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Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital demonstrated for the first time that the protein midkine plays a preventative role against Alzheimer’s disease. Midkine is known to accumulate in Alzheimer’s disease patients. Now, researchers have connected it with amyloid beta, a protein that accumulates in the brain, causing assemblies that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s….

Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems far beyond the reach of today’s fastest supercomputers. But today’s machines are notoriously fragile. The quantum bits, or “qubits,” that store and process information are easily disrupted by their environment, leading to errors that quickly accumulate. One of the most promising approaches to overcoming this challenge is…

Using a small bench-top reactor, researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) have demonstrated that electrochemically loading a solid metal target with deuterium fuel can boost nuclear fusion rates. Large-scale magnetic confinement fusion — which puts plasmas under extreme temperatures and pressure — is being widely explored as a method for clean energy generation….

Approximately 4.6 billion years ago our solar system formed from a huge disk of gas and dust orbiting our Sun. The asteroids we see today are some of the most complete artifacts of this formation left for us to observe, like the screws, offcuts, and other debris leftover at a construction site. Scientists can study…

The British evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane is said to have quipped that any divine being evidently had ‘an ordinate fondness for beetles’. This bon mot conveyed an important truth: the ‘tree of life’ – the family tree of all species, living or extinct – is very uneven. In places, it resembles a dense thicket of…

A new study led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, University of Greenwich, and the Technical University of Denmark could provide a cost-effective and sustainable solution to help tackle the devastating decline in honeybees. An engineered food supplement, designed to provide essential compounds found in plant pollen, was found…

If an extraterrestrial intelligence were looking for signs of human communications, when and where should they look? In a new study, researchers at Penn State and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California analyzed when and where human deep space transmissions would be most detectable by an observer outside our solar system and suggest that…