Quantum holds the promise of increasing the power of sensing technologies. While the field of quantum sensing has shown a lot of potential for detecting very small signals, the ability to truly optimize these sensors has been thwarted by the complexity of control schemes. In a paper published on March 25 in Nature Partner Journals - Quantum Information, a research team based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, explained how they applied two theoretical tools of quantum information to these types of extremely sensitive signal detection tasks. Their research suggests that honing this sensitivity to detect signals while rejecting background noise will enable the use of quantum ...

HOUSTON - (March 25, 2021) - One of nature's most prolific cannibals could be hiding in your pantry, and biologists have used it to show how social structure affects the evolution of selfish behavior. Researchers revealed that less selfish behavior evolved under living conditions that forced individuals to interact more frequently with siblings. While the finding was verified with insect experiments, Rice University biologist Volker Rudolf said the evolutionary principal could be applied to study any species, including humans. In a study published online this week in Ecology Letters, Rudolf, longtime collaborator Mike Boots of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues showed they could drive the evolution of cannibalism in ...

An 'astonishing' deficit of data about how the global boom in educational technology could help pupils with disabilities in low and middle-income countries has been highlighted in a new report. Despite widespread optimism that educational technology, or 'EdTech', can help to level the playing field for young people with disabilities, the study found a significant shortage of evidence about which innovations are best-positioned to help which children, and why; specifically in low-income contexts. The review also found that many teachers lack training on how to use new technology, or are reluctant to do so. The ...

Fish oil supplements are a billion-dollar industry built on a foundation of purported, but not proven, health benefits. Now, new research from a team led by a University of Georgia scientist indicates that taking fish oil only provides health benefits if you have the right genetic makeup. The study, led by Kaixiong Ye and published in PLOS Genetics, focused on fish oil (and the omega-3 fatty acids it contains) and its effect on triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood and a biomarker for cardiovascular disease. "We've known for a few decades that a higher level of omega-3 fatty acids in the blood is associated with a lower risk of heart disease," said Ye, assistant professor ...

Cholinesterase inhibitors are a group of drugs recommended for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, but their effects on cognition have been debated and few studies have investigated their long-term effects. A new study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and published in the journal Neurology shows persisting cognitive benefits and reduced mortality for up to five years after diagnosis. Alzheimer's disease is a cognitive brain disease that affects millions of patients around the world. Some 100,000 people in Sweden live with the diagnosis, which has a profound impact on the lives of both them and their families. Most of those who receive a diagnosis are over 65, but there are some patients ...

Influenza vaccines need to be evaluated every year to ensure they remain effective against new influenza viruses. Will the same apply to COVID-19 vaccines? In order to gauge whether and to what extent this may be necessary, a team of researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin compared the evolution of endemic 'common cold' coronaviruses with that of influenza viruses. The researchers predict that, while the pandemic is ongoing, vaccines will need to undergo regular updates. A few years into the post-pandemic period, however, vaccines ...

Alzheimer's disease seems to progress faster in women than in men. The protein tau accumulates at a higher rate in women, according to research from Lund University in Sweden. The study was recently published in Brain. Over 30 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease worldwide, making it the most common form of dementia. Tau and beta-amyloid are two proteins known to aggregate and accumulate in the brain in patients with Alzheimer's. The first protein to aggregate in Alzheimer's is beta-amyloid. Men and women are equally affected by the first disease stages, and the analysis did not show any differences in the accumulation of ...

How different are men and women's brains? The question has been explored for decades, but a new study led by Rosalind Franklin University neuroscientist END ...

GALVESTON, Texas - A new study conducted at the Galveston National Laboratory at the The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) has shown substantial benefit to combining monoclonal antibodies and the antiviral remdesivir against advanced Marburg virus. The study was published today in Nature Communications. "Marburg is a highly virulent disease in the same family as the virus that causes Ebola. In Africa, patients often arrive to a physician very ill. It was important to test whether a combination of therapies would work better with really sick people, said Tom Geisbert, a professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at UTMB and the principal investigator ...

