With two billion people worldwide lacking access to clean and safe drinking water, joint research by Monash University, CSIRO and the University of Texas at Austin published today in Sciences Advances may offer a breakthrough new solution.

It all comes down to metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), an amazing next generation material that have the largest internal surface area of any known substance. The sponge like crystals can be used to capture, store and release chemical compounds. In this case, the salt and ions in sea water.

Dr Huacheng Zhang, Professor Huanting Wang and Associate Professor Zhe Liu and their team in the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in collaboration with Dr Anita Hill of CSIRO and Professor Benny Freeman of the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, have recently discovered that MOF membranes can mimic the filtering function, or ‘ion selectivity’, of organic cell membranes.

With further development, these membranes have significant potential to perform the dual functions of removing salts from seawater and separating metal ions in a highly efficient and cost effective manner, offering a revolutionary new technological approach for the water and mining industries.

Source: Researchers discover efficient and sustainable way to filter salt and metal ions from water

Geologists matching rocks from opposite sides of the globe have found that part of Australia was once attached to North America 1.7 billion years ago.

Researchers from Curtin University in Australia examinedrocks from the Georgetown region of northern Queensland. The rocks — sandstone sedimentary rocks that formed in a shallow sea — had signatures that were unknownin Australia but strongly resembled rocks that can be seen in present-day Canada.

The researchers, who described their findings online Jan. 17 in the journal Geology, concluded that the Georgetown area broke away from North America 1.7 billion years ago. Then, 100 million years later, this landmass collided with what is now northern Australia, at the Mount Isa region. […]
Previous research suggested that northeast Australia was near North America, Siberia or North China when the continents came together to form Nuna, Nordsvan and colleagues noted, but scientists had yet to find solid evidence of this relationship.

Source: 1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia

Plants lack eyes and ears, but they can still see, hear, smell and respond to environmental cues and dangers—especially to virulent pathogens. They do this with the aid of hundreds of membrane proteins that can sense microbes or other stresses.

Only a small portion of these sensing proteins have been studied through classical genetics, and knowledge on how these sensors function by forming complexes with one another is scarce. Now, an international team of researchers from four nations—including Shahid Mukhtar, Ph.D., and graduate student Timothy “TC” Howton at the University of Alabama at Birmingham—has created the first network map for 200 of these proteins. The map shows how a few key proteins act as master nodes critical for network integrity, and the map also reveals unknown interactions.
[…]
The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana contains more than 600 different receptor kinases—50 times more than humans—that are critical for plant growth, development, immunity and stress response. Until now, only a handful had known functions, and little was known about how the receptors might interact with each to coordinate responses to often-conflicting signals.

For the Nature study, the Belkhadir lab tested interactions between extracellular domains of the receptors in a pairwise manner, working with more than 400 extracellular domains of the LRR-receptor kinases and performing 40,000 interaction tests.

Positive interactions were used to produce an interaction map displaying how those receptor kinases interact with one another, in a total of 567 high-confidence interactions.
[…]
At UAB, Mukhtar and Howton tested 372 intracellular domains of the LRR-receptor kinases whose extracellular domains had shown high-confidence interactions, to see if the intracellular domains also showed strong interactions. More than half did, suggesting that the formation of these receptor complexes is required for signal perception and downstream signal transduction. This also indicates a validation of the biological significance of the extracellular domain interaction
[…]
The Nature study included two major surprises, says Adam Mott, Ph.D., University of Toronto. LRR-receptor kinases that have small extracellular domains interacted with other LRR-receptor kinases more often than those that have large domains. This suggests that the small receptor kinases evolved to coordinate actions of the other receptors. Second, researchers identified several unknown LRR-receptor kinases that appear critical for network integrity.

Source: Breakthrough study shows how plants sense the world

So yes, vegetarians, plants do live and feel and see and detect, you murderers!

Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. Instead, the engine’s efficiency is bounded by a recently proposed generalized second law of thermodynamics, and it is the first information engine to approach this new bound.

The results demonstrate both the feasibility of realizing a “lossless” information engine—so-called because virtually none of the available information is lost but is instead almost entirely converted into work—and also experimentally validates the sharpness of the bound set by the generalized second law.

