Every egg cell and sperm cell depends on meiosis, a tightly choreographed process in which chromosomes find their partners, exchange genetic material and then divide. When meiosis goes awry in humans, the consequences can include infertility, miscarriage and birth defects.
Two black holes can collide and merge into one. But could the opposite happen: could a single black hole split into two smaller ones? That question is explored in a new theoretical study: "When Black Holes Admit Pair-of-pants Topologies," published in the journal Physical Review D.
Whenever anything is written about the Denisovans, the word "mysterious" is almost guaranteed to appear. That is because we just don't know a lot about this extinct human group that may have lived in East Asia from at least 300,000 to 45,000 years ago and was closely related to the Neanderthals. The main reason for that is a sparse fossil record.
Mitochondria are the tiny powerpacks that supply most of the energy our cells need. Their ability to generate this energy relies on a distinctive architecture: two membranes, one tucked inside the other, separated by a narrow gap called the intermembrane space (IMS). This tiny space helps sustain the chemistry of energy production, making its organization critical to how these cellular powerpacks function.
The Orion Nebula is a large star-forming region visible to the naked eye. Some of the young stars in the nebula are surrounded by disks of gas and dust in which planets form. Radiation from the massive central star, 1 Ori C1 (Theta-1 Orionis C1), gradually strips material from these disks, giving them shapes that resemble tadpoles.
Establishing a long-term presence on the moon will require solving challenges that are easy to overlook on Earth. Lunar temperatures, for instance, can vary from hundreds of degrees below zero to boiling, making effective insulation essential for lunar habitats.
What if we could predict early in drug development which antibiotics bacteria are most likely to become resistant to? In a review published in Nature Reviews Microbiology, researchers from the HUN-REN Biological Research Centre, Szeged (HUN-REN BRC Szeged) and the Hungarian Centre of Excellence for Molecular Medicine (HCEMM) in Szeged propose a five-step decision-making framework that could help identify resistance risks early, refine promising drug candidates and prevent costly failures.
Many of the most potent antibiotics originate from bacteria. A large proportion belong to a class of compounds known as nonribosomal peptides (NRP). They are produced by large bacterial enzyme machineries—the nonribosomal peptide synthetases, or NRPS for short. These function like molecular assembly lines: Similar to the stations in a car factory, where new parts are added to the car at each step, several specialized modules string together amino acid by amino acid to build a peptide.
In 1953, two physicists showed that an electron beam skimming past a grating emits light whose color depends only on the electron's speed and the grating's spacing. Known as Smith-Purcell radiation, this phenomenon has become a useful tool for building compact, tunable light sources and tracking particle beams without touching them.
Researchers at AIST have demonstrated the synthesis of nanoporous carbonaceous materials and carbonaceous materials with layered nanostructures through a simple process involving the chemical modification of common sugars such as sucrose and fructose.
The new RFD4-Proteina unified generative model for protein design—created by the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) in collaboration with NVIDIA—uses advanced AI to generate entirely new protein sequences and structures, achieving computational design success rates five to 10 times higher than previous models and generating candidates five to 10 times faster.
Researchers at AIST have directly observed magnetic flux quanta generated in a superconductor by photon absorption and demonstrated a new principle of photon detection that identifies the number of photons based on the number of these flux quanta.
Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) have developed a new way to make glowing biological reporters more accurate, allowing scientists to track gene activity in living plants over days, weeks and potentially even months and years. The approach could help researchers study how plants respond to disease, pests and environmental stress, while opening the door to similar applications in animal and human disease models.
Punching a virtual response box or swinging a virtual lightsaber can dramatically improve learning on certain tasks, according to new research from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science, which challenges long-standing assumptions about how people learn.
Relatively simple changes to the way traditional brick kilns operate in Bangladesh can reduce pollution, save fuel and improve the quality of bricks they produce.
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