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A new study shows that it is possible to use an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to view, in atomic detail, the binding of a potential small molecule drug to a key protein in cancer cells. The cryo-EM images also helped the researchers establish, at atomic resolution, the sequence of structural changes that normally occur in the protein, p97, an enzyme critical for protein regulation that is thought to be a novel anti-cancer target.

A collaborative of Russian and Italian scientists has created a neural network based on polymeric memristors, devices that can potentially be used to build fundamentally new computers. According to the researchers, these developments have applications in systems for machine vision, hearing, and other sensory organs, and also intelligent control systems for various devices, including autonomous robots.

We have built a world of largely straight lines – the houses we live in, the skyscrapers we work in and the streets we drive on our daily commutes. Yet outside our boxes, nature teams with frilly, crenellated forms, from the fluted surfaces of lettuces and fungi to the frilled skirts of sea slugs and the gorgeous undulations of corals.

While the notion of “players,” “actions,” and “payoffs” may seem more suited to Las Vegas gaming tables, game theory as a mathematical tool has steadily grown in cyber defense applications. In ongoing and progressive work being conducted under PNNL’s Asymmetric Resilient Cybersecurity initiative, scientists have taken on the challenge of addressing the sources and types of uncertainty that can arise in realizing a resilient cyber system

Recent news about tainted water in Flint, Michigan, and other parts of the country have called into question the safety of the nation’s drinking water supply. Adding to this, a new study finds that pollutants from household wastewater—pharmaceuticals and consumer product chemicals—can make their way into people’s private wells, and that backyard septic systems are likely to blame

Fuel cells convert the chemical energy stored in hydrogen (H2) into electrical energy by electrochemically “combusting” hydrogen gas with oxygen (O2) from the air into water (H2O), thereby generating electricity. As a result, future electric automobiles might be operated quite well with fuel cells instead of with heavy batteries.

In only a few years, digital currency bitcoin has emerged from the shadows to become something debated by politicians and pondered by economists. Now it is blockchain, the technology that makes bitcoin possible, that is having its moment in the sun: the UK government’s Chief Scientist Sir Mark Walport laid out a possible role for it in delivering public services.

Using an orbiting radio-astronomy satellite combined with 15 ground-based radio telescopes, astronomers have made the highest-resolution, or most-detailed, astronomical image yet, revealing new insights about a gorging black hole in a galaxy 900 million light-years from Earth. The scientists combined signals from the Spektr-R satellite of the RadioAstron mission with those from radio telescopes throughout Europe and nine antennas of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)

NASA satellites obtained a number of different views of the great winter storm that left many snowfall records from Virginia to New York City from January 22 to 24, 2016. RapidScat provided a look at the strong winds that led to flooding in southern New Jersey, while NASA’s Aqua satellite and NASA/USGS’s Landsat satellite provided images of the post-storm snowy blanket.

A well-known songbird, the great tit, has revealed its genetic code, offering researchers new insight into how species adapt to a changing planet. Their initial findings suggest that epigenetics—what’s on rather than what’s in the gene—may play a key role in the evolution of memory and learning.