The physicists, Govind Paneru, Dong Yun Lee, Tsvi Tlusty, and Hyuk Kyu Pak at the Institute for Basic Science in Ulsan, South Korea (Tlusty and Pak are also with the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), have published a paper on the lossless information engine in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

[…]
Traditionally, the maximum efficiency with which an engine can convert energy into work is bounded by the second law of thermodynamics. In the past decade, however, experiments have shown that an engine’s efficiency can surpass the second law if the engine can gain information from its surroundings, since it can then convert that information into work. These information engines (or “Maxwell’s demons,” named after the first conception of such a device) are made possible due to a fundamental connection between information and thermodynamics that scientists are still trying to fully understand.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.html#jCp
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.html#jCp

Source: Information engine operates with nearly perfect efficiency

a new study in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems mathematically models the implications of the larger problem: You’re not keeping the right distance from the car behind you.

That may seem counterintuitive, since you don’t have much control over how far you are from the car behind you—especially when that person is a tailgater. But the math says that if everyone kept an equal distance between the cars ahead and behind, all spaced out in a more orderly fashion, traffic would move almost twice as quickly. Now sure, you’re probably not going to convince everyone on the road to do that. Still, the finding could be a simple yet powerful way to optimize semi-autonomous cars long before the fully self-driving car of tomorrow arrives.
[…]
Problem is, we’re talking about an emergent property here. “To get the full benefits of this, a significant fraction of the cars would have to have this,” says Horn. “In terms of societal implementation that’s a big factor, because even if it’s relatively cheap, people who implement it will question whether the first car that gets it is worth that investment, because until other cars get it, it doesn’t do a whole lot of good.”
[…]
“It sounds pretty drastic, but the benefits are huge,” says Horn. “We’re talking about a potential doubling of throughput, huge decreases in CO2 emissions, a lot of aggravation reduced and fuel used.”

Source: Math Says You’re Driving Wrong and It’s Slowing Us All Down | WIRED

The recent news that stents inserted in patients with heart disease to keep arteries open work no better than a placebo ought to be shocking. Each year, hundreds of thousands of American patients receive stents for the relief of chest pain, and the cost of the procedure ranges from $11,000 to $41,000 in US hospitals.

But in fact, American doctors routinely prescribe medical treatments that are not based on sound science.The stent controversy serves as a reminder that the United States struggles when it comes to winnowing evidence-based treatments from the ineffective chaff. As surgeon and health care researcher Atul Gawande observes, “Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.

”Of course, many Americans receive too little medicine, not too much. But the delivery of useless or low-value services should concern anyone who cares about improving the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of medical care. Estimates vary about what fraction of the treatments provided to patients is supported by adequate evidence, but some reviews place the figure at under half.

Naturally that carries a heavy cost: One study found that overtreatment — one type of wasteful spending — added between $158 billion and $226 billion to US health care spending in 2011.

Source: The evidence-based medicine problem: US doctors cling to procedures that don’t work – Vox

Back in 2014, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in California reported that they’d engineered bacteria whose DNA used a whole new pair of letters, nicknamed X and Y. That same team now reports that they’ve gotten the bacteria to actually use these new letters. The biological possibilities, as a result, now seem endless.“The resulting semi-synthetic organism both encodes and retrieves increased information,” report the authors this week in Nature, “and should serve as a platform for the creation of new life forms and functions,” like new kinds of bacteria with specialized purposes (cleaning the environment, storing gifs…who knows) for example.

Source: Scientists Added Two New Letters to DNA’s Code

A group of physicists from Russia, Sweden and the U.S. has demonstrated a highly unusual optical effect. They managed to “virtually” absorb light using a material that has no light-absorbing capacity. The research findings, published in Optica, break new ground for the creation of memory elements for light.

The absorption of electromagnetic radiation, including light, is one of the main effects of electromagnetism. This process takes place when electromagnetic energy is converted to heat or another kind of energy within an absorbing material (for instance, during electron excitation). Coal, black paint and carbon nanotube arrays—also known as Vantablack—appear black because they absorb the energy of the incident light almost completely. Other materials, such as glass or quartz, have no absorbing properties and therefore look transparent.

