New Discoveries Predict Ability to Forecast Dementia from Single Molecule


A single tau monomer encodes different assembly conformations that each leads to distinct patterns of pathology.
Credit: UT Southwestern

Scientists who recently identified the molecular start of Alzheimer’s disease have used that finding to determine that it should be possible to forecast which type of dementia will develop over time – a form of personalized medicine for neurodegenerative diseases.

A new study from UT Southwestern shows that single toxic tau proteins that stick together and spread degeneration across the brains of dementia patients have different shapes. The folds of these molecules hold information that could help diagnose – and perhaps one day treat – neurodegeneration in its earliest stages.

The finding comes from a team of scientists appointed this month to a newly c...

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Novel Laser Technology for Microchip-size Chemical Sensors

The laser system developed at TU Wien creates many frequencies with equal spacing between them. Credit: TU Wien
The laser system developed at TU Wien creates many frequencies with equal spacing between them. Credit: TU Wien

A special laser system has been developed, using two slightly different frequency combs. This allows for chemical analysis on tiny spaces – it is a millimeter-format chemistry lab. With this new patent-pending technology, frequency combs can be created on a single chip in a very simple and robust manner.

Most lasers have only one color. All the photons it emits have exactly the same wavelength. However, there are also lasers whose light is more complicated. If it consists of many different frequencies, with equal intervals in between, just like the teeth of a comb, it is referred to as a “frequency comb...

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Tiny Droplets of Early Universe Matter Created


Visualization of expanding drops of quark gluon plasmas in three geometric shapes.
Credit: Javier Orjuela Koop

Researchers have created tiny droplets of the ultra-hot matter that once filled the early universe, forming three distinct shapes and siztiny droplets of the ultra-hot matter that once filled the early universees: circles, ellipses and triangles.

The study, published today in Nature Physics, stems from the work of an international team of scientists and focuses on a liquid-like state of matter called a quark gluon plasma. Physicists believe that this matter filled the entire universe during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang when the universe was still too hot for particles to come together to make atoms.

CU Boulder Professor Jamie Nagle and colleagues on an ex...

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Topological Material Switched off and on for the 1st time

his is an Na3Bi structure shown with sodium atoms white and bismuth atoms blue.
Credit: FLEET

This is an Na3Bi structure shown with sodium atoms white and bismuth atoms blue.
Credit: FLEET

Over the last decade, there has been much excitement about the discovery, recognised by the Nobel Prize in Physics only 2 years ago, that there are two types of insulators: normal insulators which don’t conduct electricity, and topological insulators – newly discovered materials that conduct electricity only on their edges.

Now, FLEET researchers at Monash University, Australia, have for the first time successfully ‘switched’ a material between these two states of matter via application of an electric-field. This is the first step in creating a functioning topological transistor – a proposed new generation of ultra-low energy electronic devices.

Ultra-low energy electronics such as topol...

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