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Abstract

Herein, the six-membered sulfur-containing cyclic carbonates was successfully synthesized from d- and l-xylose through an environmental friendly process by employing carbonyl sulfide (COS) as a sustainable C1-carbonation agent. The ring-opening polymerization of the monomers were rapidly initiated by bifunctional organocatalysts and alkali metal alkoxides, respectively, under ambient reaction conditions. The resultant sulfur-containing polycarbonates exhibit high-temperature resistance and good optical properties. This work furnishes an original and practical strategy for utilizing COS as a sulfur feedstock in biopolymer synthesis.

The research team conducted experiments involving two bacterial species: Vibrio natriegens and Ideonella sakaiensis.

Vibrio natriegens primarily inhabits saltwater ecosystems and is notable for its rapid reproduction rate. On the other hand, Ideonella sakaiensis possesses enzymes that give it the power to break down as well as ingest PET quickly, distinct from its.

As a result, the researchers isolated the genetic sequence from the latter (Ideonella sakaiensis) and integrated it into a plasmid. Plasmids are genetic sequences that may replicate independently within a cell even when it is distinct from the cell's original chromosome.

“In other words, you can sneak a plasmid into a foreign cell, and that cell will carry out the instructions in the plasmid’s DNA. And that’s exactly what the researchers did here,” noted the release.

The scientists then carefully incorporated the plasmid containing Ideonella sakaiensis genes into Vibrio natriegens bacterium in the lab. The resultant, V. natriegens was able to produce the required enzymes on its cell surface.

The researchers demonstrated that V. natriegens could degrade PET in a room-temperature-based saltwater setting.

“From a practical standpoint, this is also the first genetically engineered organism that we know capable of breaking down PET microplastics in saltwater. That’s important because it is not economically feasible to remove plastics from the ocean and rinse high concentration salts off before beginning any processes related to breaking the plastic down,” said Tianyu Li, the first author of this new study

Low-emissions strategy that could pay for itself helps scientists achieve high-yield hydrogen gas and high-value graphene.

To address this challenge, the researchers worked with two species of bacteria. The first bacterium, Vibrio natriegens, thrives in saltwater and is remarkable -- in part -- because it reproduces very quickly. The second bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis, is remarkable because it produces enzymes that allow it to break down PET and eat it.

Billion-dollar cultivated-meat startup Upside Foods wants you to think the breakthrough chicken fillets it sells are made in a futuristic factory. A WIRED investigation tells a different story. On July 1, five diners sat down at the counter of the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco for an unusual meal. They had won a competition to become the first customers in the US to eat cultivated meat—real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of a living animal. For a nominal price of $1, they tucked into two pieces of a cultivated chicken fillet made by the Californian startup Upside Foods, one of only two companies cleared to sell cultivated meat in the US. “I thought it was delicious,” says Oscar Merino, one of the diners. “The taste and the texture was incredible.”

Before their meal at Bar Crenn, Merino and the rest of the group toured Upside’s production facility across the Bay in Emeryville. They looked at neat rows of gleaming steel bioreactors, each one surrounded by a web of pipework. This factory—which WIRED visited in May 2022—is where Upside says it brews its cultivated chicken. The facility, Upside says, demonstrates to the world exactly how this novel meat is made. “We’re starting to show, from day one, what this whole industry is about,” Upside Foods cofounder and CEO Uma Valeti said in May 2022. “This is the opposite of very closely guarded food innovations.”

But former and current employees say the Emeryville plant tells a misleading story of how Upside’s chicken is made. In fact, sources say, the company’s flagship product—the juicy whole cuts of chicken served at Bar Crenn—are brewed, almost by hand, in tiny bottles. The huge bioreactors, those sources claim, simply aren’t capable of reliably brewing the sheets of tissue needed to form whole cuts of meat such as chicken fillets.

The hydrocarbon methane is highly abundant on Earth, yet its release is now known to contribute to surges in temperature and climate change. In recent years, researchers have been trying to devise reliable methods to directly convert methane into other fuels and chemicals with valuable real-world applications.

These strategies include catalyst-based methods to prompt the oxidative coupling of methane to substances containing the green gas diatomic carbon (C2). This reaction, however, typically requires extreme and challenging environmental conditions, due to the unfavorable characteristics of the thermocatalysts introduced so far.

Researchers at University College London, University of Liverpool have recently developed a new photocatalyst that could advance the oxidative coupling of methane. This photocatalyst, introduced in Nature Energy, is based on titanium dioxide (TiO2 ) loaded with gold (Au) nanoclusters.

"Photocatalytic oxidative coupling of methane (OCM) produces C2 molecules that can be used as building blocks for synthesis of fuels and chemicals," Xiyi Li, Chao Li and their colleagues wrote in the paper. "However, the yield rate and the selectivity of C2 products are still moderate due to the stable nature of methane molecules."

