Aspergillus fumigatus is a fungus that is widespread in the environment and causes life-threatening infections in humans. An international team of researchers has now taken a closer look at the pathogen’s great genetic diversity. Serious fungal infections The fungus Aspergillus fumigatus causes severe infections in more than 300,000 people worldwide every year. These infections are particularly problematic in immunocompromised patients with a fatality rate up to 50 %. Treatment of these diseases relies on triazole antimycotics. However, resistance to these…
Early-career nuclear physicists show that a better understanding of how neutrinos interact with matter is needed to make the most of upcoming experiments. Neutrinos may be the key to finally solving a mystery of the origins of our matter-dominated universe, and preparations for two major, billion-dollar experiments are underway to reveal the particles’ secrets. Now, a team of nuclear physicists have turned to the humble electron to provide insight for how these experiments can better prepare to capture critical information….
Technique likely safe for human cells; has potential for sterilizing wounds, blood products. Life-threatening bacteria are becoming ever more resistant to antibiotics, making the search for alternatives to antibiotics an increasingly urgent challenge. For certain applications, one alternative may be a special type of laser. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that lasers that emit ultrashort pulses of light can kill multidrug-resistant bacteria and hardy bacterial spores. The findings, available online in the Journal…
A new “image analysis pipeline” is giving scientists rapid new insight into how disease or injury have changed the body, down to the individual cell. It’s called TDAExplore, which takes the detailed imaging provided by microscopy, pairs it with a hot area of mathematics called topology, which provides insight on how things are arranged, and the analytical power of artificial intelligence to give, for example, a new perspective on changes in a cell resulting from ALS and where in the…
How the ACE2 receptor blocks the ‘gateway’ into human cells. A new precision strategy to hinder the infection of the coronavirus and its rapid spread between cells will come from Italian scientific research, destined to be the basis of a new drug, for which a patent has already been filed. The road that will lead to the drug has started from the study sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Sant’Anna School), University of…
Breakthrough discovery could accelerate renewable plastics and products. A team of researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation Center for Sustainable Polymers based at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have developed a chemical technology of combined fermentation and chemical refining that can produce petroleum-like liquids from renewable plants. These renewable liquids could serve as a more sustainable replacement for today’s fossil fuels used to make everyday products like plastic containers and bags, automobile parts, lubricants, and soaps. The new…
A Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) spin-off, Inrobics Social Robotics, S.L.L., has developed a robotic device that provides an innovative motor and cognitive rehabilitation service that can be used at health centres as well as at home. Inrobics was created using research results from the University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The entrepreneurial team has developed a platform made up of four elements: a robot that interacts with the patient, an artificial intelligence system that uses a 3D…
Our galaxy is not alone. Swirling around the Milky Way are several smaller, dwarf galaxies — the biggest of which are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere. During their dance around the Milky Way over billions of years, the Magellanic Clouds’ gravity has ripped from each of them an enormous arc of gas — the Magellanic Stream. The stream helps tell the history of how the Milky Way and its closest…
The launch readiness date for the James Webb Space Telescope is moving to no earlier than Dec. 22 to allow for additional testing of the observatory, following a recent incident that occurred during Webb’s launch preparations. The incident occurred during operations at the satellite preparation facility in Kourou, French Guiana, performed under Arianespace overall responsibility. Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane…
– using an antiferromagnet for solid devices. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany, together with collaborators at the Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, have discovered, for the first time, a giant thermoelectric effect in an antiferromagnet. The study published in Nature Materials in a paper entitled “Giant anomalous Nernst signal in the antiferromagnet YbMnBi2” shows, surprisingly, that antiferromagnets can have the same value of the anomalous Nernst effect as…
To address the growing threat of cyberattacks on industrial control systems, a KAUST team including Fouzi Harrou, Wu Wang and led by Ying Sun has developed an improved method for detecting malicious intrusions. Internet-based industrial control systems are widely used to monitor and operate factories and critical infrastructure. In the past, these systems relied on expensive dedicated networks; however, moving them online has made them cheaper and easier to access. But it has also made them more vulnerable to attack,…
– thanks to a spiderweb… A team of researchers from TU Delft managed to design one of the world’s most precise microchip sensors; the device can function at room temperature – a ‘holy grail’ for quantum technologies and sensing. Combining nanotechnology and machine learning inspired by nature’s spiderwebs, they were able to make a nanomechanical sensor vibrate in extreme isolation from everyday noise. This breakthrough, published in Advanced Materials’ Rising Stars Issue, has large implications for the study of gravity…
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have used a suite of correlative, multimodal microscopy methods to visualise, for the first time, why perovskite materials are seemingly so tolerant of defects in their structure. Their findings were published today in Nature Nanotechnology. The most commonly used material for producing solar panels is crystalline silicon, but to achieve efficient energy conversion requires an energy-intensive and time-consuming production process to create the highly ordered wafer structure required. In the last decade, perovskite materials have…
New approach solves a persistent problem of intermittency that has hindered use of the tiny light emitters for biological imaging or quantum photonics. Quantum dots, discovered in the 1990s, have a wide range of applications and are perhaps best known for producing vivid colors in some high-end televisions. But for some potential uses, such as tracking biochemical pathways of a drug as it interacts with living cells, progress has been hampered by one seemingly uncontrollable characteristic: a tendency to blink…
Rice lab finds 2D perovskite compound has the right stuff to challenge bulkier products. Rice University engineers have achieved a new benchmark in the design of atomically thin solar cells made of semiconducting perovskites, boosting their efficiency while retaining their ability to stand up to the environment. The lab of Aditya Mohite of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering discovered that sunlight itself contracts the space between atomic layers in 2D perovskites enough to improve the material’s photovoltaic efficiency by up to 18%, an…
The Earlham Institute (EI) has boosted its capability in high-fidelity long-read sequencing with a twin set of the cutting-edge Pacific Biosciences Sequel IIe platforms to support the Earth BioGenome projects, providing the UK bioscience community with critical technologies for biodiversity genomics. As the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is gaining momentum to sequence, catalogue, and characterise the genomes of all eukaryotic biodiversity on Earth within the next ten years, global efforts are under way to deploy the technology and infrastructure capable…
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