Amazing Science

The Neptune-like planet discovered is thought to be more than four times the size of the Earth-sized white dwarf. University of Warwick discovered the ring of gas using the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Evidence of a giant planet orbiting a dead white dwarf star has been found for the first time. Until now there was no example of a planet that had survived a star's transition to a white dwarf - leaving little hope for our own planet's future.  

Astronomers say the evidence for the distant planet comes in the form of a disc of gas created from its evaporating atmosphere.

The Neptune-like planet discovered is thought to be more than four times the size of the Earth-sized white dwarf. 

The giant planet orbits the star about once every 10 days, leaving a trail of gas comprised of hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur in its wake. 

The investigational therapeutics mAb114 and REGN-EB3 offer patients a greater chance of surviving Ebola virus disease (EVD) compared to the investigational treatment ZMapp, according to published results from a clinical trial conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The new report also shows that early diagnosis and treatment are associated with an increased likelihood of survival from EVD.

The results appear online this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. An announcement made on August 12, 2019, noted that the study leaders halted the trial early, on August 9, 2019, as recommended by an independent data and safety monitoring board based on its review of preliminary data from 499 study patients. The preliminary analysis found that both mAb114 and REGN-EB3 performed better than ZMapp. The fourth drug, remdesivir, performed similarly to ZMapp. Today’s publication provides a comprehensive analysis of the full dataset from nearly 200 additional patients enrolled in the clinical study.

The clinical trial known as PALM, short for “Pamoja Tulinde Maisha,” a Kiswahili phrase that translates to “together save lives,” was organized by an international research consortium coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is led and funded by the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB) and Ministry of Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, M.D., Ph.D., director-general of the INRB and head of the DRC’s Ebola response, and Richard T. Davey, Jr., M.D., deputy director of NIAID’s Division of Clinical Research, are co-principal investigators for the study.

“Response teams have faced unprecedented challenges in ongoing efforts to save lives and control the outbreak of Ebola in a highly insecure region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “Although effective treatments alone will not end this outbreak, the PALM study findings identify the first efficacious treatments for Ebola virus disease and therefore mark a significant step forward in improving care for Ebola patients. We thank the study team for their extraordinary efforts to conduct this landmark trial.”

The study enrolled 681 people with Ebola virus disease between November 2018 and August 2019 at four Ebola treatment centers (ETCs) in the cities of Beni, Butembo, Katwa and Mangina. Staff from The Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA), International Medical Corps (IMC), Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the DRC Ministry of Health implemented the trial at the ETCs with support from Congolese staff, the World Health Organization, the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and The Mitchell Group.

Researchers at Australia's Deakin University say they've managed to use common industrial polymers to create solid electrolytes, opening the door to double-density solid state lithium batteries that won't explode or catch fire if they overheat.

Dr. Fangfang Chen and Dr. Xiaoen Wang from Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials claim to have made a breakthrough with "the first clear and useful example of liquid-free and efficient transportation of lithium-ion in the scientific community."

The new technology uses a solid polymer material, weakly bonded to the lithium-ion, to replace the volatile liquid solvents typically used as electrolytes in current battery cells. The liquid electrolyte is the part of the system that becomes flammable during the kinds of infamous battery fires Samsung would rather forget. "If industry implements our findings I see a future where battery reliant devices can be safely packed in airplane baggage, for example, or where electric cars don’t pose a fire risk for occupants or emergency services like they currently do," Dr Chen said in a press release.

In addition to making batteries safer, the team believes this solid polymer electrolyte will finally allow batteries to work with a lithium metal anode. That would be big news in the battery world, where the lithium anode has been recently described in Trends in Chemistry as "critical to break the energy-density bottleneck of current Li-ion chemistry" – the bottleneck that's stopping electric vehicles, aircraft and portable electronics from developing at the pace they should be.

Dr. Wang says this could be a way to double the energy density of lithium batteries, which, in commercial settings, are currently peaking at around 250 Wh/kg (in Tesla's Model 3 battery pack). Getting that up toward 500 Wh/kg would allow massively extended ranges, or smaller, cheaper and vastly lighter battery packs. It's not the 10X jump everyone seems to believe is coming down the pipeline, but it would be very significant.

Imagine a sugar that has only 38 percent of the calories of traditional table sugar, is safe for diabetics, and will not cause cavities. Now add that this dream sweetener is not an artificial substitute but a real sugar found in nature and it tastes like, well, sugar. You’d probably want to use that in your next cup of coffee, right?

This sugar is called tagatose. The FDA has approved it as a food additive, and there have been no reports to date of the problems that many sugar substitutes have—such as a metallic taste, or worse, links to cancer—according to researchers and the FAO/WHO, which certified the sugar as “generally regarded as safe.”

