Parts of the primordial soup in which life arose have been maintained in our cells today according to scientists at the University of East Anglia. Research published today in the Journal of Biological Chemistry reveals how cells in plants, yeast and very likely also in animals still perform ancient reactions thought to have been responsible for the origin of life – some four billion years ago. The primordial soup theory suggests that life began in a pond or ocean as a result of the combination of metals, gases from the atmosphere and some form of energy, such as a lightning strike, to make the building blocks of proteins which would then evolve into all species. The new research shows how small pockets of a cell – known as mitochondria – continue to perform similar reactions in our bodies today. These reactions involve iron, sulfur and electro-chemistry and are still important for functions such as respiration in animals and photosynthesis in plants. Lead researcher Dr Janneke Balk, from UEA’s school of Biological Sciences and the John Innes Centre, said: “Cells confine certain bits of dangerous chemistry to specific compartments of the cell. “For example small pockets of a cell called mitochondria deal with
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Chronic pain, defined as disabling pain that persists despite attempts at treatment and often without obvious cause, has become a serious challenge for health professionals. It is not surprising that someone suffering from this level of pain might become depressed, but most studies consider depression a "comorbidity"—an associated disorder—or suggest that the pain is "somatization" of the depression. That is, it may be a mental disorder’s effect on the body.
These ideas ignore both the impact of pain on people and 50 years of understanding in pain science. A new study by Neil Schwartz at Stanford University and colleagues, just published in Science, has helped clarify the relationship between pain and depression. The researchers identify the underpinnings of loss of motivation in mice with chronic pain and depression.
For the study, they induced chronic pain in mice through injury. Before the injury, the mice were tested for their motivation to search for and work to get food. After the injury, they were just as interested in food they could obtain with minimal effort. But those with pain gave up much sooner when getting food required more work per pellet. This shows that chronic pain can reduce motivation.
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Over the years, computer chips have gotten smaller thanks to advances in materials science and manufacturing technologies. This march of progress, the doubling of transistors on a microprocessor roughly every two years, is called Moore’s Law. But there’s one component of the chip-making process in need of an overhaul if Moore’s law is to continue: the chemical mixture called photoresist. Similar to film used in photography, photoresist, also just called resist, is used to lay down the patterns of ever-shrinking lines and features on a chip. Paul Ashby and Deirdre Olynick of Berkeley Lab at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Extreme Ultraviolet 12.0.1 Beamline. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Now, in a bid to continue decreasing transistor size while increasing computation and energy efficiency, chip-maker Intel has partnered with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) to design an entirely new kind of resist. And importantly, they have done so by characterizing the chemistry of photoresist, crucial to further improve performance in a systematic way. The researchers believe their results could be easily incorporated by companies that make resist, and find their way into manufacturing lines as early as 2017. The new resist effectively
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Pottery making in Sarawak, Malaysia. Credit: Colin Charles / Flickr Sludge is a by-product of water treatment. Sludge is produced during the clarification and filtration process in the water treatment system. It is also produced from the accumulated solids removed from sedimentation basin or settling tank. The increasing number of water treatment plants has led to a considerable increase insludge generation. The disposal of sludge from water treatment operations poses a problem in Malaysia. The problem is acute because of the scarcity of space to store the sludge. The advantage of water sludge is that it is not considered as hazardous waste. The objective of this project is to reduce the environmental impact generated by the sludge coming from the Water Treatment Plant (WTP), through a new sludge management concept that introduces a method that re-uses sludge as raw material for the structural pottery industry. Read more at: Phys.org
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