The chemical ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is the fuel that powers all life. ATP is found in all known forms of life, where it provides energy to drive muscle contraction, impulse propagation and chemical synthesis. Despite ATP’s central role, the structure of the enzyme generating ATP, F1Fo-ATP synthase, in mammals, including humans, has not been known so far. Now, Leonid Sazanov and his group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) report the first complete structure of the…
The industrial conversion of nitrogen to ammonium provides fertiliser for agriculture. Würzburg chemists have now achieved this conversion at room temperature and low pressure using only light elements. Humankind is reliant on the ammonium in synthetic fertiliser for food. However, producing ammonia from nitrogen is extremely energy-intensive and requires the use of transition metals. Researchers from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, have now achieved the conversion of nitrogen to ammonium at room temperature and low pressure without the need…
A team of researchers headed by Münster University physiologist Prof. Wolfgang Linke has shown that oxidative stress, in combination with the extension of the heart walls, triggers a change in cardiac stiffness. A key role is played by the giant protein titin. This newly discovered mechanism is relevant, for example, in cases of an acute heart attack or chronic heart disease. The results have been published in the journal “PNAS”. A healthy heart beats 50 to 100 times a minute…
The forest canopy, the closed vegetation cover consisting of treetops, is rapidly declining according to a research team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna. The team used satellite images, to create the first high-resolution map of canopy openings in Europes forests and reached the conclusion that the canopy of more than 36 million forest areas has been lost over the past 30 years. Rupert Seidl (Professor of Ecosystem…
Interplay between fungi and bacteria impaired Jena. Treatment with antibiotics has a lasting effect on the microbiome in the digestive system. While the bacterial flora is largely regenerated within 30 to 90 days after drug treatment, its interaction with resident fungi changes. In a combination of bioinformatic analyses and laboratory experiments, an international team of researchers has shown now that the peaceful coexistence of bacteria and fungi changes into a competitive situation when they are treated with antibiotics. This could…
During a research stay in the highlands of Colombia conducted as part of her doctorate, Charlotte Hopfe, PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Scheibel at the Biomaterials research group at the University of Bayreuth, has discovered and zoologically described a new species of spider. The previously unknown arachnids are native to the central cordillera, not far from the Pacific coast, at an altitude of over 3,500 meters above sea-level. In the magazine PLOS ONE, the scientist from…
UV radiation modifies DNA also far away from the entry point of light – publication in Angewandte Chemie. Ultraviolet light endangers the integrity of human genetic information and may cause skin cancer. For the first time, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have demonstrated that DNA damage may also occur far away from the point of incidence of the radiation. They produced an artificially modeled DNA sequence in new architecture and succeeded in detecting DNA damage at a distance…
In a very unusual way, the electrical and magnetic properties of a particular crystal are linked together – the phenomenon was discovered and explained at TU Wien (Vienna). Electricity and magnetism are closely related: Power lines generate a magnetic field, rotating magnets in a generator produce electricity. However, the phenomenon is much more complicated: electrical and magnetic properties of certain materials are also coupled with each other. Electrical properties of some crystals can be influenced by magnetic fields – and…
Scientists from the max Planck institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Stuttgart and IMS CHIPS develope ultrasound projector on base of a CMOS chip Scientists of the Micro, Nano and Molecular Systems Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Stuttgart have developed a digital chip that can be used to project movies with ultrasound. The researchers report on this in an article in the magazine “Nature Communications”. The…
Neurons use homeostatic mechanisms to maintain stability despite experience-dependent network alterations. Neural circuits constantly undergo plastic modifications in order to store information, and quickly adapt to changes in the environment. This poses a fundamental challenge: despite the constant change in connectivity between neurons, for example during learning, neural circuits drive the generation of robust behaviors which can be executed with remarkable precision, for example, riding a bike. In a new study published in PNAS, an international team of scientists led…
Harvard researchers become first to cool polyatomic molecule using light. After firing the lasers and bombarding the molecules with light, the scientists gathered around the camera to check the results. By seeing how far these cold molecules expanded they would know almost instantly whether they were on the right track or not to charting new paths in quantum science by being the first to cool (aka slow down) a particularly complex, six-atom molecule using nothing but light. “When we started…
Plant research: publication in Current Biology If you open up a pea pod, you will find that all of the peas inside are the same size and the same distance apart. The same is true of princess beans, runner beans and soybeans as well as various other peas and beans, and it also applies to non-pulses. This is surprising because both the seed size and number and the pod size differ substantially from one variety to the next. A team…
Ling Li has a lesson in one of his mechanical engineering courses on how brittle materials like calcium carbonate behave under stress. In it, he takes a piece of chalk composed of the compound and snaps it in half to show his students the edge of one of the broken pieces. The break is blunt and straight. Then, he twists a second piece, which results in sharper shards broken at a 45-degree angle, indicating the more dangerous direction of tensile…
A soil scientist from RUDN University found out that the resources of organic phosphorus in the soils of the Tibetan Plateau could be depleted because of global warming. To do so, he compared phosphorus content in the soils from the Tibetan Plateau that has a cold climate and from the warmer Loess Plateau. The results of the study were published in the Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment journal. Phosphorus is the second most vital element for plants after nitrogen. In the…
Researchers isolated molecules present in the larvae of a blue light-emitting fungus gnat that inhabits the Appalachians; the study will help elucidate human diseases and could lead to novel biotech applications. Molecules belonging to an almost unknown bioluminescent system found in larvae of the fungus gnat Orfelia fultoni (subfamily Keroplatinae) have been isolated for the first time by researchers at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The small fly is one of…
As missions like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, TESS and Kepler continue to provide insights into the properties of exoplanets (planets around other stars), scientists are increasingly able to piece together what these planets look like, what they are made of, and if they could be habitable or even inhabited. In a new study published recently in The Planetary Science Journal, a team of researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Chicago have determined that some carbon-rich exoplanets,…
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