So why isn’t it in all your favorite desserts? The answer lies in the expense of producing it. While derived from fruits and dairy products, tagatose is not abundant and is difficult to extract from those sources. The manufacturing process involves a conversion from more easily obtained galactose to tagatose and is highly inefficient, with yields that may reach only 30 percent.

In a recent publication in Nature Communications, Assistant Professor Nikhil Nair and postdoctoral fellow Josef Bober, both from the School of Engineering, came up with an innovative way to produce the sugar using bacteria as tiny bioreactors that encapsulate the enzymes and reactants. Using this approach, they achieved yields up to 85 percent. Although there are many steps from the lab to commercial production, yields this high could lead to large-scale manufacturing and getting tagatose on every supermarket shelf.

A little robotic explorer will be rolling into Antarctica this month to perform a gymnastic feat — driving upside down under sea ice.

BRUIE, or the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration, is being developed for underwater exploration in extraterrestrial, icy waters by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It will spend the next month testing its endurance at Australia’s Casey research station in Antarctica, in preparation for a mission that could one day search for life in ocean worlds beyond Earth.  

There are moons throughout the solar system believed to be covered in deep oceans hidden beneath thick, frozen surfaces. Scientists like Kevin Hand, JPL lead scientist on the BRUIE project, believe that these lunar oceans, such as those on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, may be the best places to look for life in our solar system. But first, they’ll need a tough aquatic explorer capable of navigating solo through an alien ocean locked under ice sheets that could be 6 to 12 miles (10 to 19 kilometers) thick. BRUIE will spend the next month testing its endurance in the icy waters near Casey Station, Antarctica. The rover uses its buoyancy to anchor itself to the ice and roll along it upside down on two wheels.

“The ice shells covering these distant oceans serve as a window into the oceans below, and the chemistry of the ice could help feed life within those oceans. Here on Earth, the ice covering our polar oceans serves a similar role, and our team is particularly interested in what is happening where the water meets the ice,” said Hand.

In a world-first, a team of Griffith University researchers has used an artificial intelligence method to better predict RNA secondary structures, with the hope it can be developed into a tool to better understand how RNAs are implicated in various diseases such as cancer.

Professor Yaoqi Zhou, Professor Kuldip Paliwal, Ph.D. student Jaswinder Singh and Dr. Jack Hanson from Griffith's Institute for Glycomics and Signal Processing Laboratory led the research, which has been published in Nature Communications. In all forms of life, ribonucleic acid (RNA) is essential for the coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. RNA and DNA are among the four major macromolecules in lifeforms.

The team employed the use of deep learning—a subset of artificial intelligence used to create complex, numerical functions to approximate specific tasks automatically without explicit human instructions—to build a more accurate model of the relationship between RNA sequence and structure.

This advancement comes after more than a decade of stagnation in the performance of previous methods to predict RNA structures. Professor Zhou hoped this new method would be useful for designing new RNA molecules with therapeutic potentials. "Imagine if protein and RNA were two people, with protein standing in front of RNA—our focus is naturally on the protein," Professor Zhou said.

"Consequently, despite the fact that the number of proteins are outnumbered by the number of RNA by more than a factor of 10, we are clueless about what these RNAs are for in our human body. "That's why we developed this tool: to provide some structural clues. Getting clues is very important because more and more RNAs are implicated in more diseases including various cancers.

"The most exciting aspect is that we can now better link the sequencing information with the structure. Our sequence is encoded in our genomes, but how they are related to their function through the structure is an unknown. "Using this deep learning technique we can better link the sequence to the structure and have better clues as to what their function might be. Once we understand how the sequence encodes the structure and therefore function, we can design the RNA to do it for a particular purpose, such as new drugs or molecular sensors."

Catching two supermassive black holes sharing close quarters isn’t that unusual. But spotting three jockeying for position is quite bizarre. In fact, astronomers rarely witness such a triplet. But now, according to a new study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers have discovered a single galaxy that's home to three supermassive black holes: NGC 6240.

In the study, an international team of astronomers identified three supermassive black holes lurking near the center of galaxy NGC 6240, which has been visibly disturbed by the gravitational effects of a triple merger. NGC 6240 is relatively close — only about 300 million light-years away — and astronomers previously assumed its odd shape was the result of a run-of-the-mill merger between two galaxies. These two galaxies, they thought, slammed together while moving at hundreds of miles per second, and they're still in the process of melding together. Therefore, the researchers expected to find two supermassive black holes hiding near the center of the cosmic collision.

