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‘Invisibility’ and quantum computing tipped for physics Nobel

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‘Invisibility’ and quantum computing tipped for physics Nobel


Scientist Alfred Nobel created the Nobel prizes in his last will and testament for those who have 'conferred the greatest benefit on humankind'
Scientist Alfred Nobel created the Nobel prizes in his last will and testament for those who have ‘conferred the greatest benefit on humankind’

An “invisibility cloak”, an atomic force microscope or quantum computing are some of the scientific achievements that could win a Nobel prize in physics Tuesday.

The award, to be announced at 11:45 am (0945 GMT) in Stockholm, is the second Nobel of the season after the Medicine Prize on Monday was awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.

The US duo were honored for their discovery of microRNA and its role in how genes are regulated.

Predicting a winner is always tricky but this year, Nobel buzz has spotlighted, among others, Israeli-British physicist David Deutsch, a professor at the University of Oxford, and American mathematician Peter Shor.

David Pendlebury, head of analytics group Clarivate, which keeps an eye on potential Nobel science laureates, told AFP the duo might be honored “for their work in quantum algorithms and quantum computing”.

Pendlebury said the two researchers were among their top picks given the number of citations their papers had received.

At the same time, he said it would be “surprising” if the Nobel jury awarded quantum mechanics again, just two years after Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Austria’s Anton Zeilinger won for their work into quantum entanglement.

‘Invisibility cloak’

In the field of quantum mechanics, other notables are Israeli Yakir Aharonov and Briton Michael Berry, who have both made discoveries which now bear their names.

Another favorite who has been speculated about as a potential winner for years is Britain’s John B. Pendry, who has become famous for his “invisibility cloak“, in which he uses materials to bend light to make objects invisible.

Italian-American Federico Capasso has also been mentioned for research into photonics—the science of light waves—and contributing to the invention and development of the quantum cascade laser.

Lars Brostrom, science editor at Swedish Radio, said one potential winner could be Swiss physicist Christoph Gerber “for the invention of the atomic force microscope together with Gerd Binnig and Calvin Quate”.

The Nobel prize only honors living scientists and Quate died in 2019, but if Germany’s Binnig were to share the honor it would be his second Nobel Prize in Physics after he won it in 1986 for the “design of the scanning tunneling microscope”.

Another pick for Brostrom would be Canadian-American astronomer Sara Seager.

Brostrom told AFP that Seager could be awarded for “new ways to find signatures of life in planetary atmospheres, how to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets to find those that could harbor life”.

The Nobel jury has a tradition of honoring multiple researchers at once, and another trio among those speculated about is Canadian-born Allan MacDonald, Israeli Rafi Bistritzer and Spain’s Pablo Jarillo-Herrero.

The three already won the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics “for pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene”, a discovery that has been hailed as having the potential to lead to an energy revolution.

‘Slow light’

Physics World’s online editor Hamish Johnston speculated in a podcast ahead of the prize that Danish physicist Lene Hau might be in line for a nod “for her work on slow light”.

In 1999, Hau and her team managed to slow down light by passing it through a cloud of atoms that had been deep chilled into a slow-moving state known as Bose-Einstein condensate.

Two years later, they managed to stop it completely, before speeding it back up.

Awarded since 1901, the Nobel Prizes honor those who have, in the words of prize creator and scientist Alfred Nobel, “conferred the greatest benefit on humankind”.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to France’s Pierre Agostini, Hungarian-Austrian Ferenc Krausz and Franco-Swede Anne L’Huillier for research using ultra quick light flashes that enable the study of electrons inside atoms and molecules.

The physics prize will be followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday, with the highly watched literature and peace prizes to be announced on Thursday and Friday respectively.

The economics prize wraps up the 2024 Nobel season on October 14.

The winners will receive their prize, consisting of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1 million check, from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

© 2024 AFP

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‘Invisibility’ and quantum computing tipped for physics Nobel (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
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‘Appeals Center’ to referee EU social media disputes

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‘Appeals Center’ to referee EU social media disputes


An out-of-court dispute settlement body, dubbed Appeals Centre Europe, will hear cases related to Facebook, TikTok and YouTube at first
An out-of-court dispute settlement body, dubbed Appeals Center Europe, will hear cases related to Facebook, TikTok and YouTube at first.

