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As is sensed in our daily life, jiaozi frozen in domestic refrigerator tastes less delicious than an instant frozen one sold in the supermarket. The formation of the ice crystal is to blame. In scientific researches ranging from aerospace to biology and medicine, the formation, growth and elimination of the ice crystal are of significant importance.
By far, slow freezing and vitrification are generally adopted for cryopreservation. The former method, assembling freezing jiaozi with domestic refrigerator, is accompanied by mass formation of ice crystal which inevitably does irreversible damage to the cell. Vitrification effectively avoids former problems but requires either extremely rapid freezing rate which is too hard to achieve or high density of agent which is equally harmful to the sample. Even if all the damages have been avoided during freezing, recrystallization will do fatal damage while thawing. To successfully preserve the samples, the only possible solution is
Credit: FLEET
Just as James Cameron s Terminator-800 was able to discriminate between clothes, boots, and a motorcycle , machine-learning could identify different areas of interest on 2D materials.
The simple, automated optical identification of fundamentally different physical areas on these materials (eg, areas displaying doping, strain, and electronic disorder) could significantly accelerate the science of atomically-thin materials.
Atomically-thin (or 2D) layers of matter are a new, emerging class of materials that will serve as the basis for next-generation energy-efficient computing, optoelectronics and future smart-phones. Without any supervision, machine-learning algorithms were able to discriminate between differently perturbed areas on a 2D semiconducting material, explains lead author Dr Pavel Kolesnichenko. This can lead to fast, machine-aided characterization of 2D materials in the future, accelerating application of these materials in next-generation low-energy
Creative physics rap on molecular clusters wins
Science s annual Dance your Ph.D. contest
Competition also awards new prize for dance about COVID-19
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The newest overall winner of
Science s annual Dance your Ph.D. contest, now sponsored by the artificial intelligence company Primer, is a Finnish researcher studying atmospheric molecular clusters. With the help of several friends, Jakub Kubecka brought his studies to life with trash-talking rap lyrics ( I m the first author, you re just et al. ) endearingly crude dance moves, computer animation and drone video footage. To prepare for recording the lyrics, I was running with headphones playing the music at least 30 times per day for the whole month to get it into my blood. I think that I even dreamed about it. Kubecka recalls. Throughout the whole process, we always stayed close to our main goal of showing non-scientific muggles that science can be fun, si
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IMAGE: An artist s impression of the brain, made from images of the SARM1 protein. view more
Credit: The University of Queensland
Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson s and Alzheimer s disease are in the firing line after researchers identified an attractive therapeutic drug target.
An international collaboration, co-led by University of Queensland researchers, has isolated and analysed the structure and function of a protein found in the brain s nerve fibres called SARM1.
Dr Jeff Nanson said the protein was activated when nerve fibres were damaged by injury, disease, or as a side effect of certain drugs. After a damaging incident occurs, this protein often induces a form of nerve fibre degeneration - known as axon degeneration - a self-destruct mechanism of sorts, Dr Nanson said.