Amazing Science

Researchers at the University of Houston have reported a new method for inducing superconductivity in non-superconducting materials, demonstrating a concept proposed decades ago but never proven.

The technique can also be used to boost the efficiency of known superconducting materials, suggesting a new way to advance the commercial viability of superconductors, said Paul C.W. Chu, chief scientist at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH (TcSUH) and corresponding author of a paper describing the work, published Oct. 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Superconductivity is used in many things, of which MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is perhaps the best known," said Chu, the physicist who holds the TLL Temple Chair of Science at UH. But the technology used in health care, utilities and other fields remains expensive, in part because it requires expensive cooling, which has limited widespread adoption, he said.

The research, demonstrating a new method to take advantage of assembled interfaces to induce superconductivity in the non-superconducting compound calcium iron arsenide, offers a new approach to finding superconductors that work at higher temperatures.

Superconducting materials conduct electric current without resistance, while traditional transmission materials lose as much as 10 percent of energy between the generating source and the end user. That means superconductors could allow utility companies to provide more electricity without increasing the amount of fuel used to generate electricity.

Modern experiment methods in biology can generate overwhelming amounts of raw data.  To manage this, scientists must create entirely new workflows and systems capable of merging large, disparate data sets and presenting them intuitively.  Arrowland is a combined -omics visualization tool that runs on a web browser, tablet, or cellphone.  It shows functional genomics data (fluxomics, metabolomics, proteomics and transcriptomics) together on a zoomable, searchable map, similar to the street maps used for navigation. In addition to providing a coherent layout for -omics measurements, the maps in Arrowland are also an easy-to-use reference for the relationships between the reactions, genes, and proteins involved in metabolism.

“At JBEI we have leveraged the insights provided by metabolic fluxes measured through 13C Metabolic Flux Analysis to make quantitative predictions for E. coli, and we shared these fluxes on Arrowland” said Hector Garcia Martin, Director of Quantitative Metabolic Modeling at JBEI. “By making this cloud-based interactive tool publicly available, our hope is to enable application of this tool in a wide range of fields, not only bioenergy. We are open to collaborations with the broader scientific community and industry.”

Setting itself apart from other available tools, Arrowland is beneficial for its clarity and ease of use. With its unique interface and presentation method, Arrowland makes the exploration of -omics data as intuitive as possible, on a platform that does not require special hardware or configuration.  Four different types of -omics data are integrated into the same map – an ability that no competing visualization platforms share – making important correlations and progressions easy to recognize and examine.

Arrowland is open-source and currently under active development, with plans to add more maps, editing and curation features, and is integrated with an open-source modeling package that JBEI plans to release separately, called the JBEI Quantitative Metabolic Modeling Library. For the time being, a sample data set from the flux profiles published in “A Method to Constrain Genome-Scale Models with 13C Labeling Data”, PLOS Computational Biology (Garcia Martin et al, 2015) can be viewed at http://public-arrowland.jbei.org.

Implanted medical devices like catheters, surgical mesh and dialysis systems are ideal surfaces on which bacteria can colonize and form hard-to-kill sheets called biofilms. Known as biofouling, this contamination of devices is responsible for more than half of the 1.7 million hospital-acquired infections in the United States each year.

In a report published in Biomaterials today, a team of scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University has demonstrated that an innovative, ultra-low adhesive coating prevented bacteria from attaching to surfaces treated with it, reducing bacterial adhesion by more than 98 percent in laboratory tests.

“Device related infections remain a significant problem in medicine, burdening society with millions of dollars in health care costs,” said Elliot Chaikof, MD, PhD, chair of the Roberta and Stephen R. Weiner Department of Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief at BIDMC and an associate faculty member at the Wyss Institute. “Antibiotics alone will not solve this problem. We need to use new approaches to minimize the risk of infection, and this strategy is a very important step in that direction.”

The self-healing slippery surface coatings – known as ‘slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces’ (SLIPS) – were developed by Joanna Aizenberg, PhD, a Wyss Institute core faculty member, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS at Harvard University.

