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Throwing a ‘spanner in the works’ of our cells’ machinery could help fight cancer, fatty liver disease… and hair loss

mitochondria
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Fifty years since its discovery, scientists have finally worked out how a molecular machine found in mitochondria allows us to make the fuel we need from sugars, a process vital to all life on Earth.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge, have worked out the structure of this machine and shown how it operates like the lock on a canal to transport pyruvate—a molecule generated in the body from the breakdown of sugars—into our mitochondria.

Known as the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier, this molecular machine was first proposed to exist in 1971, but it has taken until now for scientists to visualize its structure at the atomic scale using cryo-electron microscopy, a technique used to ...

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Novel technique overcomes spurious correlations problem in AI

ai
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

AI models often rely on “spurious correlations,” making decisions based on unimportant and potentially misleading information. Researchers have now discovered these learned spurious correlations can be traced to a very small subset of the training data and have demonstrated a technique that overcomes the problem. The work has been published on the arXiv preprint server.

“This technique is novel in that it can be used even when you have no idea what spurious correlations the AI is relying on,” says Jung-Eun Kim, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University.

“If you already have a good idea of what the spurious features are, our technique is an efficient and effective...

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Astronomers confirm the existence of a lone black hole

Astronomers confirm the existence of a lone black hole
A 2.′′⁡4×2.′′⁡0 WFC3 F814W field showing the OGLE-2011-BLG-0462 field at the final epoch in 2022. The source star and its brighter neighbor are labeled. A faint star lies just to the southeast of the neighbor, but it has little effect on astrometry of the source. For each star, an open green circle shows its location at E1 in 2011, and an open red circle marks its location at E11 in 2022. Stars in this Galactic-bulge field typically move about 1 WFC3/UVIS pixel (0.′′⁡040) over the course of 11 yr. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/adbe6e

A team of astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute, working with one colleague from the University of St Andrews’ Center for Exoplanet Science and another from the European Southern Observ...

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Scientists create a ‘brilliantly luminous’ nanoscale chemical tool

Scientists create a 'brilliantly luminous' nanoscale chemical tool
Associate Professor Gary Baker, Piyuni Ishtaweera, Ph.D., and their team at the University of Missouri have created these tiny, clay-based materials, called fluorescent polyionic nanoclays. Credit: Angira Roy / University of Missouri

University of Missouri researchers developed the tiny clay-based materials that can be customized for a range of analytical, commercial and medical applications.

Imagine tiny LEGO pieces that automatically snap together to form a strong, flat sheet. Then, scientists add special chemical “hooks” to these sheets to attach glowing molecules called fluorophores.

Associate Professor Gary Baker, Piyuni Ishtaweera, Ph.D., and their team have created these tiny, clay-based materials—called fluorescent polyionic nanoclays...

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