…with triple elementalization. In recent years, organic chemicals containing boron (B) and silicon (Si) have found applications in various fields, including optoelectronics and pharmaceuticals. Moreover, they can also serve as building blocks for complex organic chemicals. As a result, scientists are actively looking for new ways to leverage these versatile chemical tools as well as produce more kinds of organosilicon and organoboron compounds. One limitation of the synthesis methods currently available for these chemicals is that we cannot introduce multiple…
Stainless steel recycling is considered to be a sustainable way to save CO2 in the globally growing steel production. As early as 2010, Fraunhofer UMSICHT researchers determined a savings potential of more than 4.5 t CO2 per ton of blend on behalf of the Oryx Stainless Group. More recent calculations by the UMSICHT team even come to savings of over 6.7 t CO2 -eq. per ton of blend for the reference year 2021. The results show: The recycling of stainless…
– including Germany. AWI researchers have analysed the origins of plastic debris on the shores of Svalbard. “Citizen Science” gives interested citizens the chance to actively engage in scientific research. A citizen-science project conducted by AWI in the Arctic now shows just how successful this can be. In the course of five years, citizens who went on sailing cruises to the Arctic surveyed and collected plastic debris that had washed up on the shores of Svalbard. This has now been…
Approximately 300 million people are chronically infected with the hepatitis B virus (HBV), which can cause liver cirrhosis or cancer. Consequently, there is an urgent need for the development of HBV curative therapies. Due to the unique replication strategy of HBV, however, quantification of viral DNA in infected liver cells, which is essential in preclinical and clinical studies, is technically difficult and not standardised. An international research consortium led by DZIF scientists has now developed recommendations for the optimisation, control…
In a recently published article in the leading physics journal “Nature Physics”, a team of researchers with the participation of the University of Augsburg reports about unexpectedly universal correlations between the thermal expansion and the glass-transition temperature of glass-forming materials, providing new insights into the complex nature of the transition from the liquid into the solid glass. Glasses are solid materials, however lacking the crystalline structure with a regular arrangement of the atoms that is typical for conventional solids. The…
Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry sheds light on the biosynthesis of pungency. How do plants make those pungent substances, anyway? The Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB) is working intensively on this topic. Recently, a group of scientists led by Dr. Thomas Vogt have pinpointed the crucial enzyme that gives the fruits of the pepper plant (lat. Piper nigrum) the distinctive, pungent taste. The enzyme in question, piperine synthase, catalyzes the final step towards biosynthesizing pungent piperine. Now the biochemists…
A new study shows how large language models like GPT-3 can learn a new task from just a few examples, without the need for any new training data. Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are massive neural networks that can generate human-like text, from poetry to programming code. Trained using troves of internet data, these machine-learning models take a small bit of input text and then predict the text that is likely to come next. But that’s not all these…
Two catalysts working in tandem enable inexpensive formate salts to perform difficult dearomative reactions, giving products potentially useful for drug development. Researchers at the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (WPI-ICReDD) have developed a method that uses cooperating catalysts to carry out challenging dearomative carboxylation reactions. In this process, highly reactive carbon dioxide (CO2) radical anions are derived from inexpensive formate salts and used to produce a variety of products, including α-amino acids, which are potentially useful in drug…
The harmonious coexistence between the human society and the nature has prompted the rapid development of advanced manufacturing. Typically, green biomanufacturing, which uses renewable resources as raw materials and enzymes or microorganisms as catalysts to produce target chemicals, has been considered to be highly consistent with The Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry. Specifically, enzyme-based green biomanufacturing has been extensively applied for many industrial fields such as food, pharmaceutical, chemicals, etc. Reduction reactions are most commonly employed in enzyme-based biomanufacturing processes….
Research to develop and deploy a world-first diagnostic test that could accelerate malaria eradication has been bolstered with over $1.3 million in new funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). Research to develop and deploy a world-first diagnostic test that could accelerate malaria eradication has been bolstered with over $1.3 million in new funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). Two WEHI projects have received funding to clinically translate a test that can detect…
It’s been over 20 years since neuroimaging studies – using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a widely-used technology to capture live videos of brain activity – have been detecting brain-wide complex patterns of correlated brain activity that appear disrupted in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders. These patterns form spontaneously, even at rest when no particular task is being performed, and have been detected not only in humans but also across mammals, including monkeys and rodents. Although such…
University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers show how Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and Epstein-Barr virus hijack a human protein to help the viruses evade innate immune detection to spread undeterred. The viruses Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) have been linked to several cancers. For the first time, UNC School of Medicine scientists have discovered that these viruses use a human protein called barrier-to-autointegration factor 1, or BAF, to evade our innate immune response, allowing the viruses…
… enables rapid organic synthesis under sunlight. A research group led by Prof. WU Kaifeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has reported the efficient near-infrared photon upconversion sensitized by lead-free semiconductor nanocrystals, and demonstrated its novel application in solar synthesis. The study was published in Nature Photonics on Feb. 6. Upconversion of near-infrared photons to visible photons can boost the performance of photovoltaics, photoredox-catalysis and phototheranostics. Sensitized triplet-fusion is a promising means…
Roughly 500 million light-years away, near the constellation Delphinus, two galaxies are colliding. Known as merging galaxy IIZw096, this luminous phenomenon is obscured by cosmic dust, but researchers first identified a bright, energetic source of light 12 years ago. Now, with a more advanced telescope — the James Webb Space Telescope that started its observations in July 2022 — the team has pinpointed the precise location of what they have dubbed the “engine” of the merging galaxy. They published their…
Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have finished testing the high-gain antenna for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. When it launches by May 2027, this NASA observatory will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search for and image exoplanets, and explore many topics in infrared astrophysics. Pictured above in a test chamber, the antenna will provide the primary communication link between the Roman spacecraft and the ground. It will downlink the…
Keanu Reeves – the molecule… Bacteria of the genus Pseudomonas produce a strong antimicrobial natural product, as researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Leibniz-HKI) have discovered. They proved that the substance is effective against both plant fungal diseases and human-pathogenic fungi. The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The newly discovered natural product group of keanumycins in bacteria works effectively against the plant pest Botrytis cinerea, which triggers grey…
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