Inspired by the carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plant that uses the slippery surface of its leaves to trap insects, Aizenberg engineered surface coatings that work to repel a variety of substances across a broad range of temperature, pressure and other environmental conditions. They are stable when exposed to UV light, and are low-cost and simple to manufacture. The current study is the first to demonstrate that SLIPS not only limit the ability of bacteria to adhere to surfaces, but also impede infection in an animal model.

“We are developing SLIPS recipes for a variety of medical applications by working with different medical-grade materials, ensuring the stability of the coating, and carefully pairing the non-fouling properties of the SLIPS materials to specific contaminates, environments and performance requirements,” said Aizenberg. “Here we have extended our repertoire and applied the SLIPS concept very convincingly to medical-grade lubricants, demonstrating its enormous potential in implanted devices prone to bacterial fouling and infection.”

Humans started brewing beer thousands of years ago, probably in ancient Egypt. Without any knowledge of the microorganisms powering their breweries, it's no surprise that the first tipplers worked blind, brewing with whatever wild yeasts found their way into the brewing process. But according to genetic analysis of over 100 yeasts used by industrial brewers today, brewers started unknowingly breeding the best yeasts sometime around the 1500s.

"Brewers were smart enough to realize that if they used the sediment found at the end of the fermentation process, if you used it to inoculate a new batch, the fermentation will go much quicker," explained study author Kevin Verstrepen, a yeast geneticist at the University of Leuven and VIB in Belgium. "And when you take the sediment from a really nice beer, the new batch will for the most part turn out pretty nice."

They didn't know it, but these early brewers were selecting the fittest beer yeasts, which settle down into sediment after they stop producing gas. By putting them into a new batch of beer (a process known as back-slopping), the brewers were keeping their favorite strains of yeast warm and well-fed, encouraging them to reproduce.

"It was something between an art and a science, because they didn't know what microbes were but knew the sediment, whatever it was, was important," Verstrepen said. "So then you had this Darwinian selection, with the gut feeling of the brewers working hand in hand with nature."

According to the study's analysis of 157 different strains of yeast used to make beer, wine, spirits, sake, bread and bioethanol, this process has caused the yeast used in beer brewing to grow more distinct from feral cousins than microbes used for other commercial fermentation.

According to a new study, a tiny skin patch may help treat peanut allergies.

Discovery of icy worlds in the distant solar system offer new clues in searches for hypothetical giant.

New solar system objects used to be a distraction for Konstantin Batygin, a planetary scientist and theorist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Each discovery added another complication to his computer models of the solar system, which twirl planetoids around the sun. But now, Batygin is eager to find more of the objects himself, and missed opportunities pain him. In late September and early October, cloudy skies foiled a 6-night run at the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. All you can do, he says, is “just sit quietly and wait for things to get slightly better.”

What drew Batygin into the hunt is the ultimate prize: a new planet, the first to be added to our solar system in more than a century. Colloquially called Planet Nine, this distant hypothetical world could have 10 times the mass of Earth and take 15,000 years to go around the sun. This past January, Batygin and Mike Brown, a Caltech astronomer, proposed that the giant could explain the peculiarly clustered orbits of six icy bodies beyond Neptune. Now, several teams, including Batygin and Brown’s, are racing to spot Planet Nine directly.

There is an ongoing 20,000-mile storm at Saturn's North Pole and it has intrigued scientists ever since it was discovered. But what's causing more confusion is that the 'hexagon' changed colors upon comparing images taken of Saturn's North Pole from 2012 to 2016. From the images released by NASA, it is evident the once blue color turned into yellowish-gold.

The Cassini spacecraft observing the planet since 2004 captured the images. The change appeared to happen gradually based on the observation launched since Nov. 2012 up to Sept. 2016.

The mystery hexagon is a cloud pattern in Saturn's northern hemisphere where an evident weather activity is taking place. Experts believe that the shape could have been caused by the varying wind speed in Saturn.

Saturn, the second largest planet in the Solar System next to Jupiter, is also a gas planet. It is composed mainly of hydrogen, methane, and helium. But despite the surprising changes, astronomers and scientists already offered some potential causes of the unusual phenomenon.

