348 articles from THURSDAY 14.5.2020

Satellites eye typhoon Vongfong landfall in the Philippines

NASA and NOAA satellites have been providing forecasters with satellite data that showed the strength and extent of Typhoon Vongfong as it made landfall in the Philippines and continued to track through the country. Warnings were in effect throughout several areas of the Philippines on May 14.

General descriptor sparks advancements in dye chemistry

There is an ongoing demand in biological research to accelerate the development of fluorescent probes based on the photo-induced electron transfer (PET) mechanism. By modulating PET formations, these probes significantly change fluorescence intensities, allowing a convenient route to monitor analytes or environmental changes with high sensitivity, vivid visibility and excellent spatiotemporal...

Unlocking the gate to the millisecond CT

Many will undergo a CT scan at some point in their lifetime—being slid in and out of a tunnel as a large machine rotates around. X-ray computed tomography, better known by its acronym CT, is a widely used method of obtaining cross-sectional images of objects.

Beads made of boa bones identified in lesser Antilles

Today boa snakes have a patchy distribution in the islands that form the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, but the constrictors are nearly absent from archaeological deposits in the region. Whether this scarcity is due to past species distribution, poor preservation conditions, or a lack of interaction with human communities, remains unknown.

An intrinsic oscillator drives the blood stage cycle of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum

The blood stage of the infection of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum exhibits a 48-hour developmental cycle that culminates in the synchronous release of parasites from red blood cells, which triggers 48-hour fever cycles in the host. This cycle could be driven extrinsically by host circadian processes or by a parasite-intrinsic oscillator. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we...

Changing perspectives in marine nitrogen fixation

Nitrogen fixation, the reduction of atmospheric dinitrogen gas (N2) to ammonia, is critical for biological productivity but is difficult to study in the vast expanse of the global ocean. Decades of field studies and the infusion of molecular biological, genomic, isotopic, and geochemical modeling approaches have led to new paradigms and questions. The discovery of previously unknown N2-fixing...

Comment on "Dry reforming of methane by stable Ni-Mo nanocatalysts on single-crystalline MgO"

Song et al. (Reports, 14 February 2020, p. 777) ignore the reported efficient Ni/MgO solid-solution catalysts and overstate the novelty and importance of the Mo-doped Ni/MgO catalysts for the dry reforming of methane. We show that the Ni/MgO solid-solution catalyst that we reported in 1995, which is efficient and stable for the dry reforming, is superior to the Mo-doped Ni/MgO...

De novo protein design enables the precise induction of RSV-neutralizing antibodies

De novo protein design has been successful in expanding the natural protein repertoire. However, most de novo proteins lack biological function, presenting a major methodological challenge. In vaccinology, the induction of precise antibody responses remains a cornerstone for next-generation vaccines. Here, we present a protein design algorithm called TopoBuilder, with which we engineered...

Deep long-period earthquakes generated by second boiling beneath Mauna Kea volcano

Deep long-period earthquakes (DLPs) are an enigmatic type of volcanic seismicity that sometimes precedes eruptions but mostly occurs at quiescent volcanoes. These earthquakes are depleted in high-frequency content and typically occur near the base of the crust. We observed a near-periodic, long-lived sequence of more than one million DLPs in the past 19 years beneath the dormant postshield Mauna...

Diverse functionalization of strong alkyl C-H bonds by undirected borylation

The selective functionalization of strong, typically inert carbon-hydrogen (C–H) bonds in organic molecules is changing synthetic chemistry. However, the undirected functionalization of primary C–H bonds without competing functionalization of secondary C–H bonds is rare. The borylation of alkyl C–H bonds has occurred previously with this selectivity, but slow rates required...

Effective containment explains subexponential growth in recent confirmed COVID-19 cases in China

The recent outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in mainland China was characterized by a distinctive subexponential increase of confirmed cases during the early phase of the epidemic, contrasting with an initial exponential growth expected for an unconstrained outbreak. We show that this effect can be explained as a direct consequence of containment policies that effectively deplete the...

Forest microclimate dynamics drive plant responses to warming

Climate warming is causing a shift in biological communities in favor of warm-affinity species (i.e., thermophilization). Species responses often lag behind climate warming, but the reasons for such lags remain largely unknown. Here, we analyzed multidecadal understory microclimate dynamics in European forests and show that thermophilization and the climatic lag in forest plant communities are...