Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Landau level spectrum of singular flat bands enables to measure the distance between quantum states

Scientists at EPFL's Brain Mind Institute have identified an enzyme that can play a central role in developing a new route of treatment for Huntington's Disease.

A new study which provides a global estimate of rock cover on the Earth's glaciers has revealed that the expanse of rock debris on glaciers, a factor that has been ignored in models of glacier melt and sea level rise, could be significant.

Asterids comprise around 100,000 flowering plants, from heather to tomatoes. Up to now, their family relationships had not yet been fully clarified. A new study by the University of Bonn, Pennsylvania State University (USA) and Fudan University (China) has now somewhat closed this knowledge gap. It is the world's most detailed phylogenetic analysis ever conducted for asterids. The results of the study have been published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Since the beginning of 2020, the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering IBMT has been coordinating the "R2U-Tox-Assay: Ready-to-use Toxicity Screening Assay based on iPS-Technologies" project, which is funded by EIT Health. The aim of this project is to develop innovative toxicity assays for drug research based on human cell systems. This should enable better prediction of undesired side effects of drug candidates in preclinical phases and reduce animal experiments in pharmaceutical research.

What happens when you pull a DNA molecule? It behaves quite differently than we are used to from macroscopic objects. Scientists at TU Wien were now able to explain this.

Carbon monoxide is a life-threatening gas - and yet it can have a performance-enhancing effect in small quantities. Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have come to this surprising insight thanks to a new study in the field of sports medicine. In healthy, well-trained individuals, the regular inhalation of carbon monoxide had the same effect as training at high-altitude. The online edition of the journal "Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise" has published first results of the study.

Scientists are increasingly trying to use the body's own immune system to fight cancer. A new study by the University of Bonn and research institutions in Australia and Switzerland now shows the strategies tumor cells use to evade this attack. The method developed for this work contributes to a better understanding of the "arms race" between immune defense and disease. The results could help to improve modern therapeutic approaches. They have been published in the journal "Immunity".

An international team of astronomers including Gisela Ortiz-Leon (MPI for Radio Astronomy, Bonn, Germany) discovered a Saturn-like planet orbiting a small, cool star by detecting the "wobble" in the star’s motion caused by the gravitational pull of the planet. This is the first time that this technique is successfully employed with observations obtained at radio wavelengths. For their observations, the researchers used a network of radio antennas that are linked together to form a continent-size radio telescope. The discovery was possible thanks to the extremely high precision measurements of the star’s position that can only be achieved with such a radio telescope network.

How can you perforate an atomic layer of material and leave the one underneath intact? Scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) developed a technique for processing surfaces on an atomic scale.

A large number of the valley networks scarring Mars's surface were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers as previously thought, according to new UBC research published today in Nature Geoscience. The findings effectively throw cold water on the dominant "warm and wet ancient Mars" hypothesis, which postulates that rivers, rainfall and oceans once existed on the red planet.

In the human body, proteins sometimes occur in fibrillar aggregates called amyloids. Although certain amyloids are known to have a biological function, amyloid formation is often associated with pathologies, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

A current problem for a wide range of chemists is when stirring a solution in the laboratory there is a need to check the properties of the solution and monitor how they change.

Soils harbour a substantial part of the world’s biodiversity, yet data on the patterns and processes taking place below ground does not represent all relevant ecosystems and taxa. For example, tropical and subtropical regions largely remain a blind spot when it comes to soil biodiversity. This is one of the results of a new study published in Nature Communications and led by scientists from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Leipzig University (UL).

Purdue University innovators are working on inventions to use micro-chip technology in implantable devices and other wearable products such as smart watches to improve biomedical devices, including those used to monitor people with glaucoma and heart disease.

Clean-up devices that collect waste from the ocean surface won't solve the plastic pollution problem, a new study shows.

New software predicts cell fate

Airplane wings, wind turbine blades, and other large parts are typically created using bulk polymerization in composite manufacturing facilities. They are heated and cured in enormous autoclaves and heated molds as big as the finished part. Frontal polymerization is a new out-of-autoclave method for composite manufacturing that doesn't require a large facility investment. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign conducted a study pitting one process against the other to discover the pros and cons of each.

Simulations at Graz University of Technology refute earlier theories on long-range charge transfer between organic and inorganic materials.

Researchers at CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have developed knowledge-primed neural networks (KPNNs), a new method that combines the power of deep learning with the interpretability of biological network models. KPNNs learn multiple layers of protein signaling and gene regulation from single-cell RNA-seq data, thereby providing a much-needed boost in our ability to convert massive single-cell atlas data into biological insights. These findings have now been published in the renowned scientific journal Genome Biology.

Meeting growing demand for increased storage capacity

Rainfall maps with high temporal resolution derived from the attenuation of commercial microwave links (CMLs) by precipitation

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) represents a novel paradigm in drug discovery that could lead to more efficient medicines to treat diseases such as cancer. “Molecular glue degraders” are an emerging but understudied class of small molecules that have been shown to induce degradation of proteins commonly considered “undruggable”. Researchers at CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have described a strategy that, for the first time, enables the rational and highly scalable discovery of novel molecular glue degraders. Their findings have now been published in the renowned scientific journal Nature Chemical Biology.