"In particular the change from a bluish color to a more golden hue may be due to the increased production of photochemical hazes in the atmosphere as the north pole approaches summer solstice in May 2017," a NASA official said in a statement.

IBM recently announced a new IBM Watson Data Platform that combines the world’s fastest data ingestion engine touting speeds up to 100+GB/second with cloud data source, data science, and cognitive API services. IBM is also making IBM Watson Machine Learning Service more intuitive with a self-service interface.

According to Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President of IBM Analytics “Watson Data Platform applies cognitive assistance for creating machine learning models, making it far faster to get from data to insight. It also, provides one place to access machine learning services and languages, so that anyone, from an app developer to the Chief Data Officer, can collaborate seamlessly to make sense of data, ask better questions, and more effectively operationalize insight.”

For more information or a free trial of IBM Watson Data Platform, Data Science Experience, Watson APIs, or Bluemix, the following resources are useful:

• http://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/watson-data-platform/
• http://datascience.ibm.com/blog/shiny-a-data-scientist-best-friend/
• http://datascience.ibm.com/blog/open-beta-available-for-everyone-2/
• http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/deeper-shade-simplicity-ibm-insight-world-watson-2016
• https://apsportal.ibm.com/analytics

Scientists have developed a new compound that's effective at inhibiting the growth of multiple types of cancer models in the lab – slowing as many as a quarter of all known types of cancer. The molecule, called S63845, works by blocking the protein MCL1, which many different types of cancer cells rely on to grow. And without access to MCL1, the cancer cells die off.

The discovery could help researchers fight blood cancers such as acute myeloid leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. Solid tumors – including melanoma and cancers of the lung and breast – could also see new treatments.

"MCL1 (a bcl2 family member) is important for many cancers because it is a pro-survival protein that allows the cancerous cells to evade the process of programmed cell death that normally removes cancer cells from the body," says one of the team, Guillaume Lessene from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia. "Extensive studies performed in a variety of cancer models have shown that S63845 potently targets cancer cells dependent on MCL1 for their survival."

Cancerous cells are difficult for the body's immune system to kill, because they can quickly evolve and spread faster than our defences can keep up, and can also evade what's called apoptosis – a form of programmed cell death.

Blasting them with chemotherapy drugs or radiation can be an effective way to combat cancer cells, but these techniques usually take healthy cells along with them, and cause debilitating side effects.

What makes S63845 so promising is that, in addition to cutting off cancer's life support system, it can be given at doses that don't harm normal cells, the team suggests. The compound is the latest development in a new class of anti-cancer drugs called BH3 mimetics, which target a family of proteins that cancers rely on to sidestep and resist programmed cell death.

"BH3 mimetics inhibit a group of proteins known as the 'pro-survival BCL-2 proteins'," says Lessene. "MCL1 is a member of this protein family, and inhibiting it activates the process of programmed cell death."

It's worth pointing out that research is still at a pre-clinical stage, and the researchers need to run further tests on the compound before turning it into a drug that can be taken safely by human patients. But the early signs are very encouraging.

The researchers, from Bristol University, found the leaves only develop this color when put in almost dark conditions - and in bright light the sheen slowly disappears.

Begonias with striking blue leaves may represent a next step in plant evolution that puts them ahead of their ordinary green neighbors, research suggests. The blue color results from a super-efficient form of photosynthesis that allows them to use light other plants reject. These findings could help scientists develop light-harvesting devices to make better electronics.

The researchers looked at Begonia pavonina - a flower found under the thick canopies of tropical forests in Malaysia. It has iridescent blue leaves because of its unusual chloroplasts, known as iridoplasts, in its surface layers. These contain regularly spaced stacks of three to four 'thylakoids' - which resemble a photonic crystal and strongly reflect wavelengths of light between 430 and 560 nanometers. This is what causes the leaves' blue iridescence. The thylakoids look very similar to the artificial structures commonly used to make miniature lasers that control the flow of light.

In the Malaysian forests, the small amount of light that reaches the plant's leaves is mainly at the green-red end of the spectrum. The iridoplasts concentrate these specific wavelengths onto the plant's photosynthetic apparatus - increasing the efficiency of its photosynthesis by five to ten per cent.