In their theoretical research, the results of which were published in the journal Optica, the physicists managed to dispel that simple and intuitive notion by making a completely transparent material appear perfectly absorbing. To achieve that, the researchers employed special mathematical properties of the scattering matrix—a function that relates an incident electromagnetic field with the one scattered by the system. When a light beam of time-independent intensity hits a transparent object, the light is not absorbed, but is scattered by the material—a phenomenon caused by the unitary property of the scattering matrix. It turned out, however, that if the intensity of the incident beam is varied with time in a certain fashion, the unitary property can be disrupted, at least temporarily. In particular, if the intensity growth is exponential, the total incident light energy will accumulate in the transparent material without leaving it (fig. 1). That being the case, the system will appear perfectly absorbent from the outside

Source: Scientists make transparent materials absorb light

Scientists for the first time have tried editing a gene inside the body in a bold attempt to permanently change a person’s DNA to cure a disease.

The experiment was done Monday in California on 44-year-old Brian Madeux. Through an IV, he received billions of copies of a corrective gene and a genetic tool to cut his DNA in a precise spot.

“It’s kind of humbling” to be the first to test this, said Madeux, who has a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome. “I’m willing to take that risk. Hopefully it will help me and other people.”

Signs of whether it’s working may come in a month; tests will show for sure in three months.
[…]
“We cut your DNA, open it up, insert a gene, stitch it back up. Invisible mending,” said Dr. Sandy Macrae, president of Sangamo Therapeutics, the California company testing this for two metabolic diseases and hemophilia. “It becomes part of your DNA and is there for the rest of your life.”

AP News

Welcome to the website of The Atlas of the underworld – the first complete mapping of subducted plates in the Earth’s mantle and their geological interpretation.The Earth’s rigid outer shell – the lithosphere – is broken into plates that move relative to one another along discrete plate boundaries – ridges, transforms, and subduction zones. At subduction zone plate boundaries, one plate disappears below another and sinks into the mantle. These sinking plates, called ‘slabs’, are colder than their surroundings, and remain colder for a very long period of time – about 250 million years. As a result, the speed at which seismic waves travel through these bodies of sinking lithosphere is a little higher than from the surrounding hot mantle. Since the 1980’s, the technique of seismic tomography has been developed that provides a 3D image of the seismic velocity structure of the Earth’s crust and mantle, from the surface to the boundary between the mantle and the Earth’s liquid outer core at a depth of 2900 km.Subduction leaves a distinct geological record at the Earth’s surface, in the form of major mountain ranges such as the Andes or the Himalaya, or major volcanic arcs such as the Pacific Ring of Fire. Using these geological records, Earth Scientists have developed ways to determine when and where subduction episodes started and ended. On this website, we provide the current state-of-the-art of the images of slabs in the Earth’s upper and lower mantle, and the geological interpretation of when and where they were subducting. In the main article associated with this website, we use the information provided here to deduct physical properties of the mantle and slabs, and discuss ways to develop reference frames for plate reconstructions of the geological past. On this website, we provide open access to all slabs, organized by location, age, depth, and name.

Source: Atlas of the Underworld | van der Meer, D.G., van Hinsbergen, D.J.J., and Spakman, W., 2017, Atlas of the Underworld: slab remnants in the mantle, their sinking history, and a new outlook on lower mantle viscosity, Tectonophysics

A large, 18-country study may turn current nutritional thinking on its head.

The new research suggests that it’s not the fat in your diet that’s raising your risk of premature death, it’s too many carbohydrates — especially the refined, processed kinds of carbs — that may be the real killer.

The research also found that eating fruits, vegetables and legumes can lower your risk of dying prematurely. But three or four servings a day seemed to be plenty. Any additional servings didn’t appear to provide more benefit.

What does all this mean to you? Well, a cheeseburger may be OK to eat, and adding lettuce and tomato to the burger is still good for you, but an excess of white flour burger buns may boost your risk of dying early.

People with a high fat intake — about 35 percent of their daily diet — had a 23 percent lower risk of early death and 18 percent lower risk of stroke compared to people who ate less fat, said lead author Mahshid Dehghan. She’s an investigator with the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University in Ontario.

The researchers also noted that a very low intake of saturated fats (below 3 percent of daily diet) was associated with a higher risk of death in the study, compared to diets containing up to 13 percent daily.