Instead, when they peered into NGC 6240's core using 3D-mapping techniques, the team unexpectedly found three supermassive black holes — each weighing more than 90 million Suns. (For comparison, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, weighs about 4 million solar masses.) What’s more, NGC 6240's three behemoth black holes are all crammed into a region less than 3,000 light-years across, which is less than one percent the size of the galaxy in which they reside.

“Up until now, such a concentration of three supermassive black holes had never been discovered in the universe,” said study co-author Peter Weilbacher of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in a press release. Although astronomers have previously found three separate galaxies and their associated black holes on a collision course before, this is the first time they've witnessed a trifecta of supermassive black holes crammed into such a small space.

A team of scientists from Scripps Research and Stanford University has recorded in real time a key step in the assembly of ribosomes—the complex and evolutionarily ancient "molecular machines" that make proteins in cells and are essential for all life forms.

The achievement, reported in Cell, reveals in unprecedented detail how strands of ribonucleic acid (RNA), cellular molecules that are inherently sticky and prone to misfold, are "chaperoned" by ribosomal proteins into folding properly and forming one of the main components of ribosomes.

The findings overturn the longstanding belief that ribosomes are assembled in a tightly controlled, step-wise process. "In contrast to what had been the dominant theory in the field, we revealed a far more chaotic process," says James R. Williamson, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Integrative Structural & Computational Biology at Scripps Research. "It's not a sleek Detroit assembly line—it's more like a trading pit on Wall Street."

For the study, Williamson's lab collaborated with the lab of Joseph Puglisi, Ph.D., a professor at Stanford University. Although the work is a significant feat of basic cell biology, it should enable important advances in medicine. For example, some current antibiotics work by inhibiting bacterial ribosomes; the new research opens up the possibility of designing future antibiotics that target bacterial ribosomes with greater specificity—and thus, fewer side effects.

More generally, the research offers biologists a powerful new approach to the study of RNA molecules, hundreds of thousands of which are active at any given time in a typical cell. "This shows that we now can examine in detail how RNAs fold while they are being synthesized and proteins are assembling on them," says first author Olivier Duss, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Integrative Structural & Computational Biology at Scripps Research. "This has been a very difficult thing to study in biology because it involves several distinct biological processes that are dependent on each other and have to be detected simultaneously."

The team used an advanced imaging technology called "zero-mode waveguide single-molecule fluorescence microscopy," which they have adapted in recent years for real-time tracking of RNAs and proteins. Ribosomes are made of both RNA and proteins, reflecting a molecular partnership that is widely believed to go back nearly to the dawn of life on Earth.

In a proof-of-principle study published last year, the researchers used their approach to record an early, brief and relatively well-studied stage of ribosome assembly from the bacterium E. coli.

Based in McMurdo Station, Antarctica for the first part of their 2019 field season, the team on Project RISE UP is using its underwater oceanographer robot Icefin to study environmental and biological factors that influence habitability in oceans beneath ice.

Project RISE UP, an acronym which stands for “Ross Ice Shelf and Europa Underwater Probe”, is using Icefin to explore ice-ocean environments and the limits of life here on Earth, in order to help develop techniques that might be used for future exploration of ice-ocean ecosystems.

NASA confirmed in 2019 that Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, had plumes of water vapor above its surface, which scientists had long expected from the ice-covered world. In addition, using observations from ground-based telescopes, “scientists have found strong evidence that beneath the ice crust is an ocean of liquid water or slushy ice,” according to NASA. These and other factors make Europa a prime subject in the search for other habitable worlds in our solar system.

Georgia Tech graduate student and member of the RISE UP team in Antarctica, Justin Lawrence‘s thesis is a major driver of work being done in the 2019 field season. He said the science and technology being developed through RISE UP could be used in the future exploration of icy worlds in our solar system, such as Europa.

“For my thesis, I’m mapping biological water mass properties including cellular abundance and microbial diversity with physical water properties such as temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen,” Lawrence said. “When combined, these variables help us understand how nutrient and carbon inputs from the open ocean and melting ice influence habitability below ice.”

In other words, studying biological and environmental factors that influence life in ice-ocean ecosystems here on Earth, will help scientists understand habitability in ice-covered oceans elsewhere.

“Earth is not the only body in our solar system with a liquid, salty ocean, and other ocean worlds such as Jupiter’s moon Europa might prove habitable to novel forms of life,” Lawrence explained. “To better understand how ecosystems under ice could work on other planets, we are developing hardware (Icefin), software, and scientific methods to first understand the interactions between life and ice in Antarctica.”

A skeleton from the Cretaceous found in Japan reveals an early bird with a tail nub resembling the avians of today.