Using a rapid sputtering method, the researchers were able to homogenously load Au nanoclusters onto TiO2, producing their promising new photocatalyst. In initial tests, an optimized sample of their photocatalyst appeared to perform remarkably well, converting methane into C2 at a high rate and without requiring particularly harsh reaction conditions.

"We develop an Au nanocluster-loaded TiO2 photocatalyst by a sputtering approach, achieving a high methane conversion rate of 1.1 mmol h−1, C2 selectivity of ~90% and apparent quantum efficiency of 10.3 ± 0.6%," Xiyi Li, Chao Li and their colleagues explained in the study.

"The high C2/C2+ yield rate is on the same order of magnitude as the benchmark thermal catalysts in OCM processes operated at high temperature (>680 °C). Au nanoparticles are shown to prolong TiO2 photoelectron lifetimes by a factor of 66 for O2 reduction, together with Au acting as a hole acceptor and catalytic center to promote methane adsorption, C–H activation and C–C coupling," they continued.

Overall, this study demonstrates the advantages of using catalysts based on various components with different functions and characteristics for enabling the oxidative coupling of methane. Their proposed photocatalyst, Au60s/TiO2, was found to outperform many previously reported catalysts that can trigger this reaction, in terms of stability, methane conversion rate and yield of C2.

Notably, the team's photocatalyst is also easy to fabricate, which could facilitate its large-scale production and deployment. More studies could soon help to validate the performance of the new Au60s/TiO2 photocatalyst and assess its applicability in real-world settings.

In the future, this study could also pave the way for the fabrication of other promising multi-material photocatalysts for the reliable and direct conversion of methane. Collectively, these efforts could aid the valuable utilization of the abundant reserves of methane on Earth.

In the last couple of years, research institutions have been working on finding new concepts of how computers can process data in the future. One of these concepts is known as neuromorphic computing. Neuromorphic computing models may sound similar to artificial neural networks but have little to do with them.

Compared to traditional artificial intelligence algorithms, which require significant amounts of data to be trained on before they can be effective, neuromorphic computing systems can learn and adapt on the fly.

With the explosive growth taking place in the machine learning sphere, researchers from Germany have devised an efficient training method for neuromorphic computers.

Plant biomass plays an increasingly important role in the circular bioeconomy, replacing non-renewable fossil resources. Genetic engineering of this lignocellulosic biomass could benefit biorefinery transformation chains by lowering economic and technological barriers to industrial processing. However, previous efforts have mostly targeted the major constituents of woody biomass: cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Here we report the engineering of wood structure through the introduction of callose, a polysaccharide novel to most secondary cell walls. Our multiscale analysis of genetically engineered poplar trees shows that callose deposition modulates cell wall porosity, water and lignin contents and increases the lignin–cellulose distance, ultimately resulting in substantially decreased biomass recalcitrance. We provide a model of the wood cell wall nano-architecture engineered to accommodate the hydrated callose inclusions.

When you read in the news that a person whom you know as rich and wealthy is in financial trouble or has declared bankruptcy, it is easy to feel a sense of futility about managing your own money. You start to think that if such a rich person, who has access to the best financial advice, can come to this state, what chance do I have?

If you read deeper into his or her story you will find that he has come to this state because he violated some basic rule of life. The Golden Rules of Financial Safety of Harry Browne are the basic rules for financial success. They are simple and obvious and if you abide by them, there is less chance than one in a million that you could lose all that you have….

Let us learn what they are…

As Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was visiting China earlier this week, a sea-green Chinese smartphone was quietly launched online.

It was no normal gadget. And its launch has sparked hushed concern in Washington that U.S. sanctions have failed to prevent China from making a key technological advance. Such a development would seem to fulfill warnings from U.S. chipmakers that sanctions wouldn’t stop China, but would spur it to redouble efforts to build alternatives to U.S. technology.

Abstract In comparison to non-human animals, humans are highly flexible in cooperative tasks, which may be a result of their ability to understand a partner’s role in such interactions. Here, we tested if wolves and dogs could flexibly adjust their behaviour according to whether they needed a partner to solve a cooperative loose string-pulling paradigm. First, we presented animals with a delay condition where a human partner was released after the subject so that the animal had to delay pulling the string to enable coordinated pulling with the human partner. Subsequently, we investigated whether subjects would recruit a partner depending on whether they could operate the apparatus alone, or help from a partner was required. Both wolves and dogs successfully waited in the delay condition in 88% of the trials. Experimental subjects were also successful in recruiting a partner, which occurred significantly more often in the cooperation trials than in the solo pulling condition. No species differences were found in either experiment. These results suggest that both wolves and dogs have some understanding of whether a social partner is needed to accomplish a task, which enables behavioural coordination and cooperation.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has begun the study of one of the most renowned supernovae, SN 1987A (Supernova 1987A). Located 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, SN 1987A has been a target of intense observations at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio for nearly 40 years, since its discovery in February of 1987. New observations by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provide a crucial clue to our understanding of how a supernova develops over time to shape its remnant.