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Category: electronics

Designing better membrane proteins by embracing imperfection

Scientists at the VIB–VUB Center for Structural Biology have uncovered a counterintuitive principle that could reshape how membrane proteins are designed from scratch: Sometimes, making a protein less stable helps it fold correctly. In their study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrate that introducing carefully placed “imperfections,” a strategy known as negative design, enables synthetic membrane proteins to fold and assemble efficiently in artificial membranes.

Membrane proteins are essential for life and biotechnology, acting as gateways, sensors, and drug targets. Yet designing them from scratch remains notoriously difficult. Unlike soluble proteins, they must navigate a complex folding process while inserting into lipid membranes and during this step, many designs fail.

Traditional protein design focuses on maximizing the stability of the final folded structure. But the new study shows that, for transmembrane β-barrel proteins, this approach can backfire.

Wearable textile-based phototherapy platform with customized NIR OLEDs toward non-invasive hair loss treatment

Hair loss is a common condition with psychosocial impact. Here, the authors develop a wearable textile platform using customized near-infrared organic LEDs for hair-loss phototherapy.

Prototype chip could boost efficiency of power management in data centers

In an effort to meet the rising energy demands of data centers, engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new chip design that could improve how graphics processing units (GPUs) convert and manage power. The technology demonstrates a more efficient way to perform a critical task in electronics: converting high voltages into lower levels required by computing hardware. In lab tests, a prototype chip performed the type of voltage conversion used in modern data centers with high efficiency.

The advance, published in Nature Communications, could lead to the development of smaller, more energy-efficient systems for advanced computing.

Opening the door to more efficient orbitronic devices

Electrons have three intrinsic properties: spin, charge and orbital angular momentum. Researchers have long studied how to use spin to more efficiently create an electrical current. But the field of orbitronics—which is based upon using an electron’s orbital angular momentum, rather than its spin, to create a current flow—remains relatively new.

“Traditionally, it has been technically challenging to generate orbital current,” says Dali Sun, a professor of physics and member of the Organic and Carbon Electronics Lab (ORaCEL) at NC State University.

In a recent study, however, Sun and an international team of researchers demonstrated a groundbreaking new method to generate orbital current.

Backdoored Telnyx PyPI package pushes malware hidden in WAV audio

TeamPCP hackers compromised the Telnyx package on the Python Package Index today, uploading malicious versions that deliver credential-stealing malware hidden inside a WAV file.

The supply-chain attack was observed by application security firms Aikido, Socket, and Endor Labs, and was attributed to TeamPCP based on the same exfiltration pattern and RSA key seen in previous incidents caused by the same actor.

TeamPCP is responsible for multiple recent supply-chain (e.g., Aqua Security’s Trivy vulnerability scanner, the open-source Python library LiteLLM) and wiper attacks targeting Iranian systems.

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