage from its central processors. Each computation is one nightmarish Monday morning commute, with the chip constantly shuttling information to and fro from each compartment, forming a notorious "memory wall." If you have...
A European robin (Erithacus rubecula) singing in Gennevilliers, France. Credit: Alexis Lours/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY When the COVID pandemic began, it was an international crisis for humans-- but as humans took shelter, reports of wildlife reclaiming what were once human-dominated spaces abounded. But biologists are noticing the patterns were not repeated around the world. Last year, a research...
The United States is returning to the Moon 60 years after JFK's famous speech. On September 12, 1962, United States president John F Kennedy informed the public of his plan to put one man on the Moon by the decade's end. It was the height of the Cold War, and also America needed a huge victory...
Proteins designed with an ultra-rapid software tool called ProteinMPNN were much more likely to fold up as intended. Credit: Ian Haydon, UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design Over the past 2 years, machine learning has revolutionized protein structure prediction. Currently, three papers in Science describe a similar revolution in protein design. In the current papers, biologists...
Researchers observed bright flares of X-ray emissions. Image credit: Dan Wilkins Researchers at Stanford University have actually located a strange pattern while seeing the X-rays from the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 800 million light-yrs away. The black hole, it seems, is spewing out these rays into the universe around it. Dan...
Credit: Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images A study describes how scientists conducted the first successful DNA sequencing on old Egyptian mummies. Egyptologists, writers, scholars, and others, have suggested the race of the ancient Egyptians since at least the 1970s. Some today think they were sub-Saharan Africans. We can observe this interpretation portrayed in Michael Jackson's 1991...
Credit: Thomas Pesquet / ESA NASA has "holoported" somebody to the International Space Station for the first time, demonstrating a new method for astronauts and people on Earth to interact with one another. Holoportation 101 Holoportation is the creation of Microsoft research. While the name is one portmanteau of "hologram" and "teleportation," that does not quite explain...
When squeezed to high pressure between two diamonds (shown), a material made of carbon, sulfur and hydrogen can transmit electricity without resistance at room temperature. It is here: Researchers have reported the exploration of the first room-temperature superconductor after more than one century of waiting. The discovery evokes daydreams of futuristic technologies which could improve electronics...
Superexchange magnetic interactions in transition-metal oxides. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2207449119 Today, an international group of scientists led by Séamus Davis, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and University Cork, has announced outcomes that reveal the atomic mechanism behind high-temperature superconductors. The searchings for are released in PNAS. Superconductors are...