Birds are ancient creatures. Every hawk, sparrow, pigeon and penguin alive today has ancestral roots dating back to the Jurassic, when the first birds were just another form of raptor-like dinosaur. Dozens of fossils uncovered and described during the last three decades have illuminated much of this deep history, but the rock record can still yield surprises. A fossil recently found in Japan is one such unexpected avian that raises questions about what else may await discovery.

The skeleton, named Fukuipteryx prima, was described by Fukui Prefectural University paleontologist Takuya Imai and colleagues today in Communications Biology. And while numerous birds of similar geologic age have been named in the past few decades, the details of these bones and where they were found have experts a-flutter.

The 120 million-year-old fossil was discovered in the summer of 2013 while searching for fossils at Japan’s Kitadani Dinosaur Quarry. “One of my colleagues at Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum spotted tiny bones in a block of siltstone,” Imai says. At the time, it wasn’t clear what creature the bones belonged to, but once the encasing rock was chipped away, the structure of the fossil became clear. The skeleton was an early bird, and an unusual one at that.

Small bodies and hollow bones have made birds relatively rare finds in the fossil record. Only a few unique fossil deposits, like China’s 125 million-year-old Jehol Biota or the United States’ 50 million-year-old Green River Formation, allow paleontologists to get a good look at ancient avians. To find a well-preserved fossil bird outside such places of exceptional preservation represents a noteworthy paleontological discovery, and Fukuipteryx in Japan adds another significant spot on the map for fossil birds.

Astronomers have used data from the Cassini spacecraft to build a full map of Titan’s geological features for the first time, revealing strange belts of different terrains.

Slowly but surely, the surface of Saturn’s strange moon Titan is being revealed. Researchers have made the first map of the geology of Titan’s entire surface, and it will eventually help us figure out what the climate is like there.

Titan’s atmosphere is full of a thick, orange haze that blocks visible light from reaching the surface, making it difficult for spacecraft to take pictures. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, took radar and infrared data of Titan’s surface, giving researchers a hint of the terrain below..

Rosaly Lopes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and her colleagues assembled those observations and placed each area, or unit, into one of six categories: lakes, craters, dunes, plains, hummocky terrain – meaning hills and mountains – and labyrinth, which looks like heavily eroded plateaus. They then made a map of where each of those terrains exists on Titan’s surface.

They found that the landscape type depended strongly on the latitude. The equator is mostly covered in dunes, with flatter plains dominating the mid-latitudes and lakes and labyrinths closer to the poles. “The surprise is how clear the latitudinal distribution is,” says Lopes. “We had seen some of that already but by doing a global map it really stands out.”

Atoms, molecules or even living cells can be manipulated with light beams. At TU Wien a method was developed to revolutionize such "optical tweezers".

They are reminiscent of the "tractor beam" in Star Trek: Special light beams can be used to manipulate molecules or small biological particles. Even viruses or cells can be captured or moved. However, these optical tweezers only work with objects in empty space or in transparent liquids. Any disturbing environment would deflect the light waves and destroy the effect. This is a problem, in particular with biological samples because they are usually embedded in a very complex environment.

But scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) have now shown how virtue can be made of necessity: A special calculation method was developed to determine the perfect wave form to manipulate small particles in the presence of a disordered environment. This makes it possible to hold, move or rotate individual particles inside a sample—even if they cannot be touched directly. The tailor-made light beam becomes a universal remote control for everything small. Microwave experiments have already demonstrated that the method works. The new optical tweezer technology has now been presented in the journal Nature Photonics.

"Using laser beams to manipulate matter is nothing unusual anymore," explains Prof. Stefan Rotter from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at TU Wien. In 1997, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for laser beams that cool atoms by slowing them down. In 2018, another Physics Nobel Prize recognized the development of optical tweezers.

But light waves are sensitive: in a disordered, irregular environment, they can be deflected in a highly complicated way and scattered in all directions. A simple, plane light wave then becomes a complex, disordered wave pattern. This completely changes the way light interacts with a specific particle.

"However, this scattering effect can be compensated," says Michael Horodynski, first author of the paper. "We can calculate how the wave has to be shaped initially so that the irregularities of the disordered environment transform it exactly into the shape we want it to be. In this case, the light wave looks rather disordered and chaotic at first, but the disordered environment turns it into something ordered. Countless small disturbances, which would normally render the experiment impossible, are used to generate exactly the desired wave form, which then acts on a specific particle.

Black holes 'have no hair': no attributes that can be used to tell them apart. Extreme black holes (spinning at maximally allowed rate) can have an additional property, permanent hair that is made of a massless scalar field. Nearly extreme black holes (like Gargantua, the black hole featured in the movie "Interstellar") have hair that is a transient phenomenon: nearly extreme black holes that attempt to regrow hair will lose it and become bald again.

