Geophysicists used remote sensing to see reservoirs beneath the surface. That water could speed up the loss of ice as the climate warms.
According to a new concept by LMU chemists led by Thomas Carell, it was a novel molecular species composed out of RNA and peptides that set in motion the evolution of life into more complex forms.
Investigating the question as to how life could emerge long ago on the early Earth is one of the most fascinating challenges for science. Which conditions must have prevailed for the basic building blocks of more complex life to form? One of the main answers is based upon the so-called RNA world idea, which molecular biology pioneer Walter Gilbert formulated in 1986. The hypothesis holds that nucleotides—the basic building blocks of the nucleic acids A, C, G, and U—emerged out of the primordial soup, and that short RNA molecules then formed out of the nucleotides. These so-called oligonucleotides were already capable of encoding small amounts of genetic information.
As such single-stranded RNA molecules could also combine into double strands, however, this gave rise to the theoretical possibility that the molecules could replicate themselves—i.e. reproduce. Only two nucleotides fit together in each case, meaning that one strand is the exact counterpart of another and thus forms the template for another strand.
Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) accounts for about 37% of sudden unexpected infant deaths a year in the U.S., and the cause of SIDS has remained largely unknown. On Saturday, researchers from The Children’s Hospital Westmead in Sydney released a study that confirmed not only how these infants die, but why.
SIDS refers to the unexplained deaths of infants under a year old, and it usually occurs while the child is sleeping. According to Mayo Clinic, many in the medical community suspected this phenomenon could be caused by a defect in the part of the brain that controls arousal from sleep and breathing. The theory was that if the infant stopped breathing during sleep, the defect would keep the child from startling or waking up.
The Sydney researchers were able to confirm this theory by analyzing dried blood samples taken from newborns who died from SIDS and other unknown causes. Each SIDS sample was then compared with blood taken from healthy babies. They found the activity of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) was significantly lower in babies who died of SIDS compared to living infants and other non-SIDS infant deaths. BChE plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway, explaining why SIDS typically occurs during sleep.
Results from the first phase 3 trial of using MDMA for PTSD along with talk therapy found the drug to be effective.
For the first time ever, scientists have successfully grown plants in soil from the Moon.
Researchers from the University of Florida planted seeds from the Arabidopsis plant — commonly known as thale cress — into a few teaspoons worth of lunar soil collected in the late 60s and early 70s during the Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions.
After about a week of watering and feeding, the seeds grew into and out of the soil, or lunar regolith, according to a paper detailing the experiment published Thursday in the scientific journal “Communications Biology.”
Glucose is the sugar we absorb from the foods we eat. It is the fuel that powers every cell in our bodies. Could glucose also power tomorrow’s medical implants?
Engineers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich think so. They have designed a new kind of glucose fuel cell that converts glucose directly into electricity. The device is smaller than other proposed glucose fuel cells, measuring just 400 nanometers thick. The sugary power source generates about 43 microwatts per square centimeter of electricity, achieving the highest power density of any glucose fuel cell to date under ambient conditions.
Silicon chip with 30 individual glucose micro fuel cells, seen as small silver squares inside each gray rectangle. (Image: Kent Dayton)
The complex aerodynamics around a moving car and its tires are hard to see, but not for some mechanical engineers.
Specialists in fluid dynamics at Rice University and Waseda University in Tokyo have developed their computer simulation methods to the point where it’s possible to accurately model moving cars, right down to the flow around rolling tires.
Over the years, supercomputers have played a pivotal role in pushing the frontiers of science. Earlier this year, Meta launched one of the fastest AI supercomputers, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), to build sophisticated AI models that can learn from trillions of examples; navigate hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyse text, images, and video together; build AR tools etc.
However, the quest for something even faster than supercomputers led to the development of quantum computers. Last year, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) introduced the world’s fastest programmable superconducting quantum computer; Zuchongzhi 2.1 is a million times faster than a conventional computer.
At last year’s I/O conference, Google unveiled a Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California, complete with a quantum data centre, quantum hardware research labs, and quantum processor chip fab facilities. The tech giant plans to build a useful, error-corrected quantum computer within a decade.
Quantum computing operations are realized using acoustic devices, paving the way for a new type of quantum processor.
At this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), the Alexa AI automatic speech recognition organization is rep… See more.
Multimodal training, signal-to-interpretation, and BERT rescoring are just a few topics covered by Amazon’s 21 speech-related papers.