TROY, N.Y. -- Outsourcing routine tasks, like payroll, customer service, and accounting, offers well-known benefits to businesses and contributes to an economy in which entrepreneurial vendors can support industry and expand employment. However, new research from the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute discovered that not all client-vendor relationships are beneficial for the vendors. "It's important to observe and study both sides of a business relationship," said T. Ravichandran, a chaired professor of information systems in Lally and an author of a new study published in Information Systems Frontiers. "For businesses to thrive, they need a vibrant vendor community that will support ...

The ocean's mammals are at a crucial crossroads - with some at risk of extinction and others showing signs of recovery, researchers say. In a detailed review of the status of the world's 126 marine mammal species - which include whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, manatees, dugongs, sea otters and polar bears - scientists found that accidental capture by fisheries (bycatch), climate change and pollution are among the key drivers of decline. A quarter of these species are now classified as being at risk of extinction (vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered on the IUCN Red List), with the near-extinct vaquita porpoise and the critically endangered North Atlantic ...

WASHINGTON -- Researchers have developed a new microscopy technique that can acquire 3D super-resolution images of subcellular structures from about 100 microns deep inside biological tissue, including the brain. By giving scientists a deeper view into the brain, the method could help reveal subtle changes that occur in neurons over time, during learning, or as result of disease. The new approach is an extension of stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, a breakthrough technique that achieves nanoscale resolution by overcoming the traditional diffraction limit of optical microscopes. Stefan Hell won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing this super-resolution imaging technique. In Optica, The ...

Serotonin, or 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT), is a kind of neurotransmitter. 5-HT can regulate multifaceted physiological functions such as mood, cognition, learning, memory, and emotions through 5-HT receptors. 5-HT receptors are a type of G protein-coupled receptor and can be divided into 12 subtypes in humans. As drug targets, they play a vital role in the treatment of schizophrenia, depression, and migraine. However, the structural and functional mechanisms of 5-HT receptors have been largely unknown. In a study published in Nature on March 24, Prof. H. Eric XU and Prof. JIANG Yi from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM) of the Chinese Academy of ...

Their study has shown that these malignant melanoma vesicles produced by CSCs have a different molecular composition from that of differentiated tumour cells. These molecules were also found to be detectable in exosomes present in the blood, and they presented differences in patients with malignant melanoma compared to healthy individuals. This makes them potentially suitable as biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of this disease. The results have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Molecular Oncology. Malignant melanoma is one of the most aggressive types of skin cancer and its prevalence has been increasing worldwide in recent years. Among the factors that contribute to the life-threatening nature and ...

Dr. Rosario González-Férez, a researcher at the Department of Atomic, Molecular and Nuclear Physics and the "Carlos I" Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics of the University of Granada, has published the article "Ultralong-Range Rydberg Bi-molecules" in the prestigious scientific journal Physical Review Letters. The results of the study show a new type of bi-molecule formed from two nitric oxide (NO) molecules, both in their ground state and in the Rydberg electronic state. The work was made possible thanks to the scientific collaboration between the researcher and the Institute for Theoretical Atomic, Molecular ...

The novel label-free assay uses unconventional L and inverse-L shaped pillars of deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) microfluidic technology to quantify and profile immune states of white blood cells (WBCs) by assessing biophysical properties of size, deformation, distribution, and cell count The assay requires only 20 microlitres (μl) of unprocessed blood and takes just 15 minutes - much faster than existing methods which require up to 15 millilitres (ml) of blood and take at least a few hours to produce results This new technology measures and profiles the often volatile host immune response, resulting in a more accurate assessment of patient pathophysiology Current methods for early diagnosis of infection focus on ...

