In a recent paper published in Scientific Reports, a UW-led team documented new habits and habitats for Nautilus and Allonautilus species. 

The breakthrough enables larger capacities for quantum information using complex states of light that are less affected by imperfections, paving the way for potential innovations in medicine, materials science, data management and security.

A research team led by Purdue University’s W. Andy Tao has discovered of a new type of protein modification related to cellular mutation that impairs a crucial enzyme’s ability to help drive energy processes. Their discovery, reported in Nature Chemistry, opens a new route to therapeutic cancer intervention.

Diversification and specialization are central to complex adaptive systems, yet overarching principles across domains remain elusive. Vicky Chuqiao Yang, assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and James Holehouse, a mathematical biologist with the Santa Fe Institute led a research project that has  introduced a general theory that unifies diversity and specialization across disparate systems, including microbes, federal agencies, companies, universities, and cities, characterized by two key parameters. The research team show from extensive data that function diversity scales with system size as a sublinear power law-resembling Heaps’ law-in all but cities, where it is logarithmic. Their theory explains both behaviors and suggests that function creation depends on system goals and structure: federal agencies tend to ensure functional coverage; cities slow new function growth as old ones expand; and cells occupy an intermediate position. Once functions are introduced, their growth follows a remarkably universal pattern across all systems.

A team led by Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researcher Nitin J. Sanket has shown that ultrasound sensors and a form of artificial intelligence (AI) can enable palm-sized aerial robots to navigate with limited power and computation through fog, smoke, and other challenging conditions during search-and-rescue operations.

As published in Nature, researchers from Purdue University and Columbia University report a naturally evolved gene-editing system that can activate genes, offering an advantage over existing CRISPR gene-editing systems that merely find and cut DNA. The research includes two complementary studies, one examining the biological function of the system and the other revealing the molecular mechanism that enables it.

MIT researchers discovered that dendrites, cracks that harm the performance of solid-state batteries, can grow at far lower stresses than previously understood. The findings reveal why developing stronger solid electrolytes alone hasn’t solved the dendrite problem; more chemically stable materials will be needed to finally fulfill the promise of these batteries.

MIT engineers designed an ultrasound wristband that precisely tracks a wearer’s hand movements in real time and communicates the information to a robot or a virtual environment. 

Natural yeasts ferment anything sugary, including fruit, flower nectar and sugar water in a hummingbird feeder. In the first study to analyze the ethanol content of nectar in a range of species, UC Berkeley biologists fought off the birds and bees to collect samples. Nearly all contained ethanol. Hummingbirds can sip up to twice their weight in nectar daily, which could provide a dose equivalent to a standard alcoholic drink for a human.