The black holes of Einstein's theory of relativity can be completely described by just three parameters: their mass, spin angular momentum, and electric charge. Since two black holes that share these parameters cannot be distinguished, regardless of how they were made, black holes are said to "have no hair"—they have no additional attributes that can be used to tell them apart.

In the early 1970s the late Jacob Bekenstein provided a proof for the nonexistence of hair made of scalar fields given a set of assumptions on the properties of the latter. Researcher Lior Burko of Theiss Research said, "Since Bekenstein's proof, several papers have found examples for scalar hair, and all these examples violate one or another of the assumptions made by Bekenstein. But in all cases, the hair was made of the scalar field itself."

Recently, it was shown that black holes that are charged by the maximum possible electric charge ("extreme black holes") can have an additional property, permanent hair that is made of a massless scalar field, and that this newly found hair can be observed from a great distance. "A massless scalar hair does not violate any of the assumptions underlying Bekenstein's proof. It was a big surprise for me when this new hair was found by Angelopoulos, Aretakis, and Gajic, so I wanted to look at it in greater detail. It is hair in a different sense than the kinds of hair that were found before. It is not the scalar field itself, but a certain integral on a derivative of the scalar field that is to be calculated on the surface of the black hole, on its event horizon," said Burko.

The new hair can be observed at a great distance, by calculating a different quantity there. "The measurement at a great distance that Angelopoulos, Aretakis, and Gajic found is strictly speaking precise only at infinitely late time," added Burko. "These would be observers who are very distant from the black hole, and who make the measurements in the infinite future. We wanted to see what happens at late but finite times, to see the time dependence of the measurement and how it approaches its asymptotic value.

Another special thing about this new hair is that it applies only for exactly extreme black holes, and we wanted to understand what happens when the black hole is nearly extreme, but not exactly extreme."

ADEPT, an artificial intelligence model developed by MIT researchers, demonstrates an understanding of some basic “intuitive physics” by registering a surprise signal when objects in a scene violate assumed reality, similarly to how human infants and adults would register surprise.

In order to remove damaged or unwanted cells, multicellular organisms rely on multiple forms of programmed cell death (PCD). PCD is an evolutionarily-conserved phenomenon and the most common and best-studied form of PCD is apoptosis (type I cell death) [1]. However, multiple alternative cell death programs have been described in the last decades [2,3]. Apoptotic cell death is believed to be the main mode-of-action of most conventional chemotherapeutics and radiation therapy in tumor treatment.

Much effort has been invested into deciphering the components of the cellular apoptotic machinery and several targeted agents have already been developed to specifically trigger apoptosis in an aim to better combat cancer in the clinic. However, many cancers are highly resistant to apoptosis and numerous studies illustrate that alternative, non-apoptotic forms of PCD [2,4] exist, some of which might represent suitable therapeutic avenues, in particular, for the treatment of apoptosis-refractory cancers.

The dual function of autophagy acting as a tumor suppressor or tumor promoter is well established and highly dependant on the exact context and the extent of autophagy engagement. Many cancer drugs, but also “physiological” processes within cancers like hypoxia or nutrient shortages, trigger autophagy. Hence, it is of paramount importance to better understand tumor- specific requirements for autophagy. This can finally lead to rationalized exploitation of autophagy-inhibition or further activation of it to increase the therapeutic response. Similarly, the induction of selective autophagy like mitophagy can negatively and positively affect survival, depending on the context and extent, for example, by preventing ROS-formation due to damaged mitochondria (pro-survival) or by removing the major energy source of the cells (pro-death). Future research should therefore focus especially on discriminating between bulk autophagy and selective types of autophagy such as mitophagy, and by defining the molecular switches regulating these processes. This is especially important since it is conceivable that other forms of selective autophagy could antagonize the death-inducing effects of non-selective autophagy.

The mystery of the role of people and climate in the fate of Australian megafauna might have been solved, in a newly published breakthrough study.

‘Megafauna’, giant beasts that once roamed the continent — including wombat-like creatures as big as cars, birds more than two meters tall, and lizards more than seven meters long — became extinct about 42,000 years ago. But the role of people in their demise has been hotly debated for decades.

The new study, led by a team of researchers from the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), analyzed fossil data, climate reconstructions, and archaeological information describing patterns in human migration across south-eastern Australia. The team developed and applied sophisticated mathematical models to the data to test scenarios to explain regional variation in the periods during which people and megafauna coexisted.

For the first time, the research suggests a combination of climate change and the impact of people sealed the fate of megafauna, at least in south-eastern Australia. And that distribution of freshwater — a precious commodity for animals and people alike as the climate warmed — can explain regional differences in the timing at which megafauna died out.