The study, published in Nature Plants, rules out a previous popular hypothesis that it was to to deter predators. 'The real novelty of what the begonia is doing is combining the light harvesting mechanism with the photonic structure - light is being both structurally manipulated and harvested with high levels of quantum efficiency within the same material,' Dr Heather Whitney, from Bristol University, said.

The plants - including species commonly grown as houseplants or in gardens - have long been using a special form of nanotechnology called photonics to create structures in their leaves to help them harvest light. 'We discovered under the microscope, individual chloroplasts in these leaves reflected blue light brightly, almost like a mirror,' said Matt Jacobs, a PhD student at Bristol University.

'Looking in more detail by using a technique known as electron microscopy, we found a striking difference between the 'blue' chloroplasts found in the begonias, also known as "iridoplasts" due to their brilliant blue iridescent coloration, and those found in other plants.

Biological macromolecules function in highly crowded cellular environments. The structure and dynamics of proteins and nucleic acids are well characterized in vitro, but in vivo crowding effects remain unclear. Using molecular dynamics simulations of a comprehensive atomistic model cytoplasm scientists found that protein-protein interactions may destabilize native protein structures, whereas metabolite interactions may induce more compact states due to electrostatic screening. Protein-protein interactions also resulted in significant variations in reduced macromolecular diffusion under crowded conditions, while metabolites exhibited significant two-dimensional surface diffusion and altered protein-ligand binding that may reduce the effective concentration of metabolites and ligands in vivo.

Metabolic enzymes showed weak non-specific association in cellular environments attributed to solvation and entropic effects. These effects are expected to have broad implications for the in vivo functioning of biomolecules.

This work is a first step towards physically realistic in silico whole-cell models that connect molecular with cellular biology.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.19274.001

In 2014 at the Museums and the Web conferences in Baltimore, Maryland, and Florence, Italy, a group of data scientists presented a report on how two thousand museums were relating on Twitter. After our presentation, they decided to continue their investigation in two directions: The first are the case studies. They wanted to analyze some museums' Twitter environments, e.g., how museums are relating to their followers, how they form different communities defined by underlying relationships, the growth of the network around a museum, detection of influencers, etc. They also wanted to study how to use this information in order to design better social-media strategies for an improved and more realistic assessment of the work and actions’ results on Twitter.

Case studies from London's Victoria & Albert, Turin's Palazzo Madama, and Barcelona's Center for Contemporary Culture have chosen museums with different Twitter strategies, countries, languages, and follower bases ranging from 7,000 at the time of writing this abstract (Palazzo Madama) to the 450,000 from V&A. The goal was to have different situations represented and run a useful research for museums of different sizes. The second direction nowadays is how museum professionals are interacting with each other on Twitter thanks to the use of hashtags, like #musetech, in order to share information, questions, and experiences.

Axel Visel, a genomicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, used python and boa genomes to track down the cause of leglessness. He and his colleagues compared the genomes of those snakes with the genomes of snakes such as vipers and cobras, which evolved more recently and have no leg remnants at all. They noticed that the Sonic hedgehog (SHH) enhancer had many deletions and mutations.

They then showed that a mutated SHH enhancer does indeed affect leg growth by testing its influence on mouse limbs. They replaced the rodent’s own version of the enhancer with the snake version using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique. They also repeated the experiment, subbing in the same enhancer from a fish and, later, from a human. Even with the fish and human enhancers, the mouse legs developed normally, demonstrating that enhancers from other species still work in the mice. But with the snake enhancer, the legs turned into little nubs,

Visel and his colleagues report their whole study in a current issue of Cell. Finally, when researchers put the missing DNA into the snake enhancer and then put the modified enhancer back into mice, their legs grew just fine.

“The Visel paper is a beautiful study; a tour de force that takes functional genomics using CRISPR-Cas9 to a new level,” Cohn says. Visel says that Cohn’s experiments with snake embryos “independently confirm what we saw in our mouse models. It's very elegant work.”

But Cohn, Visel, and Hanken caution that changes in this enhancer are not the whole story behind the evolution of the serpentine form.

