Lifeboat Foundation

Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp suffered a massive worldwide Wednesday afternoon, with services impacted in varying degrees based on user’s region.

According to DownDetector, the outage occurred at approximately 12:40 PM ET, with many users unable to access the services through the websites and apps or send messages through WhatsApp.

When users attempted to access Facebook, they were greeted with errors stating, “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”

Australian-led research is unlocking new ways for immunotherapy to better target cancer. Cancer immunotherapy has revolutionized treatment for patients, whereby the body’s own immune system is harnessed to destroy cancer cells.

Typically, several molecules restrain the ability of T cells to target cancer cells and developing approaches to limit this restraining effect can lead to improved effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy.

Research published in Science Immunology has determined the structure of how an inhibitory molecule, LAG3, interacts with its main ligand and provides a new targeted approach to improving the effectiveness of immunotherapy for certain forms of cancer.

RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) (Image: © Alain Herzog CC BY SA) EPFL researchers have built a drone that can walk, hop, and jump into flight with the aid of birdlike legs, greatly expanding the range of potential environments accessible to unmanned aerial vehicles.

The new study focused on Wnt7a, a protein essential for development, growth, regeneration, and cancer. “Researchers have been trying for years to turn Wnt7a into a muscle regeneration drug, but it is very difficult to deliver Wnt7a throughout the body, since it is covered in fatty molecules that don’t mix well with body fluid,” said first author Uxia Gurriaran-Rodriguez, PhD, Center for Cooperative Research in Biosciences (CIC bioGUNE).

Wnt7a was identified as a long-distance signaling molecule found on the surface of exosomes following muscle injury. Due to its many hydrophobic components, it was necessary to isolate smaller portions of the Wnt7a protein to determine the smallest functional segment required for attachment to an exosome. Through selective deletion of various components of Wnt7a, the team found the smallest functional segment needed for exosome binding.

This segment turned out to be an 18-amino-acid sequence, which the team termed Exosome Binding Peptide (EBP). The team found that “addition of EBP to an unrelated protein directed secretion on extracellular vesicles.” EBP binds to coatomer proteins, proteins that coat membrane-bound transport vesicles, on exosomes, and through follow-up structural experiments, the team determined this is a conserved function across the Wnt protein family. EBP can be used to direct other proteins to exosomes, effectively allowing for targeted delivery of exosomes and their contents.

Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Delft University of Technology and the IMP Vienna Biocenter have discovered a new property of the molecular motors that shape our chromosomes. While six years ago they found that these so-called SMC motor proteins make long loops in our DNA, they have now discovered that these motors also put significant twists into the loops that they form.

These findings help us better understand the structure and function of our chromosomes. They also provide insight into how disruption of twisted DNA looping can affect health—for instance, in developmental diseases like “cohesinopathies.” The scientists published their findings in Science Advances.

Imagine trying to fit two meters of rope into a space much smaller than the tip of a needle—that’s the challenge every cell in your body faces when packing its DNA into its tiny nucleus. To achieve this, nature employs ingenious strategies, like twisting the DNA into coils of coils, so-called “supercoils” and wrapping it around special proteins for compact storage.

A research team from NIMS and UTokyo has proposed and demonstrated that the transverse magneto-thermoelectric conversion in magnetic materials can be utilized with much higher performance than previously by developing artificial materials comprising alternately and obliquely stacked multilayers of a magnetic metal and semiconductor.

The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

When a temperature gradient is applied to a magnetic conductor, a charge current is generated in a direction orthogonal to the directions of both temperature gradient and magnetization of the magnetic conductor.

A study published in the journal Optica demonstrates live plant imaging of several representative plant samples, including the biofuel crop sorghum. By employing a novel detector, researchers obtained clear images of living sorghum plants with a light far dimmer than starlight. This advance enables imaging of delicate, light-sensitive samples, such as biofuel crops, without disturbing or damaging the plants.

A method called quantum ghost imaging (QGI) allows scientists to capture images at extremely low light levels. QGI also enables the use of one low intensity color, best matched to the sample and a different color at higher intensity, sufficient to form the image of the sample. This approach improves imaging in regions of light where traditional cameras struggle.

By using label-free infrared imaging, researchers can gather critical information about important plant processes, such as water content and photosynthesis, even in low-light conditions. This is particularly beneficial for studying biofuel crops, where researchers want to optimize plant growth and health to maximize yield and sustainability.

The reliable control of traveling waves emerging from the coupling of oscillations and diffusion in physical, chemical and biological systems is a long-standing challenge within the physics community. Effective approaches to control these waves help to improve the present understanding of reaction-diffusion systems and their underlying dynamics.

Researchers at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and Université de Rennes recently demonstrated a promising approach to control chemical waves in a type of fluid flow known as hyperbolic flow. Their experimental methods, outlined in Physical Review Letters recently, entail the control of chemical waves via the stretching and compression of fluids.

“At a summer school in Corsica, discussions between the Brussels and Rennes team triggered the curiosity to see how chemical waves studied at ULB in Brussels would behave in hyperbolic flows analyzed in Rennes,” Anne De Wit, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “The primary objective was to see how a non-trivial flow would influence the dynamics of waves.”

Quantum fluctuations in frustrated magnets are expected to produce unconventional emergent behaviour. Neutron spectroscopy measurements now provide evidence for emergent gauge fields in a pyrochlore spin ice.