New Delhi: An international team of scientists has discovered five new meteorites, including one that weighs a whopping 7.6 kilograms from Antarctica.
According to the researchers, including those from the Field Museum, Chicago, and the University of Chicago, out of the roughly 45,000 meteorites retrieved from Antarctica over the past century, only about a hundred or so are larger.
According to the researchers, Antarctica is one of the best places to hunt for meteorites. Its dry climate limits the degree of weathering the meteorites. Moreover, the landscape is ideal — the black space rocks stand out clearly against snowy fields.
But the vast expanse of ice makes it difficult to know where to look. This is where a new mapping technology has come into play. This team was the first to use it.
The five meteorites will be analysed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
The team said that studying meteorites will eventually help us better understand our place in the universe. Read more.
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Europe’s Jupiter mission on track for lift-off in April
The satellite behind Europe’s next flagship space mission — JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) is ready to be transported to its launchpad at Kourou, French Guiana in preparation for its lift-off in April.
The spacecraft’s prime contractor is Airbus and it has been at their headquarters in Toulouse since August 2021 for final assembly and testing. This included the integration of the final instrument units and fitting of the largest solar arrays ever to fly on a planetary exploration mission — to ensure that the spacecraft has enough power, even when it’s 740 million kilometres away from the Sun.
A commemorative plaque, in tribute to Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, has been mounted on the spacecraft to honour him as he was the first to view Jupiter and its largest moons through a telescope in 1610.
On its more than 2 billion-kilometre-long journey, the 6.2-tonne spacecraft will collect data about the icy moons to understand whether there is a possibility that these moons could host microbial life.
Carrying 10 state-of-the-art scientific instruments, including cameras, spectrometers, an ice-penetrating radar, an altimeter, a radio-science experiment, and sensors, JUICE will complete a unique tour of the Jupiter system. This includes in-depth studies of three potentially ocean-bearing moons — Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. Read more.
New study may help predict solar flares
Using data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a team of scientists has found new clues in the upper atmosphere of the Sun that could help predict when and where the Sun’s next flare might explode.
The researchers from NorthWest Research Associates, an America-based scientific research organisation, identified small signals in the upper layers of the solar atmosphere, the corona, that can help identify which regions on the Sun are more likely to produce solar flares — energetic bursts of light and particles.
They found that above the regions about to flare, the corona produced small-scale flashes – like small sparklers before the big fireworks.
This information could eventually help improve predictions of flares and space weather storms — the disrupted conditions in space caused by the Sun’s activity. Space weather can affect Earth in many ways such as producing auroras, endangering astronauts, disrupting radio communications, and even causing large electrical blackouts.
Scientists have previously studied how activity in lower layers of the Sun’s atmosphere can indicate impending flare activity in active regions, which are often marked by groups of sunspots, or strong magnetic regions on the surface of the Sun that are darker and cooler compared to their surroundings. The new findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, add to that picture. Read more.
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AI successfully used to design cancer drug
Scientists have used AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered database that predicts protein structures, to help design a drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of primary liver cancer.
This marks the first successful application of AlphaFold to hit the identification process in drug discovery.
The study by an international team of researchers, including those from the University of Toronto, shows how AlphaFold was successfully applied to an end-to-end AI-powered drug discovery platform called Pharma.AI, including a biocomputational engine, PandaOmics, and a generative chemistry engine, Chemistry42.
In 2022, the AlphaFold computer program, developed by Alphabet’s DeepMind, predicted protein structures for the whole human genome –– a remarkable breakthrough in both AI applications and structural biology.
This free AI-powered database is helping scientists predict the structure of millions of unknown proteins, which is key to accelerating the development of new medicines to treat disease and beyond.
Researchers discovered a novel target for HCC — a previously undiscovered treatment pathway — and then developed a molecule that could bind to that target without the aid of an experimentally determined structure.
This was accomplished in just 30 days from target selection and after only synthesising seven compounds. In a second round of AI-powered compound generation, researchers discovered a more potent molecule.
Without AI, scientists must rely on conventional trial-and-error methods of chemistry that are slow, expensive and limit the scope of their exploration. As COVID-19 has demonstrated, the speedy development of new drugs or new formulations of existing ones is needed and increasingly expected by the public. Read more.
Scientists discover first single-celled organism that can survive on viruses
Scientists have discovered that a kind of pond-dwelling virus Halteria ciliates is able to survive by only consuming other viruses – making them the first known single-celled creatures to do so.
Some microscopic organisms are known to thrive on aquatic viruses such as chloroviruses, which infect and kill algae. However, according to researchers from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln it was not known whether viruses alone could provide enough nutrients for an organism to grow and reproduce.
The study found that lab-cultured Halteria living in water droplets and given only chloroviruses for sustenance were able to reproduce. Halteria numbers went up, even as the number of other viruses in the water dwindled, hinting that viruses can’t satisfy the nutritional requirements for all organisms to grow.
Viruses could be a good source of phosphorus, which is essential for making copies of genetic material, However, it takes a lot of viruses to account for a ‘full meal’.
In the lab, each Halteria microbe ate about 10,000 to 1 million viruses daily, the team estimates. Halteria in small ponds with abundant viral snacks might chow down on about a quadrillion viruses per day. Read more.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)