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Silicon Valley in Northern California got its nickname from the multitude of computer chip manufacturers that sprung up in the surrounding area in the 1980’s. Despite its ubiquity as a chip building material, silicon may be facing some competition from a new version of an old substance.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component, or organelle, that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell. The engineered ribosome may enable the production of new drugs and next-generation biomaterials and lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes function.

Using a climate model that can tag sources of soot from different global regions and can track where it lands on the Tibetan Plateau, researchers have determined which areas around the plateau contribute the most soot—and where. The model can also suggest the most effective way to reduce soot on the plateau, easing the amount of warming the region undergoes.

An analysis of data on stomach acidity and diet in birds and mammals suggests that high levels of stomach acidity developed not to help animals break down food, but to defend animals against food poisoning. The work raises interesting questions about the evolution of stomach acidity in humans, and how modern life may be affecting both our stomach acidity and the microbial communities that live in our guts.

The genetics content of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) – a recent set of performance-based expectations for elementary, middle, and high school students in science classes – represents, on average, a modest improvement over state standards, but is missing core genetics concepts and is difficult to interpret, according to research published today in PLOS ONE by science education specialists at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG).

Rewritable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs owe their existence to phase-change materials, those materials that change their internal order when heated and whose structures can be switched back and forth between their crystalline and amorphous phases. Phase-change materials have even more exciting applications on the horizon, but our limited ability to precisely control their phase changes is a hurdle to the development of new technology.

Visionect, which is in the business of helping companies build electronic paper display products, announced that Sydney has launched e-paper traffic signs. The traffic signage integrates displays from US manufacturer E Ink and a platform for managing the traffic signs developed by Visionect, according to Visionect’s blog earlier this month.

Teachers with strong social-emotional skills tend to implement new social-emotional intervention programs more faithfully, according to a study conducted by a University of Pittsburgh education professor published in the Society for Prevention Research’s journal, Prevention Science. This study is part of a larger special issue on schools’ readiness to implement new interventions, edited by Pitt’s Shannon Wanless and her colleague Celene Domitrovich from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

The odds of being attacked and castrated by a variety of parasitic flatworms increases for marine horn snails the farther they are found from the tropics. A Smithsonian-led research team discovered this exception to an otherwise globally observed pattern—usually biodiversity is greatest in the tropics and decreases toward the poles.

A new peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Mammalogy by the Oxford University Press adds important insights to the debate over how long killer whales in human care live. The study found no difference in life expectancy between killer whales born at SeaWorld and a well-studied population of wild killer whales.