Amazing Science

New research indicates that the common fruit fly can travel tens of kilometers in a single flight when in search of food.

In 2005, an ultramarathon runner ran continuously 560 kilometers (350 miles) in 80 hours, without sleeping or stopping. This distance was roughly 324,000 times the runner's body length. Yet this extreme feat pales in comparison to the relative distances that fruit flies can travel in a single flight, according to new research from Caltech.

Caltech scientists have now discovered that fruit flies can fly up to 15 kilometers (about 9 miles) in a single journey--6 million times their body length, or the equivalent of over 10,000 kilometers for the average human. In comparison to body length, this is further than many migratory species of birds can fly in a day. To discover this, the team conducted experiments in a dry lakebed in California's Mojave Desert, releasing flies and luring them into traps containing fermenting juice in order to determine their top speeds.

The research was conducted in the laboratory of Michael Dickinson, Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering and Aeronautics and executive officer for biology and biological engineering. A paper describing the study appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 20, 2021.

Video is here

A single 'super photon' made up of many thousands of individual light particles: About ten years ago, researchers produced such an extreme aggregate state for the first time. Researchers report a new, previously unknown phase transition in the optical Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a overdamped phase.

The first of two studies examined whether genetic changes associated with exposure to radiation from the 1986 nuclear power plant accident were passed from parent to child. The second study documented the genetic changes in thyroid tumors from people exposed as children or fetuses to radiation from the accident.

In two landmark studies, researchers have used cutting-edge genomic tools to investigate the potential health effects of exposure to ionizing radiation, a known carcinogen, from the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. One study found no evidence that radiation exposure to parents resulted in new genetic changes being passed from parent to child. The second study documented the genetic changes in the tumors of people who developed thyroid cancer after being exposed as children or fetuses to the radiation released by the accident.

The findings, published around the 35th anniversary of the disaster, are from international teams of investigators led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. The studies were published online in Science on April 22.  

"Scientific questions about the effects of radiation on human health have been investigated since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and have been raised again by Chernobyl and by the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami in Fukushima, Japan," said Stephen J. Chanock, M.D., director of NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG). "In recent years, advances in DNA sequencing technology have enabled us to begin to address some of the important questions, in part through comprehensive genomic analyses carried out in well-designed epidemiological studies."

The Chernobyl accident exposed millions of people in the surrounding region to radioactive contaminants. Studies have provided much of today’s knowledge about cancers caused by radiation exposures from nuclear power plant accidents. The new research builds on this foundation using next-generation DNA sequencing and other genomic characterization tools to analyze biospecimens from people in Ukraine who were affected by the disaster.

New research suggests that rocks in the Martian crust could produce the same kind of chemical energy that supports microbial life deep beneath Earth’s surface. As NASA's Perseverance rover begins its search for ancient life on the surface of Mars, a new study suggests that the Martian subsurface.

As NASA’s Perseverance rover begins its search for ancient life on the surface of Mars, a new study suggests that the Martian subsurface might be a good place to look for possible present-day life on the Red Planet. The study, published in the journal Astrobiology, looked at the chemical composition of Martian meteorites — rocks blasted off of the surface of Mars that eventually landed on Earth. The analysis determined that those rocks, if in consistent contact with water, would produce the chemical energy needed to support microbial communities similar to those that survive in the unlit depths of the Earth. Because these meteorites may be representative of vast swaths of the Martian crust, the findings suggest that much of the Mars subsurface could be habitable.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago have demonstrated a new technique based on quantum technology that will advance the search for dark matter, the invisible stuff that accounts for 85% of all matter in the universe.

The collaboration has developed superconducting versions of devices called qubits that will be able to detect the weak signals emitted by two kinds of hypothetical subatomic particles that could reside in an invisible but ubiquitous part of the universe called the dark sector. One is called an axion, a leading dark matter candidate. The other is called a hidden photon, a particle that possibly interacts with the photons—particles of light—of the visible universe.

The technique now demonstrated by the Fermilab-University of Chicago team is 36 times more sensitive to the particles than the quantum limit, a benchmark of conventional quantum measurements, enabling searches for dark matter to proceed 1,000 times faster.

Using light to detect dark particles

In the technique, the qubits are designed to detect the photons that would be produced when dark matter particles interact with an electromagnetic field. The benefit of using qubits as detectors instead of the conventional technology lies in the way they interact with photons.

The key to the technique's sensitivity is its ability to eliminate false-positive readings. Conventional techniques destroy the photons they measure. But the new technique can probe the photon without destroying it. Making repeated measurements of the same photon, over the course of its 500-microsecond lifetime, provides insurance against erroneous readings.