An independent appeals panel was unveiled Tuesday to decide disputes between social media firms and their users in the European Union over content posted on their platforms.

The out-of-court dispute settlement body, dubbed Appeals Center Europe and backed by Meta’s own oversight board, will be established in Dublin under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

The act polices illegal content like hate speech and disinformation on the biggest online platforms, and allows for outside entities to establish mechanisms to resolve disputes.

“The body will initially decide cases relating to Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, aiming to include more social media platforms over time,” the board said in a statement.

Meta’s oversight board—often described as a top court for the company’s content moderation decisions—is providing a one-time grant for the center.

Thomas Hughes, former oversight board chief, will be CEO of the new body and said it should begin accepting cases by the end of the year.

He told AFP it was a “game-changing moment” and confirmed users would be able to appeal to the appeals center for a wide range of disputes under the DSA.

This could be a decision to take down—or leave up—content a user believes is hate speech, incitement to violence or other categories deemed unacceptable.

The DSA aims to force the largest online companies to tackle illegal content or face fines of up to six percent of their global turnover.

The bloc has already used the DSA to probe Facebook and Instagram for failing to tackle election-related disinformation, and has accused X of breaching the rules with its blue-tick “verified” accounts.

Establishing a dispute resolution mechanism is part of the process to make the law fully operational.

Empowering Europeans

Meta established the oversight board in 2020 with a non-retractable trust fund of $130 million.

The panel has the power to overrule the company on content moderation decisions with CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising to abide by their rulings.

Hughes explained that the oversight board’s trust had paid for the new appeals center, but once established it would take payments from users and the companies.

Users, he said, would pay a nominal fee of five euros ($5.50), which would be refunded if they won the appeal. Companies would pay around 100 euros for each case.

“It puts into the hands of individual users the ability to be able to challenge the decisions that are taken about their own content and what other content they see online as well,” he told AFP.

Last month, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s digital enforcer, explained to reporters that, at its heart, the DSA was about empowering Europeans to hold big tech to account.

“The DSA is not content moderation,” she said on a visit to the United States.

“It is a system to enable you to actually know what is taken down so that you can complain about it.”

© 2024 AFP

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‘Appeals Center’ to referee EU social media disputes (2024, October 8)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-appeals-center-referee-eu-social.html

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Beaver restoration program brings furry species back to habitats, tribal land across California

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Beaver restoration program brings furry species back to habitats, tribal land across California


beaver
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

California has strengthened a new Beaver Restoration Program which is dedicated to supporting the species and their habitats.

With the passing of Assembly Bill 2196, the program has partnered with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The initiative works with California tribal nations, private landowners and non-government organizations on implementing coexistence and beaver-assisted restoration projects to the state’s wildlife habitats. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB2196 into law in September.

The bill’s author, Assemblyman Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, said the law will now codify the program’s efforts.

“Beavers are an instrumental keystone species to our ecosystems, and they play a vital role in maintaining the habitats around them for the benefit of other species,” said Connolly in a news release. “The initiative to restore beavers back into their original wildlife habitats is beneficial to species recovery, improving habitat complexity, and enhancing watershed restoration through dam complexes.”

Brock Dolman, the co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, has been working on beaver restoration since the late 2000s, he said. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center has been at the forefront of the beaver restoration program, to center a co-existence mindset with the species.

Beavers have sometimes been seen as a nuisance or pest, Dolman said. In reality, beavers are beneficial to the environment. They help keep up maintenance of California rivers, wetlands and mountain meadows, and slow down water from spreading and sinking in their dams and canals. As a result, their presence helps address issues with flooding and droughts.

“What’s equally important is the recognition of the types of benefits that beavers (provide) and what beavers do in rivers and in wetlands, mountain meadows, salmon streams and urban riparian corridors,” Dolman said.

