“For the first time ever, physicists…have observed…the quantum-mechanical behaviour occurring at the location in a noble gas atom where, shortly before, an electron had been ejected from its orbit. The researchers achieved this result using light pulses which last only slightly longer than 100 attoseconds….” Full Slice

“A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy’s neighborhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA’s Swift space observatory earlier this summer…”…we know that this burst is one for the record books.”…” Full Slice

“Clusters of heated, magnetic nanoparticles targeted to cell membranes can remotely control ion channels, neurons and even animal behavior…The research could have broad application, potentially resulting in innovative cancer treatments that remotely manipulate selected proteins or cells in specific tissues, or improved diabetes therapies that remotely stimulate pancreatic cells to release insulin….” Full Slice

“…two widely divergent model organisms – yeast and nematodes, or garden worms – can survive hypothermia, or potentially lethal cold, if they are first put into a state of suspended animation by means of anoxia, or extreme oxygen deprivation…”We have found that extension of survival limits in the cold is possible if oxygen consumption is first diminished…Our experiments in yeast and nematodes suggest that organs may last longer outside the body if their oxygen consumption is first reduced before they are made cold.”….” Full Slice

“On the surface of things, how a bubble bursts may seem to be a simple, unremarkable event…It is well known that when small bubbles pop on a liquid surface tiny droplets are ejected upwards…Bubble-mediated aerosols are also relevant to applications in health and climate.

The shooting droplets have been shown to transfer any infectious material as well as dissolved gases and salt from large bodies of water, such as the ocean, into the air. Bubbles over a few millimeters in diameter have tended to be dismissed by researchers as not producing aerosols.

The team’s findings, however, may modify this belief…” Full Slice

“…Using the concentrated solutions of dissolved graphene, the scientists made transparent films that were electrically conductive. Such films could be useful in making touch screens that are less expensive than those used in today’s smart phones. In addition, the researchers also produced liquid crystals.

“If you can make liquid crystals, you can spin fibers,”…”In liquid crystals, the individual sheets align themselves into domains, and having some measure of alignment allows you to flow the material through narrow openings to create fibers.”

If the method proves useful for making graphene fibers in bulk, it could drive down the cost of the ultrastrong carbon composites used in the aerospace, automotive and construction industries.” Full Slice

“…”In the past, it was thought the Chasma Boreale canyon formed by melting the bottom of the ice sheet and having the floodwater carve the canyon, or perhaps having winds erode the canyon into the ice sheet from above,” said Byrne. “In this study, we’ve figured out that the canyon has actually always been there and the ice cap grew up on either side of it.”

“The arrangement of the internal layers we see with the radar instrument and the layers exposed on cliffs that we see with HiRISE have allowed us to reconstruct the history of this feature.”

“Nobody realized that there would be such complex structures in the layers,”…” Full Slice

“…Scientists think more CO2 was locked up in the deep ocean during ice ages, and that pulses or ‘burps’ of CO2 from the deep Southern Ocean helped trigger a global thaw every 100,000 years or so. The size of these pulses was roughly equivalent to the change in CO2 experienced since the start of the industrial revolution.

If this theory is correct, we would expect to see large transfers of carbon from the ocean to the atmosphere at the end of each ice age….” Full Slice

“…the construction of so-called “libraries” of carbohydrate molecules for biological study has been slow and tedious. In what may change all that, a team of scientists…has created a method for the rapid chemical synthesis of complex carbohydrates, and that method could dramatically change the availability of such molecules for research…”The emerging field of glycomics has been severely hampered by a lack of robust, well-defined libraries of carbohydrate molecules, which are greatly needed to decipher the ‘carbohydrate codes’ used by cells for processes such as cell signaling, embryogenesis and neuronal development,”…” Full Slice

“Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome. They now hope to use this method to probe the basic machinery of life and to engineer bacteria specially designed to solve environmental or energy problems…”This is the first synthetic cell that’s been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer,”…” Full Slice and Another Slice

“…The team discovered that 64 percent of the proteins found in the stem cells grown in simulated microgravity were not in control samples. In particular, the bioreactor cells contained several proteins involved in the breakdown of bone and in the regulation of calcium, neither type of which were found in stem cells grown in regular, Earth gravity.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study conducted that has investigated the effect of (simulated microgravity conditions) on an embryonic stem cell line and demonstrated a significant alteration in human cell function as a result of growth in microgravity conditions,”…” Full Slice

“Researchers…have found that the level of a single protein in the tiny roundworm C. elegans determines how long it lives. Worms born without this protein, called arrestin, lived about one-third longer than normal, while worms that had triple the amount of arrestin lived one-third less.

The research also showed that arrestin interacts with several other proteins within cells to regulate longevity. The human version of one of these proteins is PTEN, a well-known tumor suppressor….” Full Slice

“…researcher… has shown that the protein called synaptotagmin1 (Syt1) is the sole trigger for the release of neurotransmitters in the brain.

Prior to this research, Syt1 was thought to be a part of the protein structure (not the sole protein) that triggered the release of neurotransmitters at 10 parts per million of calcium….” Full Slice

“A team of researchers…has discovered an inexpensive metal catalyst that can effectively generate hydrogen gas from water at neutral pH or from sea water.

The new proton reduction catalyst is based on a molybdenum-oxo metal complex that is about 70 times cheaper than platinum…” Full Slice

“…By compressing the surface platinum atoms closer together, the process causes platinum atoms to bind a little more weakly to oxygen atoms and inch closer to the balance point between molecule dissociation and catalytic binding…The ultimate goal is to create a potential replacement not only for gasoline engines but also for the batteries found in small electronic devices…It is the first step to designer catalyists….” Full Slice