A new strategy for treating a variety of diseases known as RNA-repeat expansion disorders, which affect millions of people, has shown promise in proof-of-principle tests conducted by scientists at Scripps Research.

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new computational approach to accelerate the design of materials exhibiting metal-insulator transitions (MIT), a rare class of electronic materials that have shown potential to jumpstart future design and delivery of faster microelectronics and quantum information systems—foundational technologies behind Internet of Things devices and...

A new study shows that increased heat from Arctic rivers is melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and warming the atmosphere.

Scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, working with the perovskite family of materials, have developed an optoelectronic magnetic double perovskite. The discovery opens the possibility to couple spintronics with optoelectronics for rapid and energy-efficient information storage.

Increasing plant diversity enhances the natural control of insect herbivory in grasslands. Species-rich plant communities support natural predators and simultaneously provide less valuable food for herbivores. This was found by a team of researchers led by the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), who conducted two analogous experiments in Germany and the U.S. Their results...

Superconductivity is a phenomenon in which an electric circuit loses its resistance and becomes extremely efficient under certain conditions. There are different ways in which this can happen, which were thought to be incompatible. For the first time, researchers have discovered a bridge between two of these methods to achieve superconductivity. This new knowledge could lead to a more general...

Scientists probing a prehistoric crocodile group's shadowy past have discovered a timeless truth—pore over anyone's family tree long enough, and something surprising will emerge.

Solving the equations of general relativity for colliding black holes is no simple matter.

Researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the NOVA University of Lisbon (UNL) have used platinum (Pt) compounds of a liquid crystalline nature to design nanocrystal structures capable of effectively encapsulating and transporting water-insoluble drugs that are otherwise difficult to administer.

Optical activity in chiral molecules has become a hot topic in physics and optics, representing the ability to manipulate the polarized state of light. Understanding how molecules rotate the plane of plane-polarized light has widespread applications, from analytic chemistry to biology and medicine—where it can, for example, be used to detect the amount of sugar in a substance. A new study...

The banana has its earliest origins in Papua New Guinea, where it was domesticated by indigenous communities at least 7,000 years ago. This ancestor, Musa acuminata, subspecies Banksii, looks very different from the ubiquitous Cavendish banana: peeling back its skin reveals hundreds of large, hard seeds that enable easy reproduction in the wild.

Researchers from the Universities of Melbourne, York, Warwick and Oxford have shed light on how encapsulated viruses like hepatitis B, dengue and SARS-CoV-2 hijack the protein manufacturing and distribution pathways in the cell—they have also identified a potential broad spectrum anti-viral drug target to stop them in their tracks.

Microbiologists traditionally determine which organisms they are dealing with using the small subunit ribosomal RNA or in short SSU rRNA gene. This marker gene allows them to identify almost any living creature, be it a bacterium or an animal, and thus assign it to its place in the tree of life. Once the position in the tree of life is known, specific DNA probes can be designed to make the...

Germanium telluride (GeTe) is known as a ferrolectric Rashba semiconductor with a number of interesting properties. The crystals consist of nanodomains, whose ferrolectric polarization can be switched by external electric fields. Because of the so-called Rashba effect, this ferroelectricity can also be used to switch electron spins within each domain. Germanium telluride is therefore an...

When it comes to handling the waste crisis in Australia, options are limited: we either export our waste or bury it. But to achieve current national targets, policy-makers are increasingly asking if we can instead safely burn waste as fuel.

A recently released research brief from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy draws fresh attention to the manner in which corporate entities have sought to benefit from an economic crisis by rapidly acquiring residential property in Los Angeles.

In 1973, physicist and later Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson proposed a bizarre state of matter: the quantum spin liquid (QSL). Unlike the everyday liquids we know, the QSL actually has to do with magnetism—and magnetism has to do with spin.

Long neck, small head and a live weight of several tons—with this description you could have tracked down the Plateosaurus in Central Europe about 220 million years ago. Paleontologists at the University of Bonn have now described for the first time an almost complete skeleton of a juvenile Plateosaurus and discovered that it looked very similar to its parents even at a young age. The fact that...

They may be naturally suited to swinging in rainforests, but monkeys in a Finnish zoo have demonstrated a "significant" preference for traffic sounds instead of the noises of the jungle, researchers have found.

A galactic bar is the approximately linear structure of stars and gas that stretches across the inner regions of some galaxies. The bar stretches from one inner spiral arm, across the nuclear region, to an arm on the other side. Found in about half of spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, bars are thought to funnel large amounts of gas into the nuclear regions, with profound consequences for...

Since the emerald ash borer's introduction to the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, forest ecologists and government officials have striven to stem its destruction of ash forests. Despite those efforts, the invasive pest may be winning the war.

A new understanding of nanomaterials, sensor design and fabrication approaches could help advance stretchable, wearable gas sensors that monitor gaseous biomarkers in humans and toxic gas in an exposed environment, according to Penn State researchers.

In the quest to image exceedingly small structures and phenomena with higher precision, scientists have been pushing the limits of optical microscope resolution, but these advances often come with increased complication and cost.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs—powerful, millisecond-duration radio waves coming from deep space outside the Milky Way Galaxy—have been among the most mysterious astronomical phenomena ever observed. Since FRBs were first discovered in 2007, astronomers from around the world have used radio telescopes to trace the bursts and look for clues on where they come from and how they're produced.