For example, a paper from the California State University, Channel Islands, found that beavers play a part in wildfire prevention. When analyzing five wildfires in the American West, those that had beaver dams burned three times less than those without.

Collaboration with California tribal nations

The state’s beaver restoration program has also made an effort to reintroduce families of beavers to various California tribal lands. In an initiative nicknamed: “Beaver Back,” (in reference to the Land Back movement), two Native American communities, the Maidu Summit Consortium and the Tule River Tribe, have welcomed back beavers.

In 2023, the Maidu Summit Consortium was reunited with beavers on tribal lands for the first time in 75 years.

“It’s good to have them back home again,” said Ben Cunningham, chairman of the Maidu Summit Consortium. “The beavers are back where they belong.”

Similarly to the Maidu Summit Consortium,Tule River has been without beavers on tribal lands for decades, according to a news release. Beavers are Indigenous to Tule River lands, with pictographs dating from between 500 to 1,000 years old, documenting their existence.

Around 10 years ago, Tule River tribal leaders began their initiative to bring beavers back. These efforts became a reality this year. In June, a family of seven beavers were reintroduced to Tule River tribal lands in the southern Sierra Nevada.

“I’m very happy to see (the beavers) come home and it’s going to be wonderful to watch them do their thing,” said Kenneth McDarment, a member of the Tule River Tribe, in a news release. “People will be educated even more by seeing the work that they do and the benefits they bring to the environment. My hope is to have the beaver throughout the reservation and all the watershed that we have.”

2024 The Sacramento Bee. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Citation:
Beaver restoration program brings furry species back to habitats, tribal land across California (2024, October 7)
retrieved 8 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-beaver-furry-species-habitats-tribal.html

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Researchers source new drugs from toxic birds

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Researchers source new drugs from toxic birds


New drugs from toxic birds
Left: A feather of the toxic regent whistler (Pachycephala schlegelii). Right: A plate culture of Amycolatopsis sp. PS_44_ISF1, a bacterium isolated from the secretions of the so-called uropygial gland of the bird. Credit: L. Bernhardt

Bacteria are a valuable source for the discovery of natural products that can be used for the development of new drugs. A HIPS research team has now identified two new classes of active substances with antimicrobial properties from bacteria that live in symbiosis with a toxic bird.

This strategy and the substances discovered offer promising avenues toward the development of new anti-infectives, particularly against antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The New Guinea-based regent whistler, or Pachycephala schlegelii in Latin, is a strange bird. It carries batrachotoxin in its black and yellow plumage: a potent neurotoxin, also used by poison dart frogs to effectively protect themselves from predators. This toxin is not produced by the birds themselves, but is acquired from insects in their diet.

Together with international partners, researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), which is the site of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) in collaboration with Saarland University, have now discovered that the plumage of the regent whistler contains other substances that protect it from infestation by unwanted microorganisms.

Unlike batrachotoxin, however, these substances are not ingested with food, but are produced by bacteria that live in symbiosis with the bird.

An international team led by Christine Beemelmanns, HIPS Department Head and Professor of Medical-Pharmaceutical Microbiota Research at Saarland University, isolated these bacteria of the genus Amycolatopsis from the secretions of the so-called brush gland, a skin gland of the bird. The researchers were able to discover previously unknown bioactive substances in these bacteria, including two new classes of natural products: pachycephalamides and demiguisines.

“The discovery of these previously unknown molecules from the microbiome of a bird illustrates the enormous potential that symbiotic relationships offer for the identification of new natural products,” explains Elena Seibel, first author of the study. “Where different organisms live together, there are always interactions. In the case of microorganisms, this communication takes place with the help of chemical signals.”

Natural products discovered in this way not only help to better understand the interaction between two organisms, but can also contribute to the development of new anti-infectives.

This innovative approach, in which microbial communities (also known as microbiota) serve as a source of new active substances, is at the core of Christine Beemelmann’s research. Together with her team, she is working on the discovery and functional analysis of new anti-infective natural products from microbiota.