Proteins are large, highly complex and naturally occurring molecules can be found in all living organisms. These unique substances, which consist of amino acids joined together by peptide bonds to form long chains, can have a variety of functions and properties.

The specific order in which different amino acids are arranged to form a given protein ultimately determines the protein's 3D structure, physicochemical properties and molecular function. While scientists have been studying proteins for decades, designing proteins that elicit specific chemical reactions has so far proved to be highly challenging.

Researchers at Biomatter Designs, Vilnius University in Lithuania, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have recently developed ProteinGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) that can process and 'learn' different natural protein sequences. This unique network, presented in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, subsequently uses the information it acquired to generate new functional protein sequences.

"Proteins are long sequences of amino acids that make processes occur in all living systems, inducing humans," Aleksej Zelezniak, Associate professor at Chalmers University of Technology who led the study, told Phys.org. " Proteins are commonly used in our daily lives and are included in countless products, from washing powders to therapies against cancer and coronavirus. They are made of 20 amino acids that are arranged in different sequences and their order determines a protein's function."

Creating functional protein sequences is a very challenging task, as even a slight alteration in a given sequence can make a protein non-functional. Non-functional proteins can have harmful and undesirable effects, for instance causing humans or animals to develop cancer or other diseases.

Researchers reporting in ACS’ Nano Letters have transformed copper nanowires into metal foams that could be used in facemasks and air filtration systems. The foams filter efficiently, decontaminate easily for reuse and are recyclable.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic highlights the severe health risks posed by deep submicrometer-sized airborne viruses and particulates in the spread of infectious diseases. There is an urgent need for the development of efficient, durable, and reusable filters for this size range. Scientists now report the realization of efficient particulate filters using nanowire-based low-density metal foams which combine extremely large surface areas with excellent mechanical properties. The metal foams exhibit outstanding filtration efficiencies (>96.6%) in the PM0.3 regime, with the potential for further improvement. Their mechanical stability, light weight, chemical and radiation resistance, ease of cleaning and reuse, and recyclability further make such metal foams promising filters for combating COVID-19 and other types of airborne particulates.

It will be challenging for us to nurture and grow plants when we finally start a colony on the red planet. Researchers on the international space station made an exciting discovery that might make things a little easier.

Scientists aboard the ISS have been performing a wide range of scientific research for many years, engaging with the unique zero-gravity conditions that the station provides. Part of their focus lies in sustaining plants in extreme environments and searching for biotechnological tools to aid in growing them. 

Occupants have been surveying the space station for the presence and persistence of the microorganisms for six years on several locations (among which the special plant growth chamber) and found four strains of bacteria belonging to a family called 'Methylobacteriaceae' at separate locations on the station over two back-to-back flights. One of these strains was already known, but the other three were previously undiscovered. The newly discovered bacteria are rod-shaped and capable of movement. Genetic examination revealed that the trio is closely linked to the known Methylobacterium indicum.

Researchers think these three newly discovered strains might be useful in helping vegetation grow on Mars because Methylobacterium species are known to promote plant growth. They are good at increasing the solubility of poorly water–soluble substances with surface-active agents (Solubilization). They are also known to help convert molecular nitrogen into ammonia or related or related nitrogenous compounds in soil (Known as Nitrogen fixation). On top of that, Methylobacterium species are capable of engaging in biocontrol actions against plant pathogens.

The rate of sea-level rise in the 20th century along much of the U.S. Atlantic coast was the fastest in 2,000 years, and southern New Jersey had the fastest rates, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The global rise in sea-level from melting ice and warming oceans from 1900 to 2000 led to a rate that's more than twice the average for the years 0 to 1800—the most significant change, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications.

The study for the first time looked at the phenomena that contributed to sea-level change over 2,000 years at six sites along the coast (in Connecticut, New York City, New Jersey and North Carolina), using a sea-level budget. A budget enhances understanding of the processes driving sea-level change. The processes are global, regional (including geological, such as land subsidence) and local, such as groundwater withdrawal.

"Having a thorough understanding of sea-level change at sites over the long-term is imperative for regional and local planning and responding to future sea-level rise," said lead author Jennifer S. Walker, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "By learning how different processes vary over time and contribute to sea-level change, we can more accurately estimate future contributions at specific sites."

Sea-level rise stemming from climate change threatens to permanently inundate low-lying islands, cities and lands. It also heightens their vulnerability to flooding and damage from coastal and other storms.

