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A research team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels. The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases, rather than requires, energy, was reported on November 8, 2021, in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy,” explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW–Madison chemist John Berry....

The findings, published today in Physical Review Letters, represent a key step forward in astrophysicists’ understanding of the relationship between binary neutron star mergers, gravitational waves and short gamma-ray bursts. Commonly abbreviated as GRBs, gamma-ray bursts are narrow beams of electromagnetic waves of the shortest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. GRBs are the universe’s most powerful electromagnetic events, occurring billions of light years from Earth and able to release as much energy in a few seconds as the sun will in its lifetime....

Rice is a staple food for almost half of the world’s population. However, compared to other cereals like barley and wheat, it absorbs more cadmium from the soil. According to reports, rice accounts for 40–65% of our total dietary consumption of the toxic heavy metal cadmium. People who consume cadmium-contaminated rice face a significant danger to their health since excessive cadmium consumption is linked to conditions like Itai-itai disease. Prior efforts have been made to lower the amount of cadmium in rice by importing clean soil, managing water, and combining contaminated soil with biochar and lime....

The study was led by Andre Levchenko, the John C. Malone Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Yale Systems Biology Institute at Yale’s West Campus. It was published on June 26 in the journal Nature Communications. Levchenko is a member of the Yale Cancer Center. One way metastasis occurs is through epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), a process that breaks neighboring cells apart from each other and sets them in motion....

A mathematical model that can help project the contagiousness and spread of infectious diseases like the seasonal flu may not be the best way to predict the continuing spread of the novel coronavirus, especially during lockdowns that alter the normal mix of the population, researchers report. Called the R-naught, or basic reproductive number, the model predicts the average number of susceptible people who will be infected by one infectious person....

In a first-of-its-kind feat of science and engineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team has successfully drilled through 800 meters (2,600 feet) of Antarctic ice to reach a subglacial lake and retrieve water and sediment samples that have been isolated from direct contact with the atmosphere for many thousands of years. Scientists and drillers with the interdisciplinary Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD) announced on January 28 local time (U....

Researchers in Japan and the United States have found SARS-CoV-2 can knock out an important molecular pathway linked to an immune complex called MHC class I. The finding should help scientists better understand how COVID-19 infection takes hold. “Our discovery reveals how the virus can evade the human immune defense system and might help to explain why the pandemic has been so severe,” says Hokkaido University and Texas A&M University immunologist Koichi Kobayashi, who led the study....

In the case of the atmosphere, the “music” comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east. Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell. The basic understanding of these atmospheric resonances began with seminal insights at the beginning of the 19th century by one of history’s greatest scientists, the French physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace....

Typically, robotic hands have had trouble being dexterous enough and delicate enough to perform certain tasks, but robotics experts from Harvard University have been developing a series of soft robots, capable of accomplishing much more than previously. The scientists published their findings in the journal Advanced Materials. George Whitesides and his colleagues created a robotic tentacle that can twist around a flower without damaging it. It’s made from a flexible plastic containing three air channels, running along the entire limb....

These results, by scientists from the Paris Globe Institute of Physics (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris), Université Paris Cité, and CNRS, as part of an international consortium, are published today (December 12, 2022) in the journal Nature Astronomy. Meteorites found on Earth provide scientists with samples representing the first moments of the solar system. However, a major step forward was made with the return to Earth in December 2020 of the Hayabusa2 mission, operated by the Japanese space agency JAXA....

The findings, published on August 3, 2021, in Nature Communications, describe three different mechanisms by which the nanobodies disarm the virus, blocking it from infecting cells and causing COVID-19. The near-atomic-level structural analysis provides guidance for the development of future vaccines and therapeutics that may work against a wide variety of coronaviruses—including variants not yet in circulation. “This is the first time anyone has systematically classified ultrapotent nanobodies based on their structure,” said senior author Yi Shi, Ph....

Since the Cumbre Vieja volcano began erupting on September 19, 2021, most of the compelling activity has happened on the ground. For nearly two weeks, thick sheets of lava burned through farmland, roads, and homes on the southwestern part of La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. The atmospheric effects of the eruption had been less dramatic until the Canary Islands Volcanology Institute (INVOLCAN) reported an increase in explosive activity that started on October 2....

Our DNA determines what we look like, including our facial features. That appeals to the popular imagination, as the potential applications are obvious. Doctors could use DNA for skull and facial reconstructive surgery, forensic examiners could sketch a perpetrator’s face on the basis of DNA retrieved from a crime scene, and historians would be able to reconstruct facial features using DNA from days long gone. But first, researchers need to figure out which genes in our DNA are responsible for specific characteristics of our face....

An international team of researchers has developed a new mathematical tool that could help scientists to deliver more accurate predictions of how diseases, including COVID-19, spread through towns and cities around the world. Rebecca Morrison, an assistant professor of computer science at CU Boulder, led the research. For years, she has run a repair shop of sorts for mathematical models—those strings of equations and assumptions that scientists use to better understand the world around them, from the trajectory of climate change to how chemicals burn up in an explosion....

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a submarine complete with crew is shrunk in size so that it can navigate through the human body, enabling the crew to perform surgery in the brain. This scenario remains in the realm of science fiction, and transporting a surgical team to a disease site will certainly remain fiction. Nevertheless, tiny submarines that could navigate through the body could be of great benefit: they could deliver drugs precisely to a target location, a point on the retina for instance....

Photosynthesis is the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy. Oxygen is produced as a by-product of photosynthesis when the water absorbed by plants is ‘split’. It is one of the most important reactions on the planet because it is the source of nearly all of the world’s oxygen. Hydrogen which is produced when the water is split could potentially be a green and unlimited source of renewable energy....

Up and down, up and down. The points of light alternate back and forth in lockstep. They are produced by glowing molecules affixed to the ends of tiny robot arms. Prof. Friedrich Simmel observes the movement of the nanomachines on the monitor of a fluorescence microscope. A simple mouse click is all it takes for the points of light to move in another direction. “By applying electric fields, we can arbitrarily rotate the arms in a plane,” explains the head of the Chair of Physics of Synthetic Biological Systems at TU Munich....

Led by assistant professor Rachel Perry, the research team studied mice with either implanted tumors or a genetic model of colon cancer. The researchers first examined the effects of a high-fat diet on the mice. Then they gave the mice one of two medications: either a drug that burns fat in the liver by acting as a controlled-release mitochondrial protonophore (CRMP), or metformin, the most commonly prescribed drug for diabetes worldwide....

LCH, or Langerhans’ Cell Histiocytosis, is a serious and potentially fatal disease that primarily affects children. On average, 5-10 children in Sweden are diagnosed with LCH annually, most commonly before the age of 10. LCH is a disease in which cancerous mutations occur in immune cells, which typically play a role in detecting and eliminating cancer cells. “The origin of the LCH cells has been discussed for decades. Some researchers are convinced that LCH is derived from a certain type of immune cell called dendritic cells, while others believe that they come from related cells called monocytes,” says Egle Kvedaraite, a doctor and researcher at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at Karolinska Institutet and first author of the new study....

They increasingly hunt in the waters off Cape Cod, and sometimes humans get in their way. Last summer, scientist Greg Skomal was one of them. The shark expert has been studying the massive marine predators for years, but even as a seasoned observer he got a fright when a great white shark breached, jaws open and only inches from his feet, as he stood on the pulpit of a small boat off Cape Cod, where he was looking to tag some of the giant visitors....