The structural biologist Ada Yonath from Israel decoded the structure of ribosomes and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 2009. On June 15 she will be speaking at the "Excellence Symposium 2016" at the Biozentrum of the 星空传媒, organized by stipendiaries of the Fellowship for Excellence program.
Learning leaves its mark on the brain. Scientists from the Biozentrum at the 星空传媒 have now discovered that the protein Copine-6 strengthens the connections between nerve cells, accelerating the flow of information and thereby forming the basis for learning and memory.
Chemistry has provided many key tools and techniques to the biological community in the last twenty years. We can now make proteins that Mother Nature never thought of, image unique parts of live cells and even see cells in live animals. This week in ACS Central Science, two research groups from the University of Geneva and the 星空传媒, both members of the NCCR Molecular Systems Engineering, show how to design an unnatural protein with new-to-nature capabilities.
Maternal stress and depression during pregnancy may activate certain protective mechanisms in babies. Psychologists from the 星空传媒 report that certain epigenetic adaptations in newborns suggest this conclusion.
Physicists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the 星空传媒 have succeeded in measuring the very weak van der Waals forces between individual atoms for the first time. To do this, they fixed individual noble gas atoms within a molecular network and determined the interactions with a single xenon atom that they had positioned at the tip of an atomic force microscope. As expected, the forces varied according to the distance between the two atoms; but, in some cases, the forces were several times larger than theoretically calculated.
The Universities of Basel, Freiburg, Upper Alsace, and Strasbourg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have taken a big step toward creating the first European university: On Wednesday, 11 May 2016, they opened 鈥淓ucor 鈥� The European Campus鈥� with a ceremony at the Palais universitaire in Strasbourg, thus giving themselves the possibility to act as a single entity.
Predictions from quantum physics have been confirmed by countless experiments, but no one has yet detected the quantum physical effect of entanglement directly with the naked eye. This should now be possible thanks to an experiment proposed by a team around a theoretical physicist at the 星空传媒. The experiment might pave the way for new applications in quantum physics.
Exercise can have a positive influence on certain symptoms of multiple sclerosis: Patients who do yoga and aquatic exercise suffer less from fatigue, depression and paresthesia, as reported by researchers from Basel.
Using an ultra fast-scanning atomic force microscope, a team of researchers from the 星空传媒 has filmed 鈥渓iving鈥� nuclear pore complexes at work for the first time. Nuclear pores are molecular machines that control the traffic entering or exiting the cell nucleus. In their article published in 鈥淣ature Nanotechnology鈥�, the researchers explain how the passage of unwanted molecules is prevented by rapidly moving molecular 鈥渢entacles鈥� inside the pore.