At the same time, high-carb diets — containing an average 77 percent carbohydrates — were associated with a 28 percent increased risk of death versus low-carb diets, Dehghan said.

Source: Large diet study suggests it’s carbs, not fats, that are bad for your health

Scientists hope they have found a drug to stop all neurodegenerative brain diseases, including dementia.In 2013, a UK Medical Research Council team stopped brain cells dying in an animal for the first time, creating headline news around the world.But the compound used was unsuitable for people, as it caused organ damage.Now two drugs have been found that should have the same protective effect on the brain and are already safely used in people.”It’s really exciting,” said Prof Giovanna Mallucci, from the MRC Toxicology Unit in Leicester.She wants to start human clinical trials on dementia patients soon and expects to know whether the drugs work within two to three years.

Source: Experts excited by brain ‘wonder-drug’ – BBC News

Here we experimentally demonstrate that polarization quantum states including general qubits of single photon and entangled states can survive well after travelling through seawater. We perform experiments with seawater collected over a range of 36 kilometers in the Yellow Sea. For single photons at 405 nm in a blue-green window, we obtain an average process fidelity above 98%

The Optical Society

A small clinical trial conducted at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute has led to two-thirds of children treated with an experimental immunotherapy treatment being cured of their allergy. Importantly, this desensitisation to peanuts persisted for up to four years after treatment.
[…]
Forty-eight children were enrolled in the PPOIT trial and were randomly given either a combination of the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus with peanut protein in increasing amounts, or a placebo, once daily for 18 months.

At the end of the original trial in 2013, 82% of children who received the immunotherapy treatment were deemed tolerant to peanuts compared with just 4% in the placebo group.

Four years later, the majority of the children who gained initial tolerance were still eating peanuts as part of their normal diet and 70% passed a further challenge test to confirm long-term tolerance.

Source: Peanut allergy cured in majority of children in immunotherapy trial

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13162476/nobel-prize-chemistry-tiny-machine-molecules-nanocar-stoddart-ferringa-sauvage

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who figured out how to build tiny machines out of molecules. The machines, which include a nano-sized car, are invisible to the human eye and have important implications in medicine and other fields. The researchers — Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard Feringa — will share the prize equally.

Historically, it is believed that crystalline uraninite, produced via the abiotic reduction of hexavalent uranium (U(VI)) is the dominant reduced U species formed in low-temperature uranium roll-front ore deposits. Here we show that non-crystalline U(IV) generated through biologically mediated U(VI) reduction is the predominant U(IV) species in an undisturbed U roll-front ore deposit in Wyoming, USA. Characterization of U species revealed that the majority (∼58-89%) of U is bound as U(IV) to C-containing organic functional groups or inorganic carbonate, while uraninite and U(VI) represent only minor components. The uranium deposit exhibited mostly 238U-enriched isotope signatures, consistent with largely biotic reduction of U(VI) to U(IV). This finding implies that biogenic processes are more important to uranium ore genesis than previously understood. The predominance of a relatively labile form of U(IV) also provides an opportunity for a more economical and environmentally benign mining process, as well as the design of more effective post-mining restoration strategies and human health-risk assessment.

Source: Biogenic non-crystalline U(IV) revealed as major component in uranium ore deposits

Geologists now believe uranium is produced biologically, in a series of chemical reactions in Earth’s crust that take place over millions of years.

A team of biogeochemists has spotted promising signs that living microorganisms can also produce uranium, albeit in a different form than in the mineral uraninite. By analyzing the composition of uranium from 650-foot-deep samples mined in Wyoming – and using synchotron radiation-based spectroscopy and isotope fingerprinting – they found that 89 per cent of the uranium was bound to inorganic carbonate instead of being in uraninite ore.

The deposits match up to a series of biochemical reactions present in dissimilatory metal-reducing bacteria, a class of microbes that oxidize organic matter and produce metals in the process of anaerobic respiration. In other words, the bacteria use uranium instead of oxygen for energy.

The Register

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have been able to capture the first composite image of a dark matter bridge that connects galaxies together. The scientists publish their work in a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The composite image, which combines a number of individual images, confirms predictions that galaxies across the universe are tied together through a cosmic web connected by dark matter that has until now remained unobservable.
[…]
They combined lensing images from more than 23,000 galaxy pairs located 4.5 billion light-years away to create a composite image or map that shows the presence of dark matter between the two galaxies. Results show the dark matter filament bridge is strongest between systems less than 40 million light years apart.

