Credit: Unsplash A group of scientists from Helmholtz Munich has identified a new use for vitamin K, typically recognized for its part in blood clotting. In its fully reduced configuration, the researchers discovered that vitamin K operates as an anti-oxidant by efficiently inhibiting ferroptotic cell death. Ferroptosis is a natural kind of cell death in...
An in-depth conversation with Jess Toolson, founder, and CEO of Mixhers, concerning how being a parent has shaped her skill sets. One article celebrating an accomplished woman entrepreneur and the fact that its writer is one man might sound like a disjointed arrangement, yet rest assured: I had quite a bit of assistance writing it. Because...
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...
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...
Illustration of the experiment. Credit: Dreyer et al, Nature Communications (CC-BY-SA 4.0) Strong alternating magnetic fields can be utilized to generate a new kind of spin wave that was previously just theoretically anticipated. A team of physicists from Martin Luther College Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) achieved this for the first time. They report on their work in...
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...
Tokamak geometry and the parameter evolution of a FIRE mode. a, The plasma configuration of a FIRE mode in KSTAR. Credit: Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05008-1 A team of researchers connected with several institutions in South Korea, working with two coworkers from Princeton University and one from Columbia University, has accomplished a new milestone in the development of...
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...
