314 articles from THURSDAY 20.2.2020

‘Your Workday Is Easier Thanks to His Revolutionary Ideas.’ Computer Scientist Who Created ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’ Dies

(NEW YORK) — Larry Tesler, the Silicon Valley pioneer who created the now-ubiquitous computer concepts such as “cut,” “copy” and “paste,” has died. He was 74. He made using computers easier for generations as a proponent and pioneer of what he called “modeless editing.” That meant a user wouldn’t have to use a keyboard to switch between...

Spacewatch: Solar Orbiter sends first data back to Earth

Spacecraft completes first critical stage of mission after successful deployment of boom armThe European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter has completed the first critical stage of its mission. Launched on 10 February from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the spacecraft has sent back its first readings after the deployment of its 4.4 metre-long boom arm.Made of titanium and carbon fibre, the boom arm points...

Water reuse could be key for future of hydraulic fracturing

Enough water will come from the ground as a byproduct of oil production from unconventional reservoirs during the coming decades to theoretically counter the need to use fresh water for hydraulic fracturing operations in many of the nation's large oil-producing areas. But while other industries, such as agriculture, might want to recycle some of that water for their own needs, water quality issues...

A better pregnancy test for whales

To determine whale pregnancy, researchers have relied on visual cues or hormone tests of blubber collected via darts, but the results were often inconclusive. Research points to a weakness of previous testing and evaluation methods and provides a new hormone testing regime that offers better results.

New drug helps to preserve brain cells for a time after stroke

After 50 years of research and the testing of over 1,000 drugs, there is new hope for preserving brain cells for a time after stroke. Treating acute ischemic stroke patients with an experimental neuroprotective drug, combined with a surgical procedure to remove the clot improves outcomes as shown by clinical trial results.

Physics tool helps track cancer cell diversity

A team took a novel, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the behavior of breast tumor cells by employing a statistical modeling technique more commonly used in physics and economics. The team was able to demonstrate how the diversity, or heterogeneity, of cancer cells can be influenced by their chemical environment -- namely, by interactions with a specific protein, which leads to tumor...

Water reuse could be key for future of hydraulic fracturing

Enough water will come from the ground as a byproduct of oil production from unconventional reservoirs during the coming decades to theoretically counter the need to use fresh water for hydraulic fracturing operations in many of the nation's large oil-producing areas. While other industries might want to recycle some of that water for their own needs, water quality issues and the potential costs...

A better pregnancy test for whales

It's not easy to do pregnancy tests on whales. You can't just ask a wild ocean animal that's the size of a school bus to pee on a little stick. For decades, the only way scientists could count pregnant females was by sight and best guesses based on visual characteristics. For the last several years, researchers have relied on hormone tests of blubber collected via darts, but the results were often...

Beyond the brim, Sombrero Galaxy's halo suggests turbulent past

Surprising new data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests the smooth, settled "brim" of the Sombrero galaxy's disk may be concealing a turbulent past. Hubble's sharpness and sensitivity resolves tens of thousands of individual stars in the Sombrero's vast, extended halo, the region beyond a galaxy's central portion, typically made of older stars. These latest observations of the Sombrero are...

Fifty years of data show new changes in bird migration

A growing body of research shows that birds' spring migration has been getting earlier and earlier in recent decades. New research on Black-throated Blue Warblers, a common songbird that migrates from Canada and the eastern US to Central America and back every year, uses fifty years of bird-banding data to add another piece to the puzzle, showing that little-studied fall migration patterns have...

More clues for how the monkeyflower got its spots

The monkeyflower, or Mimulus, though possessing a relatively simple genome is able to produce a stunning array of pigmentation patterns. A team of researchers is one step closer to understanding exactly how this genus of wildflowers is able to achieve such remarkable diversity.

Artificial intelligence yields new antibiotic

Using a machine-learning algorithm, researchers have identified a powerful new antibiotic compound. In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world's most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are resistant to all known antibiotics. It also cleared infections in two different mouse models.

Let there be 'circadian' light

Researchers describe the science behind creating lighting to make us all happy and productive indoors. A company is using the technology to create commercial lightbulbs available later this year.

New discovery has important implications for treating common eye disease

Scientists have made an important discovery with implications for those living with a common, debilitating eye disease (age-related macular degeneration, AMD) that can cause blindness. They have discovered that the molecule TLR2, which recognises chemical patterns associated with infection in the body, also seems to play an important role in the development of retinal degeneration. When TLR2 is...

