A group led by physicist Viatsheslav Dobrovitski, Ames Laboratory, United States, and included scientists from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Southern California, has taken this major step forward in using the motion of nuclei and electrons individual quantum information processing, overcoming the problem of outside interference.

The great progress made is that these scientists have been able to decouple individual qubits of the environment, so they retain their information while preserving the coupling between qubits themselves.

The discovery opens the door to a robust quantum computing with solid state devices and the use of quantum technologies for atomic precision magnetic measurements at the nanoscale.

Researchers have shown that the technique can be used for the quantum information processing on a small scale. Dobrovitski and his collaborators have managed to successfully implement the quantum search algorithm of Grover, a search method for random lists. In this case, they used their solid-state hybrid system to search correctly on a list of four elements.

This is the first time we demonstrate a robust quantum computation using a solid state system with individual spins. Dobrovitski and colleagues have shown that even with the inevitable imperfections of the experiments, it is feasible to use this system for quantum information processing in a way that surpasses its classic counterpart, the conventional electronic computing, because, and this is important to a list of four elements, the quantum device is properly the desired item to review the list at one time (the four elements at once), while classical computing, limited by the laws of physics that govern the phenomena in which is based, inspects the four elements one by one.

Although a list of four elements is a small list, consider a random list of a million items. Using the classical computation would require about 500,000 queries. But, using the quantum information processing, it only takes 1,000 consultations, which shows how quantum information processing will be faster compared to the current classical computers.

According to the study, Drosophila Insulin-Like Peptide 8 (DILP8) is secreted by peripheral tissues during the development process that brings the body and the coordinated growth between organs and tissues. Likewise, this hormone is also secreted in response to damaged tissues, as it inhibits the production of hormones such as ecdysone, delaying sexual maturity until the growth process has completed successfully.

The researcher at the Neurosciences Institute (a joint CSIC and University Miguel Hernandez of Elche) Maria Dominguez, who led the study, explains: “all organisms, including humans, so mysterious coordinate the growth of various organs and parts of the body, keeping the ratio between them and an almost perfect bilateral symmetry.” According to Dominguez, “so far, had not found any sign that would control this process, but its accuracy suggested the existence of some form of communication between them”.

DILP8 has proved to be responsible for this high level of coordination. Experiments carried equipment market by Dominguez indicates that a deficit of DILP8 generates copies of drosophila asymmetric disproportionate and greater variability in their size and age of sexual maturation.

Moreover, the hormone is also produced at high levels in areas which undergo processes of regeneration and cancer. Thus, Dominguez believes that the discovery could be a “tool to understand, diagnose and treat this disease”. Likewise, the finding will also help to understand “the relationship between obesity, height and puberty”, CSIC researcher concludes.

Researchers from around the globe have studied the potential of copper as a cheap and energy efficient to recycle the carbon dioxide emitted in many power plants. The idea, in essence, is that instead of being released to the atmosphere, CO2 will be circulated through a copper catalyst, through which methane is obtained, which in turn serves as fuel for power plant itself. This system could significantly reduce CO2 emissions, a greenhouse gas of concern in the coal-fired power plants or natural gas.

But the copper is rather easily oxidized, as shown by the green color which often ends up taking. Therefore, this metal is unstable, which can significantly slow reaction with carbon dioxide and thus lead to a significant formation of unwanted byproducts such as carbon monoxide and formic acid.

Now, researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), located in Cambridge, USA, has introduced a solution that can further reduce the energy needed to process copper to carbon dioxide, while ensuring that the metal is much more stable. The group of copper nanoparticles designed with a bit of gold, which is resistant to corrosion and oxidation.

In tests, researchers found that low profile copper gold becomes much more stable. In the experiments, the electrodes were coated with the hybrid nanoparticles, and found that much less energy was needed to ensure that these nanoparticles were reacted as desired with carbon dioxide, compared with what happens when using pure copper nanoparticles.

The results obtained by the team of Yang Shao-Horn, Zhichuan Xu, Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli and Erica Lai pave the way towards a potentially effective way to cut emissions of carbon dioxide from several thermoelectric energy perspective.

The results obtained by the team of Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, Yang Shao-Horn, Erica Lai and Zhichuan Xu pave the way for a potentially effective from the viewpoint of energy to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants enough. With conventional methods, it is usual to have to expend much energy to convert CO2 into something useful. The new system based on hybrid nanoparticles of gold and copper may represent the final advance to change that situation.

Astronauts undergo many physiological changes in the process of adaptation to microgravity. For years scientists have known that, in space, the immune system does not work as well as they should, and the search for answers to this question has been precisely one of the main drivers of research in orbit.