“There has been much debate among scientists about what conditions led to this extinction event,” said lead author Dr Frédérik Saltré, Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Global Ecology Lab at Flinders University. “Resolving this question is important because it is one of the oldest such extinction events anywhere after modern human beings evolved and left Africa”, he added.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, are the result of analysis and complex modeling based on data including more than 10,000 fossils and archaeological records.

The majority of our human genome transcribes into noncoding RNAs with unknown structures and functions. Obtaining functional clues for noncoding RNAs requires accurate base-pairing or secondary-structure prediction. However, the performance of such predictions by current folding-based algorithms has been stagnated for more than a decade.

Scientists now propose the use of deep contextual learning for base-pair prediction including those noncanonical and non-nested (pseudoknot) base pairs stabilized by tertiary interactions. Since only <<250 nonredundant, high-resolution RNA structures are available for model training, they utilized transfer learning from a model initially trained with a recent high-quality bpRNA dataset of >>10,000 nonredundant RNAs made available through comparative analysis. The resulting method achieves large, statistically significant improvement in predicting all base pairs, noncanonical and non-nested base pairs in particular. The proposed method (SPOT-RNA), with a freely available server and standalone software, should be useful for improving RNA structure modeling, sequence alignment, and functional annotations.

Engineers find that limpets' tiny teeth are made of the strongest biological material ever tested.

Limpets cling tenaciously to rocks as waves batter them. They can clamp on with a force of 75 pounds per square inch, using their muscular mollusk "foot" and a chemical secretion. But even that feat isn’t as stunning as their ability to grind down rock as they feed, using a tooth-studded tongue called a radula. Now the snails have upped their tough-guy street cred with help from engineers based in the U.K., who discovered that these snails’ teeth are made of the strongest natural material out there.

Spider silk, often compared to kevlar, has wowed with its tough yet flexible powers. But when tested, the tooth material was, on average, about five times stronger than most spider silk, reports BBC News. This makes it the strongest natural material on Earth. Tests in the lab revealed that it can withstand pressure that would turn carbon into diamond. Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar, the study’s lead author, Asa Barber of the University of Portsmouth, told the BBC. 

By folding snippets of DNA into the shape of a five-pointed star using structural DNA nanotechnology, researchers have created a trap that captures Dengue virus as it floats in the bloodstream. Once sprung, the trap – which is non-toxic and is naturally cleared from the body – lights up. It’s the most sensitive test for the mosquito-borne diseases yet devised.

Published in Nature Chemistry, this detection technique could be expanded to other viruses and adapted to kill the viruses it snares. “This is more sensitive than any other way of detecting Dengue, beating the clinical test by more than 100 fold,” said Xing Wang, the corresponding author of the study, an assistant professor of chemistry and member of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at the time of the research. “The binding is tight and the specificity is high, enabling us to distinguish the presence of Dengue on the first day of infection.”

A trap could be effective against many different viruses because, in order to infect their host, all viruses must first latch onto a cell wall and disgorge their genetic instructions into the cell. In 2016 research conducted at CBIS, Rensselaer chemist Robert Linhardt and Rensselaer chemical engineer Jonathan Dordick constructed a synthetic polymer configured to match a sequence of sialic acid latch points on the influenza virus. In the lung, influenza must bind to sialic acid to invade lung cells. The synthetic trap worked as a decoy, catching influenza before it latched onto lung cells.

The treatment reduced influenza A mortality in mice from 100% to 25% over 14 days. However, Linhardt and Dordick, who are both co-authors on the new study, expected that the synthetic polymer they had used as framework for the trap might prove toxic to the body and was unlikely to be accepted as a therapeutic. Structural DNA nanotechnology — an established method of folding strands of DNA into designed, customized geometric shapes and objects — offered the research team a non-toxic, biodegradable alternative on which to construct a new trap, said Wang. The spherical surface of Dengue, like the closely related Zika virus, are studded with multiple latch points to catch a cell surface.

By superimposing various DNA nanostructural shapes onto images of the virus, the team settled on a five-pointed star — they call it a “DNA star” — as the best match between points on the DNA shape and latch points on the virus. Wang took the lead on producing the DNA star. He also attached specific aptamers — molecules the viral latches will bind to — precisely to the tips and vertices of the star so that they would align with the distribution of the latches on the virus.

“You could overlay the star onto the virus and target a whole hemisphere of the sphere precisely,” said Wang, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “All the ligands that would target the antigens of this virus would overlay perfectly with a DNA star. If we were only able to make a connection in one place it would be a weak binder, but with ten aptamers connecting the virus to the star, we have a tight hold on the target.”

According to the latest theories, planets are formed from fluffy dust aggregates in a protoplanetary disk around a young star. But young stars are not the only objects that possess dust disks. In a novel approach, the researchers focused on heavy disks around supermassive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies.

