Academic Awards

  Three chemists are pioneers of 'click chemistry' and 'bioorthogonal chemistry' A toolkit for snapping together molecules like Lego building blocks has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Chemists Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen and Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., will evenly split the prize for developing click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 5 in a news conference in Stockholm. These tools allow scientists to easily construct complex molecules in the lab and inside living organisms. “The good thing with this discovery is that it can be used for almost everything,” said Olof Ramström, a chemist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a member of the Nobel committee for chemistry. Applications include building drug molecules, polymers, new materials and tracking biomolecules among cells.  “We’re kind of at...

  Students at Arizona State University are learning biology in a unique virtual reality experience, hurtling through space to interact with creatures in an intergalactic wildlife sanctuary the size of a small city and to solve the mystery of why the creatures are dying. And the data are in to show that the experience is working. ASU’s Dreamscape Learn biology course debuted in the spring 2022 semester for students who took Biology 181 (introduction to biology for biology majors) and Biology 100 (introduction to biology for non-science majors). The experience is straight out of Hollywood, created in a collaboration with Dreamscape Immersive, a company co-founded by Walter Parkes, former head of Dreamworks Motion Pictures and the writer or producer of hit movies including “WarGames,” “Gladiator” and the “Men in Black” series. And while its roots are in Hollywood, the technology is an innovative new way to learn, driven by storytelling and a sense of wonder. Consider what happened in ...

  Quarks inside the particles seem to move more than they should in an electric field   A proton (illustrated) contains three particles called quarks (red, green and blue blobs). In electric fields, those quarks seem to move more than theory predicts, making the proton stretchier than imagined. The subatomic particles are built of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound together by a powerful interaction known as the strong force. New experiments seem to show that the quarks respond more than expected to an electric field pulling on them, physicist Nikolaos Sparveris and colleagues report October 19 in  Nature . The result suggests that the strong force isn’t quite as strong as theory predicts. It’s a finding at odds with the standard model of particle physics, which describes the particles and forces that combine to make up us and everything around us. The result has some physicists stumped about how to explain it — or whether to even try. “It is certainly ...

  Microsoft is investigating a known issue causing OneDrive and OneDrive for Business crashes on Windows 10 systems where customers have installed updates released earlier this month. "After installing KB5018410 or later updates, OneDrive might unexpectedly close," the company explained in a Windows health dashboard update. On affected devices, this issue will prevent users from signing out or unlinking their OneDrive accounts or their sites and folders from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. As Redmond further explained, affected users might receive errors when trying to: Sign out or unlink your account in the Microsoft OneDrive sync app. Unlink sites or folders from syncing to your device from Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Teams sites. Uninstalling the OneDrive sync app might fail. The complete list of impacted platforms includes Windows 10, version 22H2; Windows 10, version 21H2; Windows 10, version 21H1; Windows 10, version 20H2. Website Link: https://academicawards.scie...