Europe’s physics lab CERN on Thursday said private donors had pledged $1 billion toward the construction of a new particle accelerator that would be by far the world’s biggest.
In a first, private individuals and philanthropic foundations have backed a flagship research project at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which seeks to unravel what the universe is made of and how it works.
The donors include the Breakthrough Prize Foundation of billionaire Silicon Valley investor Yuri Milner; the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation of former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt; plus Italian Agnelli family heir John Elkann, and French telecoms tycoon Xavier Niel.
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Researchers at LMU have uncovered how ribosomes, the cell’s protein builders, also act as early warning sensors when something goes wrong inside a cell.
When protein production is disrupted, and ribosomes begin to collide, a molecule called ZAK detects the pileup and switches on protective stress responses.
Ribosomes as protein builders and stress sensors.
A collaborative team has achieved the first monolithic 3D chip built in a U.S. foundry, delivering the densest 3D chip wiring and order-of-magnitude speed gains.
Engineers at Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have collaborated with SkyWater Technology, the largest exclusively U.S.-based pure-play semiconductor foundry, to develop a novel multilayer computer chip whose architecture could help usher in a new era of AI hardware and domestic semiconductor innovation.
Unlike today’s largely flat, 2D chips, the new prototype’s key ultra-thin components rise like stories in a tall building, with vertical wiring acting like numerous high-speed elevators that enable fast, massive data movement. Its record-setting density of vertical connections and carefully interwoven mix of memory and computing units help the chip bypass the bottlenecks that have long slowed improvement in flat designs. In hardware tests and simulations, the new 3D chip outperforms 2D chips by roughly an order of magnitude.
Scientists have found that human hair growth does not grow by being pushed out of the root; it’s actually pulled upward by a force associated with a hidden network of moving cells. The findings challenge decades of textbook biology and could reshape how researchers think about hair loss and regeneration.
The team, from L’Oréal Research & Innovation and Queen Mary University of London, used advanced 3D live imaging to track individual cells within living human hair follicles kept alive in culture. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that cells in the outer root sheath—a layer encasing the hair shaft—move in a spiral downward path within the same region from where the upward pulling force originates.
Dr. Inês Sequeira, Reader in Oral and Skin Biology at Queen Mary and one of the lead authors, said, “Our results reveal a fascinating choreography inside the hair follicle. For decades, it was assumed that hair was pushed out by the dividing cells in the hair bulb. We found that instead that it’s actively being pulled upwards by surrounding tissue acting almost like a tiny motor.”