DNA from ancient packrat nests helps unpack Earth's past

New work shows how using next-generation DNA sequencing on ancient packrat middens -- nests made out of plant material, fragments of insects, bones, fecal matter, and urine -- could provide ecological snapshots of Earth's past. The study may pave the way for scientists to better understand how plant communities -- and possibly animals, bacteria, and fungi as well -- will respond to human-caused...

New method to isolate atomic sheets and create new materials

Researchers have invented a new method -- using ultraflat gold films -- to disassemble vdW single crystals layer by layer into monolayers with near-unity yield and with dimensions limited only by bulk crystal sizes. The monolayers have the same high quality as those created by conventional 'Scotch tape' exfoliation, but are roughly a million times larger. They can be assembled into macroscopic...

Origins of immune system mapped, opening doors for new cancer immunotherapies

A first cell atlas of the human thymus gland could lead to new immune therapies to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases. Researchers mapped thymus tissue through the human lifespan to understand how it develops and makes vital immune cells called T cells. In the future, this information could help researchers to generate an artificial thymus and engineer improved therapeutic T cells.

Earliest interbreeding event between ancient human populations discovered

A new study documented the earliest known interbreeding event between ancient human populations -- a group known as the 'super-archaics' in Eurasia interbred with a Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestor about 700,000 years ago. The event was between two populations more distantly related than any other recorded. The authors proposed a revised timeline for human migration out of Africa and into Eurasia....

African killifish may hold key to stopping ageing in humans

Turquoise killifish is able to suspend its development for longer than its average lifespanThe curious ability of the African turquoise killifish to press pause on its development could have intriguing implications for human ageing, say researchers.Certain creatures, including the killifish, can put themselves into suspended animation as an embryo – a trait known as diapause. The phenomenon is...

Earliest interbreeding event between ancient human populations discovered

For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic patterns such as mutations and shared genes. He develops statistical methods that infer...

Old carbon reservoirs unlikely to cause massive greenhouse gas release

Permafrost in the soil and methane hydrates deep in the ocean are large reservoirs of ancient carbon. As soil and ocean temperatures rise, the reservoirs have the potential to break down, releasing enormous quantities of the potent greenhouse gas methane. But would this methane actually make it to the atmosphere?

Researchers develop new method to isolate atomic sheets and create new materials

Two-dimensional materials from layered van der Waals (vdW) crystals hold great promise for electronic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices, but making/manufacturing them has been limited by the lack of high-throughput techniques for exfoliating single-crystal monolayers with sufficient size and high quality. Columbia University researchers report today in Science that they have invented a new...

Beyond the brim, Sombrero Galaxy's halo suggests turbulent past

These latest Hubble observations of the Sombrero galaxy indicate only a tiny fraction of older, metal-poor stars in the halo, plus an unexpected abundance of metal-rich stars. Past major galaxy mergers are a possible explanation, though the stately Sombrero shows none of the messy evidence of a recent merger of massive galaxies.

A cell atlas of human thymic development defines T cell repertoire formation

The thymus provides a nurturing environment for the differentiation and selection of T cells, a process orchestrated by their interaction with multiple thymic cell types. We used single-cell RNA sequencing to create a cell census of the human thymus across the life span and to reconstruct T cell differentiation trajectories and T cell receptor (TCR) recombination kinetics. Using this approach, we...

Ancient origins of allosteric activation in a Ser-Thr kinase

A myriad of cellular events are regulated by allostery; therefore, evolution of this process is of fundamental interest. Here, we use ancestral sequence reconstruction to resurrect ancestors of two colocalizing proteins, Aurora A kinase and its allosteric activator TPX2 (targeting protein for Xklp2), to experimentally characterize the evolutionary path of allosteric activation. Autophosphorylation...

Angiotensin and biased analogs induce structurally distinct active conformations within a GPCR

Biased agonists of G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) preferentially activate a subset of downstream signaling pathways. In this work, we present crystal structures of angiotensin II type 1 receptor (AT1R) (2.7 to 2.9 angstroms) bound to three ligands with divergent bias profiles: the balanced endogenous agonist angiotensin II (AngII) and two strongly β-arrestin–biased analogs....

Biocatalytic synthesis of planar chiral macrocycles

Macrocycles can restrict the rotation of substituents through steric repulsions, locking in conformations that provide or enhance the activities of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, aroma chemicals, and materials. In many cases, the arrangement of substituents in the macrocycle imparts an element of planar chirality. The difficulty in predicting when planar chirality will arise, as well as the...

Bumble bees display cross-modal object recognition between visual and tactile senses

Many animals can associate object shapes with incentives. However, such behavior is possible without storing images of shapes in memory that are accessible to more than one sensory modality. One way to explore whether there are modality-independent internal representations of object shapes is to investigate cross-modal recognition—experiencing an object in one sensory modality and later...