"Our calculations show that tens of thousands of planets with 10 times the mass of the Earth could be formed around 10 light-years from a black hole," says Eiichiro Kokubo, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan who studies planet formation. "Around black holes, there might exist planetary systems of astonishing scale."

Some supermassive black holes have large amounts of matter around them in the form of a heavy, dense disk. A disk can contain as much dust as 100,000 times the mass of the sun. This is 1 billion times the dust mass of a protoplanetary disk.

In a low temperature region of a protoplanetary disk, dust grains with ice mantles stick together and evolve into fluffy aggregates. A dust disk around a black hole is so dense that the intense radiation from the central region is blocked and low temperature regions are formed. The researchers applied the planet formation theory to circumnuclear disks and found that planets could form over several hundred million years.

Currently, there are no techniques to detect these planets around black holes. However, the researchers expect this study to open a new field of astronomy.

Astrophysicists have been searching for dark matter for several decades, but these searches have so far yielded disappointing results. In a recent study, two researchers at Weizmann Institute of Science and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel have introduced a new theoretical framework outlining a mechanism of elementary thermal dark matter with a mass up to 1014 GeV.

The dark matter considered in their work consists of several almost degenerate particles that scatter in the nearest-neighbor chain in a way that is aligned with the standard model used in dark matter studies. The new framework presented by these researchers, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could ultimately inform future searches for heavy dark matter.

"The nature of dark matter is a longstanding problem in modern day physics," Hyungjin Kim, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "A particle that is as heavy as Higgs boson, and is involved in interactions whose strength is that of electroweak interaction, is thought to be a particularly well-motivated dark matter candidate, as it often naturally arises when addressing another key problem: the hierarchy between the electroweak scale and the Planck scale."

The particle that is thought to be a good dark matter candidate, known as a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), could be produced naturally from interactions between standard model particles in the early universe while they are in thermal equilibrium. This particular process goes by the name of the 'thermal freeze-out mechanism."

Based on current astrophysics theory, the final abundance of WIMPs in our universe today would thus be insensitive to details of initial conditions or model parameters. However, a common lore originating from a 1990 paper by Kim Griest and Marc Kamionkowski suggests that this thermal freeze-out mechanism does not work when dark matter is heavier than 100 TeV (i.e., a thousand times heavier than the Higgs boson).

"In our recent paper, we prove this common lore wrong and show that thermal freeze-out is possible even when dark matter is several orders of magnitude heavier than the Higgs mass, if there are a set of dark particles that scatter off the standard model particles with nearest-neighbor interactions," Eric Kuflik, the other researcher behind the study, said. "The relic abundance of the dark matter is then determined by stochastic interactions between the dark particles and the Standard Model particles."

A reliable set of functional brain networks is found in healthy people and thought to underlie our cognition, emotion, and behavior. Now, scientists investigated these networks by quantifying intrinsic functional connectivity in six individuals who had undergone surgical removal of one hemisphere. Hemispherectomy subjects and healthy controls were scanned with identical parameters on the same scanner and compared to a large normative sample (n = 1,482).

Surprisingly, hemispherectomy subjects and controls all showed strong and equivalent intrahemispheric connectivity between brain regions typically assigned to the same functional network. Connectivity between parts of different networks, however, was markedly increased for almost all hemispherectomy participants and across all networks.

These results support the hypothesis of a shared set of functional networks that underlie cognition and suggest that between-network interactions may characterize functional reorganization in hemispherectomy.

Forty years ago, a Voyager spacecraft snapped the first closeup images of Europa, one of Jupiter’s 79 moons. These revealed brownish cracks slicing the moon’s icy surface, which give Europa the look of a veiny eyeball. Missions to the outer solar system in the decades since have amassed enough additional information about Europa to make it a high-priority target of investigation in NASA’s search for life.

What makes this moon so alluring is the possibility that it may possess all of the ingredients necessary for life. Scientists have evidence that one of these ingredients, liquid water, is present under the icy surface and may sometimes erupt into space in huge geysers. But no one has been able to confirm the presence of water in these plumes by directly measuring the water molecule itself. Now, an international research team led out of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has detected the water vapor for the first time above Europa’s surface. The team measured the vapor by peering at Europa through one of the world’s biggest telescopes in Hawaii.

Confirming that water vapor is present above Europa helps scientists better understand the inner workings of the moon. For example, it helps support an idea, of which scientists are confident, that there’s a liquid water ocean, possibly twice as big as Earth’s, sloshing beneath this moon’s miles-thick ice shell. Another source of water for the plumes, some scientists suspect, could be shallow reservoirs of melted water ice not far below Europa’s surface. It’s also possible that Jupiter’s strong radiation field is stripping water particles from Europa’s ice shell, though the recent investigation argued against this mechanism as the source of the observed water.