Research finds EPA underestimates methane emissions from oil and gas production 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is underestimating methane emissions from oil and gas production in its annual Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, according to new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The research team found 90 percent higher emissions from oil production and 50 percent higher emissions for natural gas production than EPA estimated in its latest inventory. The paper is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 

The research team, led by Joannes Maasakkers, a former graduate student at SEAS, developed a method to trace and map total emissions from satellite data to their source on the ground. “This is the first country-wide evaluation of the emissions that the EPA reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),” said Maasakkers, who is currently a scientist at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

Currently, the EPA only reports total national emissions to the UNFCC. In previous research, Maasakkers and his collaborators, including Daniel Jacob, the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at SEAS, worked with the EPA to map regional emissions of methane from different sources in the US. That level of detail was used to simulate how methane moves through the atmosphere.

In the paper, the researchers compared those simulations to satellite observations from 2010-2015. Using a transport model, they were able to trace the path of emissions from the atmosphere back to the ground and identify areas across the US where the observations and simulations didn’t match up.  “When we look at emissions from space, we can only see how total emissions from an area should be scaled up or down, but we don’t know the source responsible for those emissions,” said Maasakkers.

“Because we spent so much time with the EPA figuring out where these different emissions occur, we could use our transport model to go back and figure out what sources are responsible for those under- or over-estimations in the national total.”

Someday, scientists believe, tiny DNA-based robots and other nanodevices will deliver medicine inside our bodies, detect the presence of deadly pathogens, and help manufacture increasingly smaller electronics. Researchers took a big step toward that future by developing a new tool that can design much more complex DNA robots and nanodevices than were ever possible before in a fraction of the time.

In a paper published on April 19, 2021 in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University -- led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang -- unveiled new software they call MagicDNA. The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery.

Researchers have been doing this for a number of years with slower tools with tedious manual steps, said Carlos Castro, co-author of the study and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. "But now, nanodevices that may have taken us several days to design before now take us just a few minutes," Castro said. And now researchers can make much more complex -- and useful -- nanodevices.

"Previously, we could build devices with up to about six individual components and connect them with joints and hinges and try to make them execute complex motions," said study co-author Hai-Jun Su, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. "With this software, it is not hard to make robots or other devices with upwards of 20 components that are much easier to control. It is a huge step in our ability to design nanodevices that can perform the complex actions that we want them to do."

The software has a variety of advantages that will help scientists design better, more helpful nanodevices and -- researchers hope -- shorten the time before they are in everyday use. One advantage is that it allows researchers to carry out the entire design truly in 3D. Earlier design tools only allowed creation in 2D, forcing researchers to map their creations into 3D. That meant designers couldn't make their devices too complex.

The software also allows designers to build DNA structures "bottom up" or "top down." In "bottom up" design, researchers take individual strands of DNA and decide how to organize them into the structure they want, which allows fine control over local device structure and properties. But they can also take a "top down" approach where they decide how their overall device needs to be shaped geometrically and then automate how the DNA strands are put together. Combining the two allows for increasing complexity of the overall geometry while maintaining precise control over individual component properties, Castro said.

Another key element of the software is that it allows simulations of how designed DNA devices would move and operate in the real world. "As you make these structures more complex, it is difficult to predict exactly what they are going to look like and how they are going to behave," Castro said. "It is critical to be able to simulate how our devices will actually operate. Otherwise, we waste a lot of time."

As a demonstration of the software's ability, co-author Anjelica Kucinic, a doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State, led the researchers in making and characterizing many nanostructures designed by the software. Some of the devices they created included robot arms with claws that can pick up smaller items, and a hundred nanometer-sized structure that looks like an airplane. The "airplane", however, is about 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair!

The ability to make more complex nanodevices means that they can do more useful things and even carry out multiple tasks with one device, Castro said.

A new study is the first to identify how human brains grow much larger, with three times as many neurons, compared with chimpanzee and gorilla brains. The study, led by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, identified a key molecular switch that can make ape brain organoids grow more like human organoids, and vice versa. The study, published in the journal Cell, compared 'brain organoids' -- 3D tissues grown from stem cells which model early brain development -- that were grown from human, gorilla and chimpanzee stem cells. Similar to actual brains, the human brain organoids grew a lot larger than the organoids from other apes.