“By using this technique, we’re not only able to see that these dark matter filaments in the universe exist, we’re able to see the extent to which these filaments connect galaxies together,” said Epps.

Source: Researchers capture first ‘image’ of a dark matter web that connects galaxies

Researchers have discovered that the lungs play a far more complex role in mammalian bodies than we thought, with new evidence revealing that they don’t just facilitate respiration – they also play a key role in blood production.

In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals’ circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components.

Source: An Unexpected New Lung Function Has Been Found – They Make Blood

Imagine a liquid that could move on its own.

No need for human effort or the pull of gravity. You could put it in a container flat on a table, not touch it in any way, and it would still flow.

Brandeis researchers report in a new article in Science that they have taken the first step in creating a self-propelling liquid. The finding holds out the promise of developing an entirely new class of fluids that can flow without human or mechanical effort. One possible real-world application: Oil might be able to move through a pipeline without needing to be pumped.

Researchers recreate the system that causes cells to change shape. The result: a liquid that can move by itself.

The human brain reaches its adult volume by age 10, but the neurons that make it up continue to change for years after that. The connections between neighboring neurons get pruned back, as new links emerge between more widely separated areas of the brain.

Eventually this reshaping slows, a sign that the brain is maturing. But it happens at different rates in different parts of the brain.

The pruning in the occipital lobe, at the back of the brain, tapers off by age 20. In the frontal lobe, in the front of the brain, new links are still forming at age 30, if not beyond.

“It challenges the notion of what ‘done’ really means,” Dr. Somerville said.

Source: You’re an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much.

Fillings could be consigned to history after scientists discovered that a drug already trialled in Alzheimer’s patients can encourage tooth regrowth and repair cavities.

Researchers at King’s College London found that the drug Tideglusib stimulates the stem cells contained in the pulp of teeth so that they generate new dentine – the mineralised material under the enamel.
[…]
Scientists showed it is possible to soak a small biodegradable sponge with the drug and insert it into a cavity, where it triggers the growth of dentine and repairs the damage within six weeks.

The tiny sponges are made out of collagen so they melt away over time, leaving only the repaired tooth.

Source: End of fillings in sight as scientists find Alzheimer’s drug makes teeth grow back 

Today, the University of California at Berkeley has deleted 20,000 college lectures from its YouTube channel. Berkeley removed the videos because of a lawsuit brought by two students from another university under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

We copied all 20,000 and are making them permanently available for free via LBRY.

This makes the videos freely available and discoverable by all, without reliance on any one entity to provide them (even us!).

Source: 20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them – LBRY

Source: PBDB Navigator

By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure—like a solid—and can flow without viscosity—a key characteristic of a superfluid. Studies into this apparently contradictory phase of matter could yield deeper insights into superfluids and superconductors, which are important for improvements in technologies such as superconducting magnets and sensors, as well as efficient energy transport. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature.

“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.”

Physicists had predicted the possibility of supersolids but had not observed them in the lab. They theorized that solid helium could become superfluid if helium atoms could move around in a solid crystal of helium, effectively becoming a supersolid. However, the experimental proof remained elusive.

Source: Researchers create new form of matter—supersolid is crystalline and superfluid at the same time

A new material can absorb up to 90 times its own weight in spilled oil and then be squeezed out like a sponge and reused, raising hopes for easier clean-up of oil spill sites.

But to determine whether this material could help sort out a big spill in marine waters, they needed to perform a special large-scale test.
Recreating a spill

To do this, the team made an array of square pads of the sponge material measuring around 6 square metres. “We made a lot of the foam, and then these pieces of foam were placed inside mesh bags – basically laundry bags, with sewn channels to house the foam,” Darling says.

The researchers suspended their sponge-filled bags from a bridge over a large pool specially designed for practising emergency responses to oil spills.

They then dragged the sponges behind a pipe spewing crude oil to test the material’s capability to remove oil from the water. They next sent the sponges through a wringer to remove the oil and then repeated the process, carrying out many tests over multiple days.

Source: Sponge can soak up and release spilled oil hundreds of times | New Scientist