Single-atom tractor beams power chemical catalysis

By trapping light into tiny gaps only a few atoms wide, a team from the NanoPhotonics Center at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge has magnified optical forces a thousand-fold, strong enough to force ...

Taking quantum control of life's building blocks

Life (as we know it) is based on carbon. Despite its ubiquity, this important element still holds plenty of secrets, on earth and in the heavens above us. For example, astrophysicists like Columbia's Daniel Wolf Savin who ...

Linker histone's surprising partnership with single-stranded DNA

To keep order in the tight quarters of the cell nucleus, our DNA is neatly clamped in place around a central disk by H1 linker histone, which helps shepherd DNA into the tidy chromatin fibers that comprise chromosomes. Linker ...

Two teams use neutral atoms to create quantum circuits

Two teams of researchers working independently have shown the viability of using neutral atoms to create quantum circuits—both have published outlines of their work in the journal Nature. One of the groups, with members ...

Octopus-like tentacles help cancer cells invade the body

With help from the best tweezers in the world, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen has shed new light on a fundamental mechanism in all living cells that helps them explore their surroundings and even ...

New advances in protein-folding process thermodynamics

In biophysics, the kinetic states of molecules play a determining role in the metabolic and physiological processes in which they take part. Now, a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...

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