Human intestinal organoids grown from stem cells used to model congenital disorder in babies. Scientists at Cincinnati Children’s used human intestinal organoids grown from stem cells to discover how our bodies control the absorption of nutrients from the food we eat. They further found that one hormone might be able to reverse a congenital disorder in babies who cannot adequately absorb nutrients and need intravenous feeding to survive. Heather A. McCauley, PhD, a research associate at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical…
Fairy circles are one of nature’s greatest enigmas and most visually stunning phenomena. An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has now, for the first time, collected detailed data to show that Alan Turing’s model explains the striking vegetation patterns of the Australian fairy circles. In addition, the researchers showed that the grasses that make up these patterns act as “eco-engineers” to modify their own hostile and arid environment, thus keeping the ecosystem functioning. The results were…
Widespread fungal disease in plants can be controlled with a commercially available chemical that has been primarily used in medicine until now. This discovery was made by scientists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the University of the State of Paraná in Brazil. In a comprehensive experiment the team has uncovered a new metabolic pathway that can be disrupted with this chemical, thus preventing many known plant fungi from invading the host plant. The team reported on their study…
The search for new, more efficient materials to harvest solar energy is a major research focus around the world. Until now, silicon has been the material of choice for solar cells – but scientists are trying to develop far more efficient and cost-effective alternatives. One promising material is pentacene, an organic molecule which converts solar energy extremely well when combined with certain other molecules. Pentacene stands out because of its ultrafast ‘singlet fission’ – a process which scientists hope to…
On Earth, auroras, also called northern lights, have always fascinated people. An international consortium involving the University of Bern has now discovered such auroras in the ultraviolet wavelength range at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Chury for short. This phenomenon was detected thanks to the analysis of data from the European Space Agency ESA’s Rosetta mission. In the aurora borealis on Earth, electrically charged particles of the solar wind move along the Earth’s magnetic field. At high latitudes, these strike nitrogen and oxygen…
Scientists from Kiel find a new mechanism for the stabilization of skyrmions Tiny magnetic whirls that can occur in materials – so-called skyrmions – hold high promises for novel electronic devices or magnetic memory in which they are used as bits to store information. A fundamental prerequisite for any application is the stability of these magnetic whirls. A research team of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of Kiel University has now demonstrated that so far neglected magnetic interactions…
Fralin Biomedical Research Institute scientists’ finding has implications for brain diseases. Hard skulls help protect our brains from physical injuries. In addition to a tough outer shell, brains have internal defenses, including a powerful shield called the blood-brain barrier that defends brain cells from substances in the bloodstream that are toxic and dangerous to nerve cells. If the blood-brain barrier is breached, then health problems arise. Now, in a study with potential impacts on a variety of neurological diseases, Virginia…
Physicists from Lancaster University have established why objects moving through superfluid helium-3 lack a speed limit in a continuation of earlier Lancaster research. Helium-3 is a rare isotope of helium, in which one neutron is missing. It becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures, enabling unusual properties such as a lack of friction for moving objects. It was thought that the speed of objects moving through superfluid helium-3 was fundamentally limited to the critical Landau velocity, and that exceeding this speed…
An international team of researchers have found a way to refine and reliably produce an unpredictable and hard-to-control material that could impact environmental conservation, energy and consumer electronics. The material, Molybdenum Disulfide (MoS2), holds tremendous potential for numerous applications in energy storage, water treatment, gas, chemical and light sensing. But high costs and fabrications challenges have held back wider use. “There are many different ways to fabricate this material, but no one has yet been able to make it in…
Kiel research team provides new insights into the role of the eisosomes as membrane building blocks in fungi The red mould Neurospora crassa belongs to the group of sac fungi and serves researchers as a common model organism that allows a comparatively simple analysis of genetic information and the functions associated with it. The fungus has been the subject of scientific research for decades and its genetic information contained in around 10,000 genes has been completely decoded since the beginning…
Despite climate change being most obvious to people as unseasonably warm winter days or melting glaciers, as much as 95 percent of the extra heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse gases is held in the world’s oceans. For that reason, monitoring the temperature of ocean waters has been a priority for climate scientists, and now Caltech researchers have discovered that seismic rumblings on the seafloor can provide them with another tool for doing that. In a new paper publishing in…
Study: Pointed tips on aluminum ‘octopods’ increase catalytic reactivity. Points matter when designing nanoparticles that drive important chemical reactions using the power of light. Researchers at Rice University’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) have long known that a nanoparticle’s shape affects how it interacts with light, and their latest study shows how shape affects a particle’s ability to use light to catalyze important chemical reactions. In a comparative study, LANP graduate students Lin Yuan and Minhan Lou and their colleagues studied…
Self-induced ultrafast demagnetization limits the amount of light diffracted from magnetic samples at soft x-ray energies. Free electron X-ray lasers deliver intense ultrashort pulses of x-rays, which can be used to image nanometer-scale objects in a single shot. When the x-ray wavelength is tuned to an electronic resonance, magnetization patterns can be made visible. When using increasingly intense pulses, however, the magnetization image fades away. The mechanism responsible for this loss in resonant magnetic scattering intensity has now been clarified….
UBC researchers say yes Breadfruit is sustainable, environmentally friendly and a high-production crop. A fruit used for centuries in countries around the world is getting the nutritional thumbs-up from a team of British Columbia researchers. Breadfruit, which grows in abundance in tropical and South Pacific countries, has long been a staple in the diet of many people. The fruit can be eaten when ripe, or it can be dried and ground up into a flour and repurposed into many types…
Theorists publish improved prediction for the tiny difference in kaon decays observed by experiments. -An international collaboration of theoretical physicists–including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC)–has published a new calculation relevant to the search for an explanation of the predominance of matter over antimatter in our universe. The collaboration, known as RBC-UKQCD, also includes scientists from CERN (the European particle physics laboratory), Columbia University, the University of Connecticut,…
Stripe rust is one of the most destructive wheat diseases in the world, especially in the United States. While the disease can be controlled by chemicals, those may be harmful to humans, animals, and the environment and the application can cost millions of dollars to wheat production. Rather than use chemicals, many farmers would prefer to grow wheat varieties that resist stripe rust and the development of such varieties is a top priority for wheat breeding programs. To help develop…
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