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Why Labrador retrievers are more interested in food than other breeds

Dog owners tell their vets that Labrador retrievers are always interested in food, and new work shows there might be a biological truth to the claim. A May 3 study in Cell Metabolism links a gene alteration specifically found in Labs and related flat coat retrievers to greater food-motivated behavior, describing the first gene associated with canine obesity

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Quantum sensors for high-precision magnetometry of superconductors

Scientists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Department of Physics at the University of Basel have developed a new method that has enabled them to image magnetic fields on the nanometer scale at temperatures close to absolute zero for the first time. They used spins in special diamonds as quantum sensors in a new kind of microscope to generate images of magnetic fields in superconductors with unrivalled precision

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Insulating layer of air above the Greenland ice sheet reduces precipitation

The Earth’s climate has been warming, but even though the Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly in the coastal regions, there are large parts of the ice sheet (40 percent) where there has hardly been any melting on the surface. A warmer climate usually also means that there is more precipitation, but there has been no increase in the amount of precipitation on the ice sheet.

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Unique fragment from Earth’s formation returns after billions of years in cold storage

In a paper to be published today in the journal Science Advances, lead author Karen Meech of the University of Hawai`i’s Institute for Astronomy and her colleagues conclude that C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS) formed in the inner Solar System at the same time as the Earth itself, but was ejected at a very early stage.

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Autonomous quantum error correction method greatly increases qubit coherence times

(Phys.org)—It might be said that the most difficult part of building a quantum computer is not figuring out how to make it compute, but rather finding a way to deal with all of the errors that it inevitably makes. Errors arise because of the constant interaction between the qubits and their environment, which can result in photon loss, which in turn causes the qubits to randomly flip to an incorrect state.

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Entomologists shed light on bizarre mating mechanisms of native twisted-winged parasites

Twisted-winged parasites of the species Stylops ovinae reproduce using so-called traumatic insemination. Entomologists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Christian Albrechts University of Kiel published on this phenomenon in the new edition of the science magazine Scientific Reports

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Structure of an enzyme that pathogenic bacteria use to reduce oxygen revealed

(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers has revealed for the first time, the structure of an enzyme that pathogenic bacteria use to reduce oxygen. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes their study of the atomic structure of a bd oxidase from the bacteria Geobacillus thermodenitrificans, and why they believe what they found might help to create new ways to combat bacterial infections

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It's the year 2020…how's your cybersecurity?

What if, in 2020, wearable devices did not care about how many steps you took, and instead were concerned with your real-time emotional state? With networked devices tracking hormone levels, heart rates, facial expressions, voice tone and more, the Internet could become a vast system of “emotion readers,” touching the most intimate aspects of human psychology

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A long-noncoding RNA regulates repair of DNA breaks in triple-negative breast cancer cells

The discovery of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) has dramatically changed the understanding of the biology of diseases such as cancer. The human genome contains about 20,000 protein-coding genes – less than 2 percent of the total – but 70 percent of the genome is made into non-gene-encoding RNA.

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