A team of researchers from the University of Teramo, the European Brain Research Institute and the Foundation Santa Lucia has discovered that there is an enzyme in particular, known as 5-LOX, which becomes more active in microgravity conditions.

The enzyme 5-LOX regulates, among other things, the life expectancy of human cells. Most cells in our body divide and regenerate, but you can only replicate a limited number of times. The question now is ‘is it affected the health of astronauts by changes in the level of activity of the enzyme 5-LOX’. To find answers, researchers need to test their hypothesis in the only laboratory which may negate the effects of gravity: the International Space Station.

To develop this experiment, we sent samples of blood from two healthy donors to the orbiting complex. One set was exposed to microgravity conditions for two days, while the other remained inside a small centrifuge that simulated gravity. Then all samples were frozen and sent back to Earth for analysis. As expected, the activity of the enzyme 5-LOX was much higher in the samples under microgravity conditions in the samples were kept in the centrifuge or where they had been grounded. In fact, the activity in samples from the centrifuge was virtually identical to that seen in those who had not gone to space.

“We have identified an enzyme that could be responsible for weakening the immune system”, says Mauro Maccarrone, University of Teramo. “The activity of the enzyme 5-LOX can be blocked by existing drugs, so these results could help improve human health in the very near future”.

The researchers continue to study the enzyme 5-LOX and related compounds. A few days ago, the Expedition 30 crew brought back to Earth new samples, part of a follow-up experiment, in which other changes seek to fully understand all the underlying mechanisms.

By limiting the biological activity of certain cellular signals, including those controlled by the enzyme 5-LOX, it could even slow certain parts of the aging process. The results of this research have been shared with the international scientific community, and especially to those researchers who treat patients with a reduced immune response. It is likely that this line of research will help improve the quality of life of older people on Earth.

The technology used for that, once perfected, could someday enable doctors to perform routine laboratory tests in minutes, speeding up diagnosis and treatment, and also reducing costs.

In the experiments carried out by the team of Ethan Minot and Vincent Remcho, of Oregon State University in the U.S., and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, new nanobiosensors almost tripled the speed achieved by previous prototypes. For this and its other benefits, it is easy to end up having many practical applications, not only in medicine but also in toxicology, environmental monitoring, development of new drugs, and other fields.

Although further refinements are needed before the sensors are ready for commercial production, and have great potential right now.

With these types of sensors will be possible in a few minutes many medical laboratory tests, allowing the doctor make a diagnosis during a single patient visit to his office. With many of the tests done today, it takes days of the charge until the doctor can view the results in his office. And often expensive and require specialized laboratory technicians.

The new technology would make the same analysis but in a much shorter time, using a handheld device, and reducing the cost of each analysis so that a test that costs $ 50 would now cost only a dollar.

The key to the new technology is a rare capacity for carbon nanotubes, which allows them to detect a protein on the surface of a sensor. Nanotubes change their electrical resistance when a protein is placed in them, and the magnitude of this change can be measured to determine the presence of a particular protein.

The Laboratory for Genomics and Bioinformatics where you work combines experiments with computational analysis to study important problems in the field of Immunology and precisely one of the most important is how “turns off” inflammation. “Inflammation can be initiated in many ways, usually by a bacterial infection, but it really is not much studied how it goes”, he says.

However, it is a fundamental mechanism, because “a persistent inflammation is associated with many diseases, including atherosclerosis, neurodegenerative diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes or asthma”, says expert. That is not the cause of these diseases, “but a lot worse”.

The work of Diego Miranda Saavedra is to combine experimental data and computational analysis to develop models to understand how the body gets off inflammation once it is no longer needed. “We are half way yet, but we have something important to determine the form of regulation that has a very important gene called STAT3, and that is the beginning of the inflammatory response that shuts down inflammation”.

From this finding, the objectives are to identify genes regulated STAT3. Researchers claim to know exactly which parts of the genome this gene binds and what other genes selected to start the inflammatory response. In recent years research has been conducted on the process by which refers inflation, since it is fundamental and this group of Osaka University seems to have found a critical clue. “It’s a line we want to continue although it is in its infancy”, says the scientist.

The researcher says that canary Bioinformatics is essential for current biomedical research, because there is so much data that if you have no ability to analyze, you can not do anything. New techniques offer much information that if not handled properly; form a bottleneck that prevents you from progressing.