Dr Madeline Lancaster, from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, who led the study, said: "This provides some of the first insight into what is different about the developing human brain that sets us apart from our closest living relatives, the other great apes. The most striking difference between us and other apes is just how incredibly big our brains are." During the early stages of brain development, neurons are made by stem cells called neural progenitors. These progenitor cells initially have a cylindrical shape that makes it easy for them to split into identical daughter cells with the same shape. The more times the neural progenitor cells multiply at this stage, the more neurons there will be later. As the cells mature and slow their multiplication, they elongate, forming a shape like a stretched ice-cream cone.

Previously, research in mice had shown that their neural progenitor cells mature into a conical shape and slow their multiplication within hours. Now, brain organoids have allowed researchers to uncover how this development happens in humans, gorillas and chimpanzees. They found that in gorillas and chimpanzees this transition takes a long time, occurring over approximately five days. Human progenitors were even more delayed in this transition, taking around seven days. The human progenitor cells maintained their cylinder-like shape for longer than other apes and during this time they split more frequently, producing more cells.

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter just completed a much more ambitious third flight. As Space.com reports, the Mars aircraft ventured about 164 feet north of its home base (slightly more than half the length of a football field) at a speed of about 4.5MPH. That may not sound like much, but Ingenuity only traveled 13 feet at 1.1MPH during its second flight — this was far enough that you almost have to squint to see Ingenuity in the photo above.

There are only two potential flights left before NASA winds down its efforts in early May and shifts focus to the Perserverance rover's main mission. Expect these to be exciting, though. Project manager Mimi Aung said the final two journeys should be "really adventurous" and test the limits of the flying machine. The successes so far are already likely to have a significant impact on future Mars exploration. Ingenuity is proof that aircraft can fly on the planet despite its very low atmospheric density, and there's now a good chance that later missions will use drones to survey Mars from perspectives that simply weren't available before.

The human body is made up of nearly 40 trillion cells, of many different types. Recent advances in experimental biology have made it possible to explore the genetic material of single cells.

RAPIDS is a suite of open-source Python libraries that can speed up data science workflows using GPU acceleration. Starting from a single-cell count matrix, RAPIDS libraries can be used to perform data processing, dimensionality reduction, clustering, visualization, and comparison of cell clusters.

Several examples are inspired by the Scanpy tutorials and based upon the AnnData format. Currently, examples provide for scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq, and can be scaled up to 1 million cells. The authors also show how to create GPU-powered interactive, in-browser visualizations to explore single-cell datasets.

Dataset sizes for single-cell genomics studies are increasing, presently reaching millions of cells. With RAPIDS, it becomes easy to analyze large datasets interactively and in real time, enabling faster scientific discoveries.

Github repository is here

Fiber optic technology is the holy grail of high-speed, long-distance telecommunications. Still, with the continuing exponential growth of internet traffic, researchers are warning of a capacity crunch.

In AVS Quantum Science, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland show how quantum-enhanced receivers could play a critical role in addressing this challenge. The scientists developed a method to enhance receivers based on quantum physics properties to dramatically increase network performance while significantly reducing the error bit rate (EBR) and energy consumption.

Fiber optic technology relies on receivers to detect optical signals and convert them into electrical signals. The conventional detection process, largely as a result of random light fluctuations, produces 'shot noise,' which decreases detection ability and increases EBR. To accommodate this problem, signals must continually be amplified as pulsating light becomes weaker along the optic cable, but there is a limit to maintaining adequate amplification when signals become barely perceptible.

Quantum-enhanced receivers that process up to two bits of classical information and can overcome the shot noise have been demonstrated to improve detection accuracy in laboratory environments. In these and other quantum receivers, a separate reference beam with a single-photon detection feedback is used so the reference pulse eventually cancels out the input signal to eliminate the shot noise. The researchers' enhanced receiver, however, can decode as many as four bits per pulse, because it does a better job in distinguishing among different input states.

To accomplish more efficient detection, they developed a modulation method and implemented a feedback algorithm that takes advantage of the exact times of single photon detection. Still, no single measurement is perfect, but the new holistically designed communication system yields increasingly more accurate results on average.

"We studied the theory of communications and the experimental techniques of quantum receivers to come up with a practical telecommunication protocol that takes maximal advantage of the quantum measurement," author Sergey Polyakov said. "With our protocol, because we want the input signal to contain as few photons as possible, we maximize the chance that the reference pulse updates to the right state after the very first photon detection, so at the end of the measurement, the EBR is minimized."

Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage - from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to metal space trusses that give way after the warping of a single strut.