“Essential chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur) and sources of energy, two of three requirements for life, are found all over the solar system. But the third — liquid water — is somewhat hard to find beyond Earth,” said Lucas Paganini, a NASA planetary scientist who led the water detection investigation. “While scientists have not yet detected liquid water directly, we’ve found the next best thing: water in vapor form.”

Paganini and his team reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18 that they detected enough water releasing from Europa (5,202 pounds, or 2,360 kilograms, per second) to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes. Yet, the scientists also found that the water appears infrequently, at least in amounts large enough to detect from Earth, said Paganini: “For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.”

Water molecules emit specific frequencies of infrared light as they interact with solar radiation. Indeed, Paganini’s team detected the faint yet distinct signal of water vapor just once throughout 17 nights of observations between 2016 and 2017. Looking at the moon from the W. M. Keck Observatory atop the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, the scientists saw water molecules at Europa’s leading hemisphere, or the side of the moon that’s always facing in the direction of the moon’s orbit around Jupiter. (Europa, like Earth’s moon, is gravitationally locked to its host planet, so the leading hemisphere always faces the direction of the orbit, while the trailing hemisphere always faces in the opposite direction.)

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made one of the highest-performance cameras ever composed of sensors that count single photons, or particles of light.

With more than 1,000 sensors, or pixels, NIST's camera may be useful in future space-based telescopes searching for chemical signs of life on other planets, and in new instruments designed to search for the elusive "dark matter" believed to constitute most of the "stuff" in the universe.

Described in Optics Express, the camera consists of sensors made from superconducting nanowires, which can detect single photons. They are among the best photon counters in terms of speed, efficiency, and range of color sensitivity. A NIST team used these detectors to demonstrate Einstein's "spooky action at a distance," for example.

The nanowire detectors also have the lowest dark count rates of any type of photon sensor, meaning they don't count false signals caused by noise rather than photons. This feature is especially useful for dark-matter searches and space-based astronomy. But cameras with more pixels and larger physical dimensions than previously available are required for these applications, and they also need to detect light at the far end of the infrared band, with longer wavelengths than currently practical.

NIST's camera is small in physical size, a square measuring 1.6 millimeters on a side, but packed with 1,024 sensors (32 columns by 32 rows) to make high-resolution images. The main challenge was to find a way to collate and obtain results from so many detectors without overheating. The researchers extended a "readout" architecture they previously demonstrated with a smaller camera of 64 sensors that adds up data from the rows and columns, a step toward meeting the requirements of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Repairing and reusing plastics and delivering cancer drugs more effectively are only two of many of the potential applications a new 3D/4D printing technology offers, thanks to the pioneering work of a research collaboration between UNSW Sydney and The University of Auckland.

The researchers of this project have revealed the successful merging of 3D/4D printing and photo-controlled/living polymerization - a chemical process to create polymers - in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie, International Edition.

4D printing is a subset of 3D printing, where the printed object can transform its shape in response to certain conditions. The new controlled polymerization method, where the researchers used visible light to create an environmentally friendly "living" plastic or polymer, opens up a new world of possibilities for the manufacture of advanced solid materials.

Since this development, the technology has expanded and has proven useful for making well-controlled molecules for many different applications, including drug delivery and other biomaterials.

Polymers can be synthetic, such as plastic, as well as biological, for example, DNA or RNA. Lead author Cyrille Boyer said his team's latest breakthrough was a world first in the development of a new 3D printing system using PET-RAFT polymerization, to allow 3D printed materials to be easily modified after printing. Controlled polymerization has never been used in 3D and 4D printing before, because the rates of typical controlled polymerization processes are too slow for 3D/4D printing, where the reaction must be fast for practical printing speeds. Such polymers can be reactivated for further growth, unlike traditional polymers which are "dead" after being made.

After two years of research and hundreds of experiments, we developed a rapid process compatible with 3D printing. In contrast to conventional 3D printing, our new method of using visible light allows us to control the architecture of the polymers and tune the mechanical properties of the materials prepared by our process. This also gives us access to 4D printing and allows the material to be transformed or functionalized, which was not previously possible."

UNSW's Nathaniel Corrigan, co-first author with UNSW PhD candidate Zhiheng Zhang, said a bonus advantage of their new system was the ability to finely control all molecules in the 3D-printed material could reversibly change its shape when it was exposed to water and then dried. For example, the 3D object starts as a flat plane and when exposed to certain conditions, it will start to fold - that's a 4D material. So, the fourth dimension is time.