Using co-cultivation studies and cell-based assays, the researchers were able to show that the substances produced by the bacteria in the brush gland have an antimicrobial effect. In particular, the new compounds act against keratinolytic bacteria and fungi that attack the skin and feathers of birds.

“Our work impressively demonstrates that the identification of new bioactive natural products from microbial communities is a promising source for the discovery of innovative anti-infectives,” explains Beemelmanns. “The newly discovered natural products, especially the lipopeptides and hexapeptides that we found in avian microbiomes, offer great potential for combating infectious diseases.”

Through a combination of genetic and structural analyses, the team was able to decipher the genetic blueprints responsible for the production of these natural products and thus confirm their origin in the symbiotic relationship between bird and bacterium. The identification of such natural products has far-reaching significance, particularly in view of the increasing spread of antimicrobial resistance, which poses a serious challenge to modern medicine.

“By unlocking the potential of microorganisms in symbiotic communities, we can develop new therapeutic approaches to fight infections and counter the global resistance problem,” says Beemelmanns.

More information:
Elena Seibel et al, Bacteria from the Amycolatopsis genus associated with a toxic bird secrete protective secondary metabolites, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52316-3

Citation:
Researchers source new drugs from toxic birds (2024, October 7)
retrieved 7 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-source-drugs-toxic-birds.html

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Scientists decode black widow spider venom

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Scientists decode black widow spider venom


Scientists decode black widow spider venom
When the α-latrotoxin binds to the receptor of the presynaptic membrane of the signaling cell, it undergoes a transformation: part of the molecule forms a stalk that penetrates the cell membrane (“membrane insertion,” right). As a special feature, this stalk forms a small pore in the membrane that acts as a calcium channel. MD simulations revealed that calcium ions (Ca2+ ions) enter the cell through a lateral selective gate directly above the pore. Credit: Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52635-5

The black widow spider is one of the most feared spider species. Its venom is a cocktail of seven different toxins that attack the nervous system. These so-called latrotoxins specifically paralyze insects and crustaceans, but one of them, the α-latrotoxin, targets vertebrates and is also poisonous to humans. It interferes with the transmission of signals in the nervous system.

As soon as α-latrotoxin binds to specific receptors of the synapses—the contacts between nerve cells or between nerve cells and muscles—calcium ions flow uncontrollably into the presynaptic membranes of the signaling cells. This induces release of neurotransmitters, triggering strong muscle contractions and spasms.

Despite the apparent simplicity of this process, there is a highly complex mechanism behind it. Scientists at the University of Münster have now deciphered the structure of α-latrotoxin before and after membrane insertion at near atomic resolution. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

In order to better understand the mechanism of calcium influx into the presynaptic membrane, experts from the Center for Soft Nanoscience at the University of Münster, headed by Prof Christos Gatsogiannis (Institute of Medical Physics and Biophysics) and Prof Andreas Heuer (Institute of Physical Chemistry), used high-performance cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and molecular dynamics (MD) computer simulations.

They showed that the toxin undergoes a remarkable transformation when it binds to the receptor. Part of the toxic molecule forms a stalk that penetrates the cell membrane like a syringe. As a special feature, this stalk forms a small pore in the membrane that functions as a calcium channel. MD simulations revealed that calcium ions can flow into the cell through a selective gate located on the side directly above the pore.

Thanks to these results, researchers now better understand how α-latrotoxin works. “The toxin mimics the function of the calcium channels of the presynaptic membrane in a highly complex way,” explains Gatsogiannis. “It therefore differs in every respect from all previously known toxins.”

The new findings open up a wide range of potential applications; latrotoxins have considerable biotechnological potential, including the development of improved antidotes, treatments for paralysis and new biopesticides.

In previous work, the research group led by Gatsogiannis had already deciphered the structure of insect-specific latrotoxins in the venom of the black widow spider before inserting into the membrane.

More information:
B. U. Klink et al, Structural basis of α-latrotoxin transition to a cation-selective pore, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52635-5

Citation:
Scientists decode black widow spider venom (2024, October 7)
retrieved 7 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-scientists-decode-black-widow-spider.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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