In a study published recently in Advanced Materials, engineers at the University of California, Irvine and the Georgia Institute of Technology describe the creation of a new class of mechanical metamaterials that delocalize deformations to prevent failure. They did so by turning to tensegrity, a century-old design principle in which isolated rigid bars are integrated into a flexible mesh of tethers to produce very lightweight, self-tensioning truss structures.

Starting with 950 nanometer-diameter members, the team used a sophisticated direct laser writing technique to generate elementary cells sized between 10 and 20 microns. These were built up into eight-unit supercells that could be assembled with others to make a continuous structure. The researchers then conducted computational modeling and laboratory experiments and observed that the constructs exhibited uniquely homogenous deformation behavior free from localized overstress or underuse.

The team showed that the new metamaterials feature a 25-fold enhancement in deformability and an orders-of-magnitude increase in energy absorption over state-of-the-art lattice arrangements.

"Tensegrity structures have been studied for decades, particularly in the context of architectural design, and they have recently been found in a number of biological systems," said senior co-author Lorenzo Valdevit, a UCI professor of materials science and engineering who directs the Architected Materials Group. "Proper periodic tensegrity lattices were theoretically conceptualized only a few years ago by our co-author Julian Rimoli at Georgia Tech, but through this project we have achieved the first physical implementation and performance demonstration of these metamaterials."

The process of egg formation in fruit flies relies on physical phenomena analogous to the exchange of gases between balloons of different sizes, according to a study by MIT biologists and mathematicians.

Egg cells are by far the largest cells produced by most organisms. In humans, they are several times larger than a typical body cell and about 10,000 times larger than sperm cells.

There’s a reason why egg cells, or oocytes, are so big: They need to accumulate enough nutrients to support a growing embryo after fertilization, plus mitochondria to power all of that growth. However, biologists don’t yet understand the full picture of how egg cells become so large.

A new study in fruit flies, by a team of MIT biologists and mathematicians, reveals that the process through which the oocyte grows significantly and rapidly before fertilization relies on physical phenomena analogous to the exchange of gases between balloons of different sizes. Specifically, the researchers showed that “nurse cells” surrounding the much larger oocyte dump their contents into the larger cell, just as air flows from a smaller balloon into a larger one when they are connected by small tubes in an experimental setup.

“The study shows how physics and biology come together, and how nature can use physical processes to create this robust mechanism,” says Jörn Dunkel, an MIT associate professor of physical applied mathematics. “If you want to develop as an embryo, one of the goals is to make things very reproducible, and physics provides a very robust way of achieving certain transport processes.”

Dunkel and Adam Martin, an MIT associate professor of biology, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study’s lead authors are postdoc Jasmin Imran Alsous and graduate student Nicolas Romeo. Jonathan Jackson, a Harvard University graduate student, and Frank Mason, a research assistant professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, are also authors of the paper.

Blocking cell receptors for glucagon, the counter-hormone to insulin, cured mouse models of diabetes by converting glucagon-producing cells into insulin producers instead, a team reports in a new study. The findings could offer a new way to treat both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes in people.

Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are associated with reduced β-cell mass or function, resulting from decreased proliferation and increased apoptosis. Understanding the signals governing β-cell survival and regeneration is critical for developing strategies to maintain healthy populations of these cells in individuals. Both forms of diabetes are associated with hyperglucagonemia and an increased plasma glucagon:insulin ratio. Glucagon excess contributes to metabolic dysregulation of the diabetic state and glucagon receptor antagonism is a potential target area for the treatment and prevention of diabetes. The new study suggests that blockade of glucagon signaling lowers glycemia in mouse models of type 1 diabetes while enhancing formation of functional β-cell mass and production of insulin-positive cells from α-cell precursors.

New research has demonstrated that a magnetic uranium compound can have strong thermoelectric properties, generating four times the transverse voltage from heat than the previous record in a cobalt-manganese-gallium compound. The result unlocks a new potential for the actinide elements at the bottom of the periodic table and point to a fresh direction in research on topological quantum materials.

"We found that the large spin-orbit coupling and strong electronic correlations in a system of uranium-cobalt-aluminum doped with ruthenium resulted in a colossal anomalous Nernst conductivity," said Filip Ronning, lead investigator on the paper published today in Science Advances. Ronning is director of the Institute for Materials Science at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "It illustrates that uranium and actinide alloys are promising materials to study the interplay among a material's topology and strong electron correlations. We're very much interested in understanding, tuning and eventually controlling this interplay, so hopefully one day we can exploit some of these remarkable responses."

