122 articles from FRIDAY 12.8.2022

How life on land learned to breathe

Scientists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, together with collaborators from South Africa and the U.S., have revealed a new chapter in the history of the mammalian breastbone. Their study of a 260-million-year-old fossil shows that its breastbone was divided into a series of segments, like that of modern mammals. This discovery indicates that prerequisites of the mammalian way of walking...

Ice core taken in Antarctica contains sample of atmosphere from five million years ago

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. has successfully pulled an ice core from Antarctica's Ong Valley that contains samples of Earth's atmosphere from up to 5 million years ago. In their paper published in The Cryosphere, the researchers explain why they chose to drill in the Ong Valley and what they hope to learn from their study of the ice core.

Single-cell RNA sequencing to study salmonella infection

In May 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalled Jif peanut butter due to potential salmonella contamination. In the last 5 years alone, there have been ~35 food-related salmonella outbreaks. Salmonella enterica is a gram-negative pathogen that typically invades the intestines to cause disease. People who get salmonella infection experience symptoms with varying degrees of...

High-fidelity Cas13 variants with minimal collateral RNA targeting

A recent study published in Nature Biotechnology revealed the development of high-fidelity Cas13 variants with markedly reduced collateral effects by mutagenesis and demonstrated the feasibility of hfCas13 for efficient on-target RNA degradation with almost no collateral damage in mammalian cells and animals.

New van der Waals heterostructures for high-efficiency infrared photodetection

Professors Hu Weida and Peng Hailin, two of researchers at Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics and Peking University, recently proposed momentum-matching and band-alignment van der Waals heterostructures to solve the low QE of 2D materials infrared photodetectors. The results were published in Science Advances, titled "Momentum-matching and band-alignment van der Waals heterostructures for...

Using nature and data to weather coastal storms

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense, sometimes with tragic consequences. Europe's coastal cities are preparing to meet the challenges with help from nature and data from outer space.

Important milestone on the way to transition metal catalysis with aluminum

Chemists Philipp Dabringhaus, Julie Willrett and Prof. Dr. Ingo Krossing from the Institute of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry at the University of Freiburg have succeeded in synthesizing the low-valent cationic aluminum complex [Al(AlCp*)3]+ by a metathesis reaction. The team presents their research work in the journal Nature Chemistry.