A formamide modification (yellow) to a therapeutic agent siRNA (blue) prevents siRNA to bind to non-target mRNA, which allows for treatment with less side effects. Credit: Reiko Matsushita Small interfering RNA (siRNA) drugs are a class of therapeutic agents that silence specific genes associated with inherited diseases. However, siRNA drugs have challenges because siRNAs often … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain If you’re a young person (or a parent of one), you may be thinking some big thoughts about your future. Am I going to go to university? Maybe I’ll look at a trade? I might want to travel? Or maybe I don’t? Do I have to decide now? I don’t know … Read more
by Light Publishing Center, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics And Physics, CAS The microsphere, levitated by the dual beam optical tweezer (green), is driven by the active optomechanical system (red) to generate nonlinear phonon lasers (colored waves). Meanwhile, the injected electrical signal, represented by the white lightning mark, acts as a simple but powerful … Read more
QSA All Personnel Meeting 2024. Credit: Berkeley Lab Before quantum computers can solve complex problems, researchers must develop technologies that manage larger numbers of qubits (the building blocks of quantum computers) for extended periods. Neutral atoms play an important role in this effort and are promising for quantum computing because they offer a stable, controllable, … Read more
Visualization of the structure of the level-3 many-hypercube code. Credit: Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adp6388 In work published in Science Advances, Hayato Goto from the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing in Japan has proposed a new quantum error correction approach using what he calls “many-hypercube codes.” This approach, which turns out to have an elegant … Read more
Map of Late Neolithic sites. Credit: Communications Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-024-06676-7 Since the catastrophic pandemics of the Middle Ages, one disease has almost proverbially symbolized contagion and death: the plague. It is now known that the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis has been present in Central and Northern Europe for more than 5,000 years. However, it … Read more
Codi overcoming a slope in rocky terrain. Credit: Airbus Rover trials in a quarry in the U.K. showing a four-wheeled rover, known as Codi, using its robotic arm and a powerful computer vision system to pick up sample tubes. The rover drives to the samples with an accuracy of 10 cm, constantly mapping the terrain. … Read more
Experimental setup of the FSO outdoor experiments. Tunable laser source (TLS), driving amplifier (DA), arbitrary waveform generator (AWG), transmitter digital signal processing (Tx-DSP), erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), bandpass filter (BPF), optical spectrum analyzer (OSA), polarization division multiplexing emulator (PDM), high power optical amplifier (HPOA), real time controller (RTC), deformable mirror (DFM), wafefront sensor (WFS), optical … Read more
The first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. Credit: EHT Collaboration The origins of aptly named supermassive black holes—which … Read more
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Severe drought in the American Southwest and Mexico and more severe wet years in the Northeast are the modern norm in North America, according to new research—and the analysis suggests these seasonal patterns will be more extreme in the future. The middle of the United States, meanwhile, can expect bigger swings … Read more