The Nernst response occurs when a material converts a flow of heat into an electric voltage. This thermoelectric phenomenon can be exploited in devices that generate electricity from a heat source. The most notable current example is the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) that were developed in part at Los Alamos. RTGs use heat from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium-238 to generate electricity--one such RTG is currently powering the Perseverance rover on Mars.

Peer deeper into the heart of the atom than any microscope allows and scientists hypothesize that you will find a rich world of particles popping in and out of the vacuum, decaying into other particles, and adding to the weirdness of the visible world. These subatomic particles are governed by the quantum nature of the Universe and find tangible, physical form in experimental results.

Carleton DeTar and Steven Gottlieb are two of the leading contemporary scholars of QCD research and practitioners of an approach known as lattice QCD. Lattice QCD represents continuous space as a discrete set of spacetime points (called the lattice). It uses supercomputers to study the interactions of quarks, and importantly, to determine more precisely several parameters of the Standard Model, thereby reducing the uncertainties in its predictions. It's a slow and resource-intensive approach, but it has proven to have wide applicability, giving insight into parts of the theory inaccessible by other means, in particular the explicit forces acting between quarks and antiquarks.

DeTar and Gottlieb are part of the MIMD Lattice Computation (MILC) Collaboration and work very closely with the Fermilab Lattice Collaboration on the vast majority of their work. They also work with the High Precision QCD (HPQCD) Collaboration for the study of the muon anomalous magnetic moment. As part of these efforts, they use the fastest supercomputers in the world. Since 2019, they have used Frontera at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)—the fastest academic supercomputer in the world and the 9th fastest overall—to propel their work. They are among the largest users of that resource, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The team also uses Summit at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (the #2 fastest supercomputer in the world); Cori at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (#20), and Stampede2 (#25) at TACC, for the lattice calculations.

The efforts of the lattice QCD community over decades have brought greater accuracy to particle predictions through a combination of faster computers and improved algorithms and methodologies.

"We can do calculations and make predictions with high precision for how strong interactions work," said DeTar, professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah. "When I started as a graduate student in the late 1960s, some of our best estimates were within 20 percent of experimental results. Now we can get answers with sub-percent accuracy."

In particle physics, physical experiment and theory travel in tandem, informing each other, but sometimes producing different results. These differences suggest areas of further exploration or improvement. "There are some tensions in these tests," said Gottlieb, distinguished professor of Physics at Indiana University. "The tensions are not large enough to say that there is a problem here—the usual requirement is at least five standard deviations. But it means either you make the theory and experiment more precise and find that the agreement is better; or you do it and you find out, 'Wait a minute, what was the three sigma tension is now a five standard deviation tension, and maybe we really have evidence for new physics.'"

USC researchers harness the power of living organisms to make materials that are strong, tolerant and resilient.

Biological systems can harness their living cells for growth and regeneration, but engineering systems cannot. Until now. Qiming Wang and researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are harnessing living bacteria to create engineering materials that are strong, tolerant, and resilient. The research is published in Advanced Materials.

“The materials we are making are living and self-growing,” said Wang, the Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). “We have been amazed by the sophisticated microstructures of natural materials for centuries, especially after microscopes were invented to observe these tiny structures. Now we take an important step forward: We use living bacteria as a tool to directly grow amazing structures that cannot be made on our own.”

The researchers work with specific bacteria— S. pasteurii—known for secreting an enzyme called urease. When urease is exposed to urea and calcium ions, it produces calcium carbonate, a fundamental and strong mineral compound found in bones or teeth. “The key innovation in our research,” said Wang, “is that we guide the bacteria to grow calcium carbonate minerals to achieve ordered microstructures which are similar to those in the natural mineralized composites.” Wang added: “Bacteria know how to save time and energy to do things. They have their own intelligence, and we can harness their smartness to design hybrid materials that are superior to fully synthetic options.

Borrowing inspiration from nature is not new in engineering. As one would suspect, nature has great examples of complex mineralized composites that are strong, fracture resistant, and energy damping—for example nacre or the hard shell surrounding a mollusk. Wang said: “Although microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi and viri are sometimes detrimental in causing diseases—like COVID-19—they can also be beneficial. We have a long history of using microorganisms as factories—for example, using yeast to make beer. But there is limited research on using microorganisms to manufacture engineering materials.”

Combining living bacteria and synthetic materials, Wang said this new living material demonstrates mechanical properties superior to that of any natural or synthetic material currently in use. This is largely due to the material’s bouligand structure, which is characterized by multiple layers of minerals laid at varying angles from each other to form a sort of “twist” or helicoidal shape. This structure is difficult to create synthetically.