The New Siberian Islands were the birthplace of the MOSAiC floe: the sea ice in which the research vessel Polarstern is now drifting through the Arctic was…
Tiny, 3D printed cubes of plastic, with intricate fractal voids built into them, have proven to be effective at dissipating shockwaves, potentially leading to…
The global economy’s demand for lithium-ion batteries will be rising sharply in future. Electric cars depend on them, as do laptops, smartphones and power…
Especially activities in the field of artificial intelligence, like teaching robots to walk or precise automatic image recognition, demand ever more powerful,…
The Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) of TU Dresden with its bioinformatics group and the spin-off PharmAI GmbH participate in such a competition – the so-called…
What happens inside a battery at the microscopic level during charging and discharging processes? A team of scientists led by Prof. Dr. Gunther Wittstock of…
In all living organisms, gene expression is a two-stage process: First, the genetic information stored in the DNA is used as template to synthesize ribonucleic…
More than 600,000 people worldwide have fallen victim to the lung disease COVID-19 so far, which is caused by the SARS coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). In order to…
With advances in genome sequencing, cancer treatments have increasingly sought to leverage the idea of “synthetic lethality,” exploiting cancer-specific…
After exactly 300 days of drifting with the MOSAiC floe, the international team around Expedition Leader Markus Rex on Wednesday, 29 July 2020, started the…
The geometry of an object indicates its shape or the relationship of its parts to each other. Did you know that the electrons in solids also have geometric…
To combat the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, research has been stepped up in search of new vaccines and treatments. To enter the cells, the virus needs the spike protein on its surface. Researchers of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut in co-operation with some research groups in Germany (EMBL at Heidelberg, MPI for Biophysics at Frankfurt) have analysed the spike protein in its natural environment using high resolution imaging and computer-assisted methods. In doing so, they have discovered a degree of mobility of the spikes on…
Imagine reading by the light of an exploded star, brighter than a full moon – it might be fun to think about, but this scene is the prelude to a disaster when the radiation devastates life as we know it. Killer cosmic rays from nearby supernovae could be the culprit behind at least one mass extinction event, researchers said, and finding certain radioactive isotopes in Earth’s rock record could confirm this scenario. A new study led by University of Illinois,…
Electrons are able to move within molecules, for example when they are excited from outside or in the course of a chemical reaction. For the first time, scientists have now succeeded in studying the first few dozen attoseconds of this electron movement in a liquid. To understand how chemical reactions begin, chemists have been using super-slow motion experiments for years to study the very first moments of a reaction. These days, measurements with a resolution of a few dozen attoseconds…
A team of researchers at University of Toronto Engineering and University of Michigan have modified an enzyme from bacteria to promote regrowth of nerve tissue. A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and the University of Michigan has redesigned and enhanced a natural enzyme that shows promise in promoting the regrowth of nerve tissue following injury. Their new version is more stable than the protein that occurs in nature, and could lead to new treatments for reversing nerve…
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is the most common muscle disease in children and is passed on by X-linked recessive inheritance. Characteristic is a progressive muscular atrophy. The disease often results in death before the third decade of life. Researchers of the Universities of Maynooth (Ireland) and Bonn have found a connection between dystrophic muscles and the lymphatic system in mice with Duchenne disease. The results have now been published in the journal “iScience”. The muscular atrophy in Duchenne disease is…
Stem cell technologies are revolutionizing the biomedical field. Scientists at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) in collaboration with research partners of the Cluster of Excellence “Multiscale Bioimaging” (MBExC) and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease (DZNE) combined induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and their deep knowledge in the bioengineering of human organoids to for the first time bioengineer the human brain at the macroscale level with comprehensive network function. The so called Bioengineered Neuronal Organoids (BENOs) recapitulate important morphological…
Radio astronomers have detected jets of hot gas blasted out by a black hole in the galaxy at the heart of the Phoenix Galaxy Cluster, located 5.9 billion light-years away in the constellation Phoenix. This is an important result for understanding the coevolution of galaxies, gas, and black holes in galaxy clusters. Galaxies are not distributed randomly in space. Through mutual gravitational attraction, galaxies gather together to form collections known as clusters. The space between galaxies is not entirely empty….
Analyzing documents faster using artificial intelligence from Fraunhofer The flood of documents created every day in business and in society as a whole poses an enormous challenge. Information from countless different sources must be sorted, processed and evaluated. And this issue isn’t limited to companies: public authorities, research institutions and hospitals are affected, too. The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS has developed solutions that classify all kinds of documents and analyze their text content. The key…
The hemoglobin in the red blood cells ensures that our body cells receive sufficient oxygen. When the blood pigment is broken down, “heme” is produced, which in turn can influence the protein cocktail in the blood. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now discovered in complex detective work that the “activated protein C” (APC) can be commandeered by heme. At the same time, APC can also reduce the toxic effect of heme. Perspectively, the findings may provide the basis…