Research lab
Research institute and graduate university in Rehovot, Israel, working across the natural and exact sciences.
Weizmann and Regensburg researchers report in Cell that heat-loving archaea carry natural RNA phosphorothioates, the backbone chemistry used in RNA drugs. Developers get a natural counterpart to study, and the paper's title also points to the enzymes that install the marks.
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Weizmann Institute researchers analyzed more than 300 million lab tests from over a million women and report step-like shifts at menopause. In the Nature Medicine paper the largest changes sit in bone metabolism, liver tests and lipid handling.
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Ada Yonath, the crystallographer who shared the 2009 Nobel prize in chemistry for mapping the ribosome, has died aged 87. She spent almost two decades proving that the cell's protein factories could be crystallised and solved in three dimensions.
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University of Pittsburgh researchers reversed the direction of the energy cascade in two-dimensional turbulence using one small, correctly angled obstacle. The result loosens the long-held rule that a flow's dimensions alone decide whether energy moves to larger or smaller eddies.
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Weizmann researchers built an AI decoder that redraws images people saw from brain scans, trained on eight volunteers who each viewed about 9,000 pictures. The uses for patients are still hopes, and one neuroscientist is already warning about consent.
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Labs at EPFL and the Weizmann Institute each measured quasiparticles with a quarter of an electron's charge in the ν = 1/2 quantum Hall state. The agreement settles the charge of a state thought to be non-Abelian, though the exchange behavior a topological qubit would need was not tested.
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CeMM and Oxford researchers degraded the protein NUDT5 in cells and made them resistant to 6-thioguanine, while inhibiting the same enzyme had little effect. The split separates what the protein catalyses from what it does by being present.
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A Kyoto and Weizmann team screened 561,000 human-specific regulatory changes in cartilage cells. The survivors were then read inside cells carrying both human and gorilla chromosomes, where glycosaminoglycan genes ran lower on the human copies.
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Marc Neveu's group ran the biggest collisions it could devise against simulated icy moons, and the result says a shattered past tells you little about whether a moon holds water under its shell today.
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A Weizmann team built a delayed sensor to catch fruit fly cells that begin apoptosis and survive it. Those cells, which the group named DARE, replenished nearly half the damaged epithelium within 48 hours.
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In Nature Communications, Noam Stern-Ginossar's group reports that human cytomegalovirus goes active or dormant according to the dose a single cell takes up. Adding receptors to monocytes raised entry 15-fold.
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