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Organic molecules that capture photons and convert these into electricity have important applications for producing green energy. Light-harvesting complexes need two semiconductors, an electron donor and an acceptor. How well they work is measured by their quantum efficiency, the rate by which photons are converted into electron-hole pairs.
Quantum efficiency is lower than optimal if there is self-quenching , where one molecule excited by an incoming photon donates some of its energy to an identical non-excited molecule, yielding two molecules at an intermediate energy state too low to produce an electron-hole pair. But if electron donors and acceptors are better spaced out, self-quenching is limited, so that quantum efficiency improves.
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IMAGE: Protocells containing bubble-like compartments formed spontaneously on a mineral-like and encapsulated fluorescent dye. This could have been what happened 3.8 billion years ago when cells first began to form.. view more
Credit: Image courtesy of Karolina Spustova.
New research by the University of Oslo provides evidence that the protocells that formed around 3.8 billion years ago, before bacteria and single-celled organisms, could have had specialized bubble-like compartments that formed spontaneously, encapsulated small molecules, and formed daughter protocells.
ROCKVILLE, MD - Scientists have long speculated about the features that our long-ago single-celled ancestors might have had, and the order in which those features came about. Bubble-like compartments are a hallmark of the superkingdom to which we, and many other species including yeast, belong. But the cells in today s superkingdom have a host of specialized molecules that help make and
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IMAGE: The Frontera expansion added nearly 400 Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server nodes, housed in 11 racks. view more
Credit: TACC
Frontera the 9th fastest supercomputer in the world, deployed at The University of Texas at Austin s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has expanded thanks to a supplemental award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the system, and a substantial contribution from Dell Technologies and Intel.
The expansion will contribute to TACC s urgent computing capabilities, accelerating life sciences research during the COVID-19 pandemic and supporting rapid responses to emergencies like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, and other large-scale disasters.
When researchers applied deep learning and 3D holographic microscopy to the task, they not only avoided these difficultues but found that AI was better at it than humans were.
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IMAGE: Electron microscopy image of DNA origami rotor arms, which are the faint orange L s attached to the purple tracking particles. view more
Credit: Image courtesy of Julene Madariaga Marcos.
ROCKVILLE, MD - The remarkable genetic scissors called CRISPR/Cas9, the discovery that won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sometimes cut in places that they are not designed to target. Though CRISPR has completely changed the pace of basic research by allowing scientists to quickly edit genetic sequences, it works so fast that it is hard for scientists to see what sometimes goes wrong and figure out how to improve it. Julene Madariaga Marcos, a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow, and colleagues in the lab of Professor Ralf Seidel at Leipzig University in Germany, found a way to analyze the ultra-fast movements of CRISPR enzymes, which will help researchers understand how they recognize their target sequences in hopes of improving the specificity. Madariaga Marcos will