Category: Science

They simulated the Big Bang in a lab, and measured the reaction rate of deuterium hit by a proton beam, revealing key details about the first minutes after the Big Bang.
Deuterium’s creation was the first step in Big Bang nucleosynthesis, a sequence of nuclear reactions that happened when cosmos was a soup of protons and neutrons.
The measurement allowed physicists to compare cosmos in the first few minutes to 380,000 years later, when it cooled down enough for electrons to orbit atomic nuclei.
It basically tells us that the standard model of cosmology is so far pretty correct.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on November 13, 2020

cnbc.com

Chemist Lee Cronin with team built a “chemputer” that makes drug molecules, and now they created software that turns research papers into recipes for the machine.
The goal is to create a “Spotify for chemistry”, with recipes for molecules that can be quickly created for medication or research purposes.
Cronin’s system uses XDL, a “chemical description language”, which chemists can edit in plain English.
The system successfully extracted 12 recipes from chemical literature, including lidocaine, which the chemputer created with similar efficiency to human chemists.
Cronin started a company called Chemify, and his system is making ways into pharma - but competition’s growing in the market, with other systems like AutoSyn.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on October 30, 2020

iac.es

Researchers measured and confirmed the gravitational redshift (displacement of red lines in the light spectrum) of the sun, which was first theorised by Albert Einstein.
Solar spectrum reflected from the Moon, and the position of red lines in the solar spectrum was confirmed using a “laser frequency comb”.
Thus, they were able to verify one of the predictions from the Theory of General Relativity to a precision of a few meters per second.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on October 23, 2020

In people with schizophrenia, brain cells keep firing unnecessary signals, and it might be caused by a genetic defect called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.
It increases the risk for schizophrenia 30 times, and about 35% of people with this defect are diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder early in their lives.
22q11.2DS causes electrical defects in nerve cells, as scientists found by generating and manipulating clusters of brain cells in a dish.
Neurons generated from cells of 22q11.2DS carriers were more excitable, and showed less-than-normal voltage while they weren’t firing.
Applying antipsychotic drugs to the cells brought them back to normal, indicating that this is a good are for further studies of schizophrenia.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on October 23, 2020

Researchers discovered a “visual word form area” (VWFA) in brain scans of newborns.
Even at birth, this area is strongly connected to the language network of the brain, disproving theories that it needs additional learning to become this way.
The team analyzed 40 newborn (less than a week old) brain scans, finding that the VWFA is different from areas that recognize faces.
This indicated that the VWFA is primed to recognize words before we’re exposed to them.
Now, the team is studying brain scans of 3-4 years, with the ultimate goal to understand how the brain becomes a reading brain.

Bulleted by Michał Słupski
on October 23, 2020

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