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IMAGE: Rising global warming is problematic for the water-intensive cultivation of rice, the staple food for about half the world s population. view more
Credit: Mengcen Wang
Rice is the staple food of about half the world s population. The cultivation of the rice plant is very water-intensive and, according to the German aid organization Welthungerhilfe, around 15 per cent of rice is grown in areas with a high risk of drought. Global warming is therefore becoming increasingly problematic for rice cultivation, leading more and more often to small harvests and hunger crises. Crop failures caused by plant pathogens further aggravate the situation. Here, conventional agriculture is trying to counteract this with pesticides, which are mostly used as a precautionary measure in rice cultivation. The breeding of resistant plants is the only alternative to these environmentally harmful agents - and currently only moderately successful. If the plants are resistant to on
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In January 2018, the entire computer industry was put on alert by two new processor vulnerabilities dubbed Meltdown and Spectre that defeated the fundamental OS security boundaries separating kernel and user space memory. The flaws stemmed from a performance feature of modern CPUs known as speculative execution and mitigating them required one of the biggest patch coordination efforts in history, involving CPU makers, device manufacturers and operating system vendors.
Meltdown and Spectre were certainly not the first vulnerabilities to result from a hardware design decision, but their widespread impact sparked the interest of the security research community into such flaws. Since then, many researchers, both from academia and the private sector, have been studying the low-level operation of CPUs and other hardware components and have been uncovering more and more issues.
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Irvine, Calif., Dec. 17, 2020 Reflectins, the unique structural proteins that give squids and octopuses the ability to change colors and blend in with their surroundings, are thought to have great potential for innovations in areas as diverse as electronics, optics and medicine. Scientists and inventors have been stymied in their attempts to fully utilize the powers of these biomolecules due to their atypical chemical composition and high sensitivity to subtle environmental changes.
In a study published recently in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Irvine researchers have revealed the structure of a reflectin variant at the molecular level, and they have demonstrated a method for mechanically controlling the hierarchical assembly and optical properties of the protein. These findings are seen as key steps in exploiting many of the potentially useful attributes of the reflectin family.
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IMAGE: The Graz researchers are the first in the world to demonstrate YeiN , an enzyme that is a suitable biocatalyst for the production of C-nucleosides, the basic building blocks of RNA.. view more
Credit: Lunghammer - TU Graz
Due to the COVID 19 pandemic and the associated intensive search for therapeutics and vaccines, the chemical substance class of nucleosides is experiencing an enormous increase in interest. Natural and synthetic nucleosides have an antiviral effect and can act as building blocks of ribonucleic acids (RNA). When incorporated into RNA, novel interactions within the macromolecule result with positive consequences for stability and biological effectiveness.
First enzyme-driven biocatalytic production of nucleic acid building blocks
Researchers from TU Graz and acib succeed in the first enzyme-driven biocatalytic synthesis of nucleic acid building blocks. This facilitates the development of antiviral agents and RNA-based therapeutics.
Due to the COVID 19 pandemic and the associated intensive search for therapeutics and vaccines, the chemical substance class of nucleosides is experiencing an enormous increase in interest. Natural and synthetic nucleosides have an antiviral effect and can act as building blocks of ribonucleic acids (RNA). When incorporated into RNA, novel interactions within the macromolecule result with positive consequences for stability and biological effectiveness.