Marianne StebbinsWhat does this solve that isn’t already handled by air and water?
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Anne KristoffersenTurn the Bering Strait Crossing into a bridge arcology and the project will handsomely pay for itself in a sustainable way.
The old adage that oil and water don’t mix isn’t entirely accurate. While it’s true that the two compounds don’t naturally combine, turning them into one final product can be done. You just need an emulsifier, an ingredient commonly used in the food industry.
Yangchao Luo, an associate professor in UConn’s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, is using an innovative emulsification process for the development of a healthier shelf-stable fat for food manufacturing.
Luo is working with something known as high internal phase Pickering emulsions (HIPEs). High internal phase means the mixture is at least 75% oil. Pickering emulsions are those that are stabilized by solid particles.
The application of mechanic forces to the cell nucleus affects the transport of proteins through the nuclear membrane, an action that controls cellular processes and could play a key role in several diseases such as cancer. These findings draw a new scenario for understanding how the mechanic forces drive the progression of cancer and open the doors to the design of potential innovative techniques—both diagnostic and therapeutic. This is the conclusion of a study published in the journal Nature Cell Biology led by lecturer Pere Roca-Cusachs, from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University of Barcelona, the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology of the UB (IN2UB) and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC).
The cells in the body receive mechanical stimuli from their environment and respond accordingly regarding decisions on how and when to grow, move and differentiate. The process is known as mechanotransduction and it is critically important for the cell function and for human health.
The study reveals that the direct application of force to the nucleus can affect the spatial organization of the DNA and the activity of nuclear proteins, among other functions. When cancer cells invade the organs and metastasis appears, these create physical forces that are transmitted to the cell nucleus.
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Noise in an electronic circuit is a nuisance that can scramble information or reduce a detector’s sensitivity. But noise also offers a way to learn about the microscopic quantum mechanisms at play in a material or device. By measuring a circuit’s “shot noise,” a form of white noise, researchers have previously shed light on conduction in quantum Hall and spintronic systems, for instance. Now, a collaboration led by Oren Tal at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and by Dvira Segal at the University of Toronto, Canada, has shown that an easier-to-measure form of noise, called “flicker noise,” can also be a powerful probe of quantum effects [1].
Continue reading “Pink Noise as a Probe of Quantum Transport” »
Whatever you are doing, whether it is driving a car, going for a jog, or even at your laziest, eating chips and watching TV on the couch, there is an entire suite of molecular machinery inside each of your cells hard at work. That machinery, far too small to see with the naked eye or even with many microscopes, creates energy for the cell, manufactures its proteins, makes copies of its DNA, and much more.
Among those pieces of machinery, and one of the most complex, is something known as the nuclear pore complex (NPC). The NPC, which is made of more than 1,000 individual proteins, is an incredibly discriminating gatekeeper for the cell’s nucleus, the membrane-bound region inside a cell that holds that cell’s genetic material. Anything going in or out of the nucleus has to pass through the NPC on its way.
Nuclear pores stud the surface of the cell’s nucleus, controlling what flows in and out of it. (Image: Valerie Altounian)
Solving the 3D structure at near atomic level resolution, one of the world’s hardest, giant jigsaw puzzles—the nuclear pore complex—the largest molecular machine in human cells, with structure-based AI prediction @ScienceMagazine
Researchers at the University of Liverpool have captured a clear view of the generation process of “protein machinery” that plays a key role in the colonization of pathogenic Salmonella bacteria.
The findings, published in Nature Communications, answer an important question about how various proteins self-assemble to create a higher-ordered functional organelle in Salmonella to boost metabolism.
Many pathogenic bacteria, such as Salmonella, use specialized nano-sized organelles, or bacterial microcompartments (BMC). The BMC has a virus-like polyhedral shell made of proteins to encase multiple metabolic cargo enzymes. The protein shell provides a selectively permeable barrier which controls the passage of metabolites and sequesters the reactions in its interior. This ensures higher efficiency of the encapsulated reactions and prevents toxic products from being released into the rest of the cell, providing the pathogens a competitive advantage in human gut.
As people across the globe look forward to longer life expectancies, malignant cancers continue to pose threats to human health. The exploration and development of immunotherapy aims to seek new breakthroughs for the treatment of solid tumors.
The successful establishment of anti-tumor immunity requires the activation, expansion and differentiation of antigen-specific lymphocytes. This process largely depends on specific interactions between various T cells and antigen-presenting cells (APCs) in the body. However, existing tumor vaccines, such as neoantigen vaccines and various vector vaccines, all rely on random interactions with APCs in the body. Furthermore, inappropriate interactions may lead to the silencing of other immune responses.
Although immune checkpoint-based immunotherapy has been shown to have great potential, only a small proportion of patients fully respond to this therapy, and the relevant molecular mechanisms need to be further explored. This delivery method is however complex and inefficient.
One day soon, buildings could become more energy-efficient—and environmentally sustainable—with insulating material developed from wood by researchers in Sweden. The newly-developed material offers as good or even better thermal performance than ordinary plastic-based insulation materials, according to researchers reporting recently in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Yuanyuan Li, an assistant professor at Wallenberg Wood Science Center, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says that the new insulating material is an aerogel integrated wood which is made without adding additional substances.
Wood cellulose aerogels themselves are nothing new—researchers have been developing advanced types of aerogels and other composites for the last several years in the Wallenberg Wood Science Center at KTH—but Li says the new method represents a breakthrough in controlled creation of insulating nanostructures in the pores of wood.
Using a network of vibrating nano-strings controlled with light, researchers from AMOLF have made sound waves move in a specific irreversible direction and attenuated or amplified the waves in a controlled manner for the first time. This gives rise to a lasing effect for sound. To their surprise, they discovered new mechanisms, so-called “geometric phases,” with which they can manipulate and transmit sound in systems where that was thought to be impossible. “This opens the way to new types of (meta)materials with properties that we do not yet know from existing materials,” says group leader Ewold Verhagen who, together with shared first authors Javier del Pino and Jesse Slim, publishes the surprising results on June 2 in Nature.
The response of electrons and other charged particles to magnetic fields leads to many unique phenomena in materials. “For a long time, we have wanted to know whether an effect similar to a magnetic field on electrons could be achieved on sound, which has no charge,” says Verhagen. “The influence of a magnetic field on electrons has a wide impact: for example, an electron in a magnetic field cannot move along the same path in the opposite direction. This principle lies at the basis of various exotic phenomena at the nanometer scale, such as the quantum Hall effect and the functioning of topological insulators (materials that conduct current perfectly at their edges and not in their bulk). For many applications, it would be useful if we could achieve the same for vibrations and sound waves and therefore break the symmetry of their propagation, so it is not time-reversal symmetric anymore.”