Recently, for example, other researchers discovered that another enhancer was responsible for snakes’ extra ribs and long backbones. And it’s possible that the Sonic hedgehog enhancer was not the first step in leg loss, Hanken says. “But it’s certainly a major player.”

First fossil evidence of a dinosaur brain doesn’t suggest they were particularly smart.

A decade ago, a fossil hunter was combing the beach in southeastern England when he found a strange, brown pebble. The surface of it caught his eye: It was smooth and strangely undulating, and also slightly crinkly in some places. That oddly textured pebble, scientists report here today at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, is actually an endocast—an impression preserved in the rock—that represents the first known evidence of fossilized brain tissue of a dinosaur (likely a close relative of Iguanodon, a large, herbivorous type of dinosaur that lived about 133 million years ago).

Human brains and bird brains are packed tightly into the brain case, so that their convolutions leave an impression of the inside of the case. But dinosaur (and reptile) brains are more loosely fitted; they are surrounded within the brain case by membranes called meninges, tough sheaths that protect and support the brain. So an endocast of a dinosaur brain might be expected to show those structures—and it did (structures above the green line, above). But beneath them, remineralized in calcium phosphate, the researchers also spied a pattern of tiny capillaries and other cortical tissues—the sort of fabric you’d expect for the cortex of a brain. That those textures were pressed up against the brain case doesn’t necessarily mean that dinosaurs were bigger-brained and smarter than we thought, however: Instead, the dinosaur had likely simply toppled over and been preserved upside down, its brain tissue preserved by surrounding acidic, low-oxygen waters that pickled and hardened the membranes and tissues, providing a template for mineralization. The structure of the brain, studied with scanning electron microscopes, reveal similarities to both birds and crocodiles. It’s the first known evidence of such a dinosaur brain—but now that they know to look for it, the researchers say, they might go back and look at other endocranial casts of dinosaurs to see if they might contain traces of other such structures. The team also reports its findings today in a Special Publication of the Geological Society of London. 

They could do wonders for medicine, chemistry, banking and information-gathering. There's just one problem...

Quantum mechanics, Carl Sagan once observed, is so strange that "common sense is almost useless in approaching it." Scientists still don't understand exactly why matter behaves as it does at the quantum level. Yet they're getting better at exploiting its peculiar dynamics -- in ways that may soon upend the technology business.

One of the most interesting applications is in computing. In theory, quantum computers could take advantage of odd subatomic interactions to solve certain problems far faster than a conventional machine could. Although a full-scale quantum computer is still years off, scientists have lately made a lot of progress on the materials, designs and methods needed to make one.

And that could have some striking benefits. Quantum computers could simulate how atoms and molecules behave, to the great advantage of chemists and drug designers. They could solve optimization problems -- say, how to efficiently route airplane traffic -- far faster than current technology can. They could speed advances in artificial intelligence, improve sensors, and lead to the design of stronger and lighter industrial materials.

Google Brain has created two artificial intelligences that evolved their own cryptographic algorithm to protect their messages from a third AI, which was trying to evolve its own method to crack the AI-generated crypto. The study was a success: the first two AIs learnt how to communicate securely from scratch.

The Google Brain team (which is based out in Mountain View and is separate from Deep Mind in London) started with three fairly vanilla neural networks called Alice, Bob, and Eve. Each neural network was given a very specific goal: Alice had to send a secure message to Bob; Bob had to try and decrypt the message; and Eve had to try and eavesdrop on the message and try to decrypt it. Alice and Bob have one advantage over Eve: they start with a shared secret key (i.e. this is symmetric encryption).

Importantly, the AIs were not told how to encrypt stuff, or what crypto techniques to use: they were just given a loss function (a failure condition), and then they got on with it. In Eve's case, the loss function was very simple: the distance, measured in correct and incorrect bits, between Alice's original input plaintext and its guess. For Alice and Bob the loss function was a bit more complex: if Bob's guess (again measured in bits) was too far from the original input plaintext, it was a loss; for Alice, if Eve's guesses are better than random guessing, it's a loss. And thus an adversarial generative network (GAN) was created.