Blame it on plate tectonics. The deep ocean is never preserved, but instead is lost to time as the seafloor is subducted. Geologists are mostly left with shallower rocks from closer to the shoreline to inform their studies of Earth history. “We have only a good record of the deep ocean for the last ~180 million years,” said David Fike, the Glassberg/Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St….
Phosphorus chemist Prof. Jan J. Weigand from the Dresden University of Technology, in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team, has developed a groundbreaking method to introduce phosphorus and nitrogen atoms into polycyclic molecules. This method holds the potential to pave the way for the development of new materials with specific optoelectronic properties, ideal for applications in organic semiconductor technologies such as OLEDs and sensors. The results of this promising endeavour were published this week in the prestigious journal CHEM. © Jannis…
…could reduce daily diabetes shots to just three a year. Dietary management drugs have transformed Type 2 diabetes care, but daily injection routines are challenging for some patients. A new hydrogel could mean shots just three times a year. Materials engineers at Stanford University have developed a novel hydrogel drug delivery system that transforms daily or weekly injections of diabetes and weight control drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro, Trulicity, Victoza, and others to just once every four months. In a new…
Plants in which an ion channel of the vacuole is hyperactive are extremely stressed and grow poorly. But the broad bean is an exception, as Würzburg researchers have discovered. Like the human body, plants also use electrical signals to process and pass on information. In addition to the cell membrane, the membrane of the central vacuole plays an important role in this process. Vacuoles are typical for plant cells. They are fluid-filled bladders that act as a reservoir for minerals…
…that may provide a link to mysterious sources. An international research team led by Michael Kramer and Kuo Liu from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, have studied a rare species of ultra-dense stars, so called magnetars, to uncover an underlying law that appears to apply universally to a range of objects known as neutron stars. This law gives insight into how these sources produce radio emission and it may provide a link to the mysterious…
Second only to the Oh-My-God particle, the newly dubbed Amaterasu particle deepens the mystery of the origin, propagation and particle physics of rare, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. In 1991, the University of Utah Fly’s Eye experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power to produce it, and the particle had more energy than was theoretically possible for cosmic rays traveling to Earth from…
Astrophysicists say they have found an answer to why spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way are largely missing from a part of our Local Universe called the Supergalactic Plane. The Supergalactic Plane is an enormous, flattened structure extending nearly a billion light years across in which our own Milky Way galaxy is embedded. While the Plane is teeming with bright elliptical galaxies, bright disk galaxies with spiral arms are conspicuously scarce. Now an international team of researchers, co-led by…
Targeting cholesterol potentially could help treat Alzheimer’s, related dementias. In Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, cognitive decline is driven by the overaccumulation of a normal brain protein known as tau. Wherever tau builds up, nearby brain tissue starts to degenerate and die. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found — in mice — that Alzheimer’s-like tau deposits in the brain lead to the accumulation of a form of cholesterol known as cholesteryl esters, and…
Cell and organ transplants can be lifesaving, but patients often encounter long waiting lists due to the shortage of suitable donors. According to donatelife.net, in 2021 6,000 people died in the U.S. alone while waiting for a transplant. One day, transplants generated from stem cells may alleviate the constant organ donor shortage, making transplants available to a larger group of patients. An issue with donation, whether it’s with solid tissues or cells from deceased or living donors, is immune rejection….
Research team of the CRC 1182 at Kiel University uses the example of the freshwater polyp Hydra to show how nerve cells and microorganisms cooperate to control the animals’ feeding behaviour. An increasingly important field of work in modern life sciences is the study of the symbiotic coexistence of animals, plants and humans with their specific microbial populations. In recent years, researchers have gathered growing evidence that the composition and balance of the microbiome plays a decisive role in the…
ERC grant for Dresden quantum physicist Hassinger. Elena Hassinger, a renowned low-temperature physicist from the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat, has been awarded €2.7 million in funding by the European Research Council. This ERC Consolidator Grant will support her pioneering work on unconventional superconductors, which could lead to a breakthrough in topological quantum computing. Over the next five years, Hassinger’s research in Dresden will delve into the enigmatic properties of cerium-rhodium-arsenic (CeRh2As2) and explore similar quantum materials under extreme laboratory…
New mechanism for the degradation of aldehyde-induced RNA-protein crosslinks. PRESS RELEASE OF THE INSTITUTE OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY (IMB) The research team of Professor Petra Beli and their collaborators have discovered that aldehydes, a type of toxic chemical produced by the body after drinking alcohol, damage cells by creating chemical crosslinks between RNA and proteins, thereby interfering with protein production. The scientists in Beli’s group, who come from the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), and the…
As biocatalysts, enzymes can make many chemical processes “greener” and open up promising opportunities for various industries from pharmaceuticals to environmental technology. New analytical methods, the enormous increase in data volumes and machine learning have helped boost the development of biocatalysis. A recent publication in the journal Science, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Uwe Bornscheuer from the University of Greifswald (DE) and Prof. Dr. Rebecca Buller from the ZHAW (CH), summarizes the developments in biocatalysis. Enzymes have been used in biocatalysis…
Using mini organs and other cutting edge research, researchers are finding clues that may enable them to treat rare and deadly diseases. A lot of research has been done over many decades on diseases that are widespread in large parts of the population, such as cancer and heart disease. As a result, treatment methods have improved enormously thanks to long-term research efforts on diseases that affect many people. However, there are many diseases that affect just a handful people. These…
For the first time, researchers have succeeded in selectively exciting a molecule using a combination of two extreme-ultraviolet light sources and causing the molecule to dissociate while tracking it over time. This is another step towards specific quantum mechanical control of chemical reactions, which could enable new, previously unknown reaction channels. The interaction of light with matter, especially with molecules, plays an important role in many areas of nature, for example in biological processes such as photosynthesis. Technologies such as…
A ground-breaking new discovery by University of Leeds scientists could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe. Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars – until now mainly thought to exist in double stars – could in fact be “triples”. The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects –…
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