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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology looked at nearly 29 million tweets surrounding four recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) events to identify the social media patterns of its activists. They found that the community is unlike many other social movements because of its ability to bond over the course of many months.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute’s Swiss Light Source in Villigen, Switzerland, have developed a new design for X-ray spectrometers that eschews a commonly utilized component to lowers overall production costs and increase the efficiency of x-ray flux, which may lead to faster acquisition times for sample imaging and increased efficiency for the system.

Although proteins are usually electrically insulating, hair-like nanoscale filaments (called pili) on the surface of Geobacter bacteria exhibit metallic-like conductivity. To understand why pili are conductive, scientists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Holy Cross, and Brookhaven National Laboratory recently used X-ray diffraction to analyze the structure of the filaments

Researchers from four U.S. universities are teaming up with dairy farms across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic to study the effect of three different manure management techniques on preventing the occurrence and spread of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, genes tied to resistance, and antibiotic residues—traces of antibiotics and the compounds they break down into.

MIT chemists have devised a new way to synthesize a complex molecular structure that is shared by a group of fungal compounds with potential as anticancer agents. Known as communesins, these compounds have shown particular promise against leukemia cells but may be able to kill other cancer cells as well.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and partners Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Wisconsin-based Eck Industries have developed aluminum alloys that are both easier to work with and more heat tolerant than existing products.

(Phys.org)—In order to determine how fast quantum technologies can ultimately operate, physicists have established the concept of “quantum speed limits.” Quantum speed limits impose limitations on how fast a quantum system can transition from one state to another, so that such a transition requires a minimum amount of time (typically on the order of nanoseconds). This means, for example, that a future quantum computer will not be able to perform computations faster than a certain time determined by these limits.

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $30 million award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) to acquire and deploy a new large scale supercomputing system, Stampede 2, as a strategic national resource to provide high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities for thousands of researchers across the U.S.

In a new study, published in Science, researchers from Uppsala University found that larval fish exposed to microplastic particles during development displayed changed behaviors and stunted growth which lead to greatly increased mortality rates. The researchers discovered that larval perch that had access to microplastic particles only ate plastic and ignored their natural food source of free-swimming zooplankton.