For almost a century, physicists have been intrigued by the fundamental question: why are complex numbers so important in quantum mechanics, that is, numbers containing a component with the imaginary number i? Usually, it was assumed that they are only a mathematical trick to facilitate the description of phenomena, and only results expressed in real numbers have a physical meaning. However, a Polish-Chinese-Canadian team of researchers has proved that the imaginary part of quantum mechanics can be observed in action in the real world. We need to significantly reconstruct our naive ...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have investigated how the X and Y chromosomes evolve and adapt to each other within a population. The results show that breaking up coevolved sets of sex chromosomes could lead to lower survival rates among the offspring - something that could be of importance in species conservation, for example. The study is published in the journal PNAS. The results provide new clues on how species are formed, and suggest it could be harmful to bring together individuals from different populations that have been separated for a long time. The reason is that the offspring have lower survival rates. "This is something worth keeping in mind in conservation biology, where you want to see a population ...

By clearing forests, burning grasslands, plowing fields and harvesting crops, humans apply strong selective pressures on the plants that survive on the landscapes we use. Plants that evolved traits for long-distance seed-dispersal, including rapid annual growth, a lack of toxins and large seed generations, were more likely to survive on these dynamic anthropogenic landscapes. In the current article, researchers argue that these traits may have evolved as adaptations for megafaunal mutualisms, later allowing those plants to prosper among increasingly sedentary human populations. The new study hypothesizes that the presence of specific anthropophilic traits explains why a select few plant families came to dominate the crop and weed ...

The claim that old-growth forests play a significant role in climate mitigation, based upon the argument that even the oldest forests keep sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, is being refuted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen. The researchers document that this argument is based upon incorrectly analysed data and that the climate mitigation effect of old and unmanaged forests has been greatly overestimated. Nevertheless, they reassert the importance of old-growth forest for biodiversity. Old and unmanaged forest has become the subject of much debate in ...

One big challenge for the production of synthetic cells is that they must be able to divide to have offspring. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a team from Heidelberg has now introduced a reproducible division mechanism for synthetic vesicles. It is based on osmosis and can be controlled by an enzymatic reaction or light. Organisms cannot simply emerge from inanimate material ("abiogenesis"), cells always come from pre-existing cells. The prospect of synthetic cells newly built from the ground up is shifting this paradigm. However, one obstacle on this path is the question of controlled division--a requirement for having "progeny". A team from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Heidelberg ...

The team of researchers at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania applied artificial intelligence (AI) methods to evaluate data of human embryo development. The AI-based system photographs the embryos every five minutes, processes the data of their development and notifies any anomalies observed. This increases the likelihood of choosing the most viable and healthy early-stage embryo for IVF procedures. The innovation was developed in collaboration with Esco Medical Technologies, a manufacturer of medical equipment. Almost one in six couples face infertility; about 48.5 million couples, 186 million individuals worldwide are inflicted. Europe has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with an average of just 1.55 children per woman. The most effective form of ...

By offering a microscopic "tightrope" to cells, Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University researchers have brought new insights to the way migrating cells interact in the body. The researchers changed their testing environment for observing cell-cell interaction to more closely mirror the body, resulting in new observations of cells interacting like cars on a highway -- pairing up, speeding up, and passing one another. Understanding the ways migrating cells react to one another is essential to predicting how cells change and evolve and how they react in applications, such as wound healing and drug delivery. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team formed by Mechanical Engineering Associate ...

Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with colleagues from different countries have developed a new sensor with two layers of nanopores. In the conducted experiments, this sensor showed its efficiency as a sensor for one of the doping substances from chiral molecules. The research findings are published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics (IF: 10,257; Q1) academic journal. The material is a thick wafer with pores of 20-30 nm in diameter. The scientists grew a layer of metal-organic frameworks (MOF) from Zn ions and organic molecules on these thick wafers. The MOF has about 3 nm nanopores only. It plays the role of a trap for molecules, which must be detected. "This sensor can operate with chiral molecules. Such substances consisting of chiral molecules are a lot among medical ...

In the future, photovoltaic cells could be "worn" over clothes, placed on cars or even on beach umbrellas. These are just some of the possible developments from a study published in Nature Communications by researchers at the Physics Department of the Politecnico di Milano, working with colleagues at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Imperial College London. The research includes among its authors the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnology (IFN-CNR) researcher Franco V. A. Camargo and Professor Giulio Cerullo. It focused on photovoltaic cells made using flexible organic technology. Today's most popular photovoltaic cells, based on silicone technology, are rigid and ...