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“Many primary atmospheres of those planets will probably be dominated by hydrocarbon compounds and not so much by oxygen-rich gases such as water and carbon dioxide,” said Dr. Thomas Henning.

Can rocky planets form around stars smaller than our Sun, also called low-mass stars? This is what a recent study published in Science hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated the chemical properties of an exoplanetary system orbiting the star, ISO-Chal 147, which is located approximately 600 light-years from Earth and whose star has a mass of 11 percent of our Sun with age estimates between 1 to 2 million years old. For context, our Sun is approximately 4.5 billion years old. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of young exoplanetary systems and their potential to host rocky planets.

For the study, the researchers used the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to identify carbon-bearing molecules at temperatures of approximately 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) within the protoplanetary disk forming around the young star. However, the team also found these molecules did not possess compounds containing oxygen, meaning the system might not have water or carbon dioxide, which are typically found in systems surrounding stars like our Sun.

Continue reading “Implications for Rocky Planet Formation Around Low-Mass Stars” »

Yale researchers are using chemical “chameleons” to sneak up on drug-resistant brain tumors.

A Yale Cancer Center team has synthesized a compound, KL-50, that they say selectively targets drug-resistant glioblastomas while leaving healthy tissue alone.

Yale scientists say KL-50, their lead “chameleon” compound, effectively targets tumors without harming healthy surrounding tissue.

Continue reading “This well-timed ‘chameleon’ sneaks up on drug-resistant brain cancers” »

A new study used machine learning to predict potential new antibiotics in the global microbiome, which study authors say marks a significant advance in the use of artificial intelligence in antibiotic resistance research…

For this study, the researchers collected genomes and meta-genomes stored in publicly available databases and looked for DNA snippets that could have antimicrobial activity. To validate those predictions, they used chemistry to synthesize 100 of those molecules in the laboratory and then test them to determine if they could actually kill bacteria, including ‘some of the most dangerous pathogens in our society’, de la Fuente said.

One of Earth’s most consequential bursts of biodiversity—a 30-million-year period of explosive evolutionary changes spawning innumerable new species —may have the most modest of creatures to thank for the vital stage in life’s history: worms.

The digging and burrowing of prehistoric worms and other invertebrates along ocean bottoms sparked a chain of events that released oxygen into the ocean and atmosphere and helped kick-start what is known as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, roughly 480 million years ago, according to new findings Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

“It’s really incredible to think how such small animals, ones that don’t even exist today, could alter the course of evolutionary history in such a profound way,” said senior author Maya Gomes, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “With this work, we’ll be able to examine the chemistry of early oceans and reinterpret parts of the geological record.”

When element 61, also known as promethium, was first isolated by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1945, it completed the series of chemical elements known as lanthanides. However, aspects of the element’s exact chemical nature have remained a mystery until last year, when a team of scientists from ORNL and the National Institute of Standards and Technology used a combination of experimentation and computer simulation to purify the promethium radionuclide and synthesize a coordination complex that was characterized for the first time. The results of their work were recently published in Nature.

During her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture in 2018, Frances Arnold said, “Today we can for all practical purposes read, write and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.” That isn’t true anymore.

The 25th Annual S. Dexter Squibb Distinguished Lecture Series in ChemistryFeaturing: Dr. Theodore Goodson IIIThe Richard Barry Bernstein Collegiate Professor…

Observations after 3 weeks of DeepMind releasing its hitherto most advanced model for biomolecular structure prediction.

Calcium oxide is a cheap, chalky chemical compound commonly used in the manufacturing of cement, plaster, paper, and steel. But the material may soon have a more high-tech application.

UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering researchers and their collaborator in Sweden have used theoretical and computational approaches to discover how tiny, lone atoms of bismuth embedded within solid calcium oxide can act as qubits — the building blocks of quantum computers and quantum communication devices.

These qubits are described in Nature Communications (“Discovery of atomic clock-like spin defects in simple oxides from first principles”).