The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation's National Deuteration Facility has provided deuterated cholesterol for international research to gain a better understanding of how the Spike protein of the COVID virus, SARS-Co-V-2, infects human cells through a membrane fusion mechanism.
In deuterated compounds, hydrogen has been replaced by deuterium. Deuterated cholesterol can be used as a molecular probe to determine the stacking order of membrane layers and to determine how cholesterol is partitioned on the membrane.
Researchers from the Institut...
People may be willing to condone statements they know to be false and even spread misinformation on social media if they believe those statements could become true in the future, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
Whether the situation involves a politician making a controversial statement, a business stretching the truth in an advertisement, or a job seeker lying about their professional skills on a resume, people who consider how a lie...
Tesla boss Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter, saying he is the right person to "unlock" the social media platform's "extraordinary potential".
Musk said he would pay $54.20 a share for Twitter, valuing it at about $40 billion, the BBC reports.
It recently emerged that Musk was Twitter's biggest shareholder after he built up a large stake in the firm.
He said that if his offer is not accepted: "I would need to reconsider my position...
Human organ transplants offer a crucial lifeline to people with serious illnesses, but there are too few organs to go around. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 112,000 people awaiting transplants.
The promise of 3D printing organs is one possible solution to address this shortage, but has been fraught with complexity and technical barriers, limiting the type of organs that can be printed. Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology are now pushing through these...
Last month, controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI announced it had given its technology to the Ukrainian government.
The BBC has been given evidence of how it is being used – in more than 1,000 cases – to identify both the living and the dead.
A man lies motionless on the floor, his head tilted down. His body is naked, apart from a pair of Calvin Klein boxers. His eyes are ringed with what look like...
An enormous comet – approximately 130 kilometres across, more than twice the width of Rhode Island – is heading our way at 35,000 kilometres per hour from the edge of the solar system. Fortunately, it will never get closer than 1 billion miles from the Sun, which is slightly farther from Earth than Saturn; that will be in 2031.
Comets, among the oldest objects in the solar system, are icy bodies that were unceremoniously tossed out...
San Francisco police officers were faced with a new challenge after stopping an autonomous vehicle with no one inside.
Officers approached the car, operated by Cruise, because it had been driving without headlights.
In the incident, captured on film, an officer remarks that there "ain't nobody in it," before the car moves to what Cruise said was a safer location.
The company said the headlights issue was a result of human error.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61080666
The U.S. inflation rate hit a fresh 40-year high in the year to March after fuel and food prices soared during the first full month of the Ukraine war.
Consumer prices surged by 8.5% – the largest annual gain since December 1981 – following a double-digit rise in energy prices, the BBC reports.
Last month, President Joe Biden banned all imports of oil and gas from Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, U.S....
France President Emmanuel Macron is firing up his campaign for re-election, directly taking on far-right rival Marine Le Pen in France's presidential run-off.
He made his first trip to a Le Pen stronghold at Denain, one of France's poorest towns in the industrial north.
Macron won the first round of the election, but opinion polls suggest the second round will be a close race on April 24.
"Make no mistake: nothing is decided," he told supporters after the...
Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, helps to "open up" depressed people's brains, even after use, enabling brain regions to talk more freely to one another.
These are the findings of a new analysis of brain scans from close to 60 people receiving treatment for depression, led by Imperial College London's Centre for Psychedelic Research. The team behind the study believes it may have untangled how psilocybin exerts its therapeutic effects on the brain.
Psilocybin is one of a number...