In this class never before nuclear decay, instead of emitting radiation by following the known patterns, the core simultaneously expelled two neutrons, in what constitutes a dineutron. Although physicists had predicted long ago the existence of this form of decay, it was the first experiment has been achieved witness an event dineutron release.

The team of Artemis Spyrou, of Michigan State University in East Lansing, USA, has been observed for the first time unambiguously the decay via the dineutron, and has been clearly identified in the beryllium-16.

The breakdown by type of newly discovered dineutron joins 15 other known types of atomic disintegration, including issuing doubly proton and positron emission twice. The results promise to strengthen the knowledge scientists have about what is called strong nuclear force which holds together the nuclei, and the processes that occur inside neutron stars.

In the traditional scheme of physics, the strong force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature. The other three are the electromagnetic force, the weak force (responsible for thermonuclear fusion mechanisms occurring inside stars) and the gravitational force.

Judging from the evidence obtained in previous studies, everything seemed to indicate that spatial memory would be most affected by aging. But instead of this, the Wisconsin researchers have found that the aging brain seems to be more likely to lose its ability to react to signs that indicate when it’s time to stop, even momentarily, the task you are working for move to another address.

Anyway, this is consistent with the difficulty for older people to do several things at once, and explain the precise cause. The team of Mark Laubach, Faculty of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, was studying the impact of aging on working memory, the type of memory that allows us to remember that dinner is cooking as we speak by phone, and we can not leave it too long to fire or burn.

The researchers examined brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of young and old rats. This crust is related to spatial working memory, the type of memory that lets us know where we stopped a while ago two objects that have been using.

The ability to switch between tasks is critical to many everyday activities, both at home and in the workplace. The errors of the brain to monitor when it is time to change momentarily activity is what causes a person to talk on the phone forget the food out of the fire before it burns.

The research team found that neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex of rats older reacted more slowly to signals indicating that there was a reward available. By contrast, these signals immediately fired a response in young rats. The neurons in older rats emitted less pulses or “shots” in response to cues predicting reward. These rats failed to respond immediately to signs.

Researchers hope that by better understanding the mechanisms underlying working memory someday find possible treatments to curb or perhaps even eliminate the deterioration of these brain functions.

At that time the world was subjected to an intense greenhouse effect and global temperatures were higher than today. The lightning would have been the main trigger of these fires, but this period had high concentrations of atmospheric oxygen. More heat and more oxygen mean that the vegetation now, even now rarely burn, was burnt down with ease.

The team of Ian Glasspool of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, USA, and Andrew C. Scott and Sarah Brown of the Royal Holloway (University of London) traced the fire activity in the fossil record using for this the presence of charcoal deposits, creating a global database for this time interval. Charcoal is the remnant of vegetation burned and stored easily in the fossil record.

The abundance of fires throughout the Cretaceous would have created a chaotic environment. So far, few experts had taken into account the impact that the fires have had on the environment, not only destroying the vegetation, but also exacerbate runoff and erosion, and worsening floods caused by storms. The study’s authors are now assessing the impact these fires have had on communities of dinosaurs.

The interest of this research goes beyond to reconstruct Earth’s past or the history of dinosaurs. These events and circumstances of the Cretaceous may provide some crucial data on how the current global warming could affect in the near future the incidence of forest fires.

The intention with the design of the robot is to create and integrate components that respond to light and chemicals in the same way that biological systems respond. It’s a new way into robotics. The ultimate goal is that the robot, called Cyberplasm, has an electronic nervous system, sensors produced from mammalian cells that make the role of eyes and a nose as well as artificial muscles to use glucose for energy to be operated and propel the robot.

The Cyberplasm is under development in the coming years as part of an international collaboration funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the United Kingdom, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Working in the UK is being conducted at the Newcastle University.

Among the future uses of Cyberplasm may be the ability to swim inside the human body without interfering with normal operation thereof and without the person noticing nothing, in order to detect a wide range of diseases. Once it is developed, the prototypes will Cyberplasm less than 1 centimeter long. Future versions may have less than 1 millimeter long or even be built at the nanoscale.

Cyberplasm sensors are being developed by the team of Daniel Frankel, Newcastle University, to respond to external stimuli turning them into electronic impulses that are sent to an electronic “brain” equipped with sophisticated microchips. The brain then sends electronic messages indicating that artificial muscles to contract and relax, allowing the robot to navigate safely through an undulating motion.

Similarly, through these systems can collect and store data on the chemical environment of the robot which then can access qualified personnel to work with it. The project roboticists are now developing and testing individual components of Cyberplasm. It is expected to reach the stage of assembly within a couple of years. The Cyberplasm could begin to be used in real situations within five years.