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Washington State University researchers used light to write a highly conducting electric path in a crystal. This opens up the possibility of transparent, three-dimensional electronics that, like an Etch-A-Sketch, can be erased and reconfigured. On the left, a photograph of a sample with four metal contacts. On the right, an illustration of a laser drawing a conductive path between two contacts.
Credit: Washington State University

Transparent, 3D electronics can be configured and erased like an Etch A Sketch. It serves as a proof of concept for a phenomenon that WSU researchers first discovered by accident 4 years ago. At the time, a doctoral student found a 400-fold increase in the electrical conductivity of a crystal simply by leaving it exposed to light...

Galaxies NGC 1510, NGC 1512
Type: Local Universe : Type : Interacting
Local Universe : Galaxy : Size : Dwarf
Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Barred
Facility: Hubble Space Telescope

The gravitational dance between 2 galaxies in our local neighbourhood has led to intriguing visual features in both as witnessed in this new Hubble image. The tiny NGC 1510 and its colossal neighbour NGC 1512 are at the beginning of a lengthy merger, a crucial process in galaxy evolution. Despite its diminutive size, NGC 1510 has had a significant effect on NGC 1512’s structure and amount of star formation.

Galaxies come in a range of shapes and sizes, and astronomers use this fact to classify them based on their appearance...

The wide-field optical camera on ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) — has captured the spectacular Orion Nebula and its associated cluster of young stars in great detail, producing this beautiful new image. This famous object, the birthplace of many massive stars, is one of the closest stellar nurseries, at a distance of about 1350 light-years. Credit: ESO/G. Beccari

Using new observations from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope, astronomers have discovered three different populations of baby stars within the Orion Nebula Cluster. This unexpected discovery adds very valuable new insights for the understanding of how such clusters form. It suggests that star formation might proceeds in bursts, where each burst occurs on a much faster time-scale than previously thought.

A team led by ESO astronomer Gi...

Highlights
•Mutation clusters in cancer genomes provide fingerprints of mutagenic mechanisms
•Error-free mismatch repair lowers the mutation rate in H3K36me3-marked active genes
•Error-prone repair using POLH also targets H3K36me3, contributing driver mutations
•UV and alcohol increase error-prone repair, targeting mutations toward active genes

Sunlight, alcohol consumption increase the rate at which this happens, resulting in more mutations in the most important parts of our genomes. Cancer is mostly caused by changes in the DNA of our cells that occur during our lifetime rather than those that we inherit from our parents. Identifying the causes of these ‘mutations’ is a difficult challenge because many processes can result in an identical DNA sequence change in a genome...