This illustration shows how four copies of computer-designed transmembrane protein assembled to form a rocket-shaped tetramer with a wide cytoplasmic base that funnels into eight transmembrane helices and which orients correctly in membrane. Credit: University of Washington Institute for Protein Design

Advance paves the way for the design of transmembrane proteins with useful, new functions. It is now possible to create complex, custom-designed transmembrane proteins from scratch, scientists report this week. The advance, led by molecular engineers at the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design, will enable researchers to create transmembrane proteins not found in nature to perform specific tasks.

In the living world, transmembrane proteins are found embedded in the membrane ...

This is an artistic impression of a quantum ball lighting. Credit: Heikka Valja

This knotted skyrmion may provide insight into a stable ball of plasma that could enhance future fusion reactors. Scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University have created, for the first time a 3D skyrmion in a quantum gas. The skyrmion was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago, but only now has it been observed experimentally.

In an extremely sparse and cold quantum gas, the physicists have created knots made of the magnetic moments, or spins, of the constituent atoms. The knots exhibit many of the characteristics of ball lightning, which some scientists believe to consist of tangled streams of electric currents...

Artist’s conception of a different brown dwarf to the one studied by Jonathan Gagné and his team. The brown dwarf depicted here is also part of a moving group, although a different one than AB Doradus. Credit: NASA/JPL, slightly modified by Jonathan Gagné

Astronomers measure temperature at which brown dwarfs go from cloudy to cloudless. Brown dwarfs, the larger cousins of giant planets, undergo atmospheric changes from cloudy to cloudless as they age and cool. A team of astronomers measured for the first time the temperature at which this shift happens in young brown dwarfs. Their findings may help them better understand how gas giant planets like our own Solar System’s Jupiter evolved.

Brown dwarfs are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that fuels stars and allows them to ...

This composite of two astrophysics simulations shows a Type Ia supernova (purple disc) expanding over different microlensing magnification patterns (colored fields). Because individual stars in the lensing galaxy can significantly change the brightness of a lensed event, regions of the supernova can experience varying amounts of brightening and dimming, which scientists believed would be a problem for cosmologists measuring time delays. Using detailed computer simulations at NERSC, astrophysicists showed that this would have a small effect on time-delay cosmology. (Credit: Danny Goldstein/UC Berkeley)

Researchers think so – and they’re using NERSC supercomputers to find them...