Science

Asia Research News magazine highlights your recent results or ongoing project with a fascinating article for lay audiences, produced by our team of professional writers, editors and designers. Don't miss your chance to be a part of the 2021 edition. Submit by Nov. 30, 2020.

A research team based in Japan may be moving toward a more controlled walk by unveiling the mechanism underlying the directional decision of each quantum step and introducing a way to potentially control the direction of movement.

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) scientists have invented a novel contrast agent for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which enables real-time visualisation and detection of the size and number of amyloid-beta in the brain, a main hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The invention offers hope for early detection and large-scale routine screening of AD. It can also help to assess the efficacy of drugs used to treat it.

Study confirms bats adopt multiple strategies to reduce pro-inflammatory responses, thus mitigating potential immune-mediated tissue damage and disease. Findings provide important insights for medical research on human diseases.

Researchers at Kanazawa University and University of California, San Francisco report in Science that arbitrary proteins, when combined with anchoring and receptor proteins, can work as a signaling protein “morphogen” capable of engineered spatial patterning.

Adaptive radiation - the rapid evolution of many new species from a single ancestor - is a major focus in evolutionary biology. Adaptive radiations often show remarkable repeatability where lineages have undergone multiple episodes of adaptive radiation in distant places and at various points in time - implying their extraordinary evolutionary potential.

Tohoku University researchers have improved a method for probing semiconducting crystals with light to detect defects and impurities. The details of their 'omnidirectional photoluminescence (ODPL) spectroscopy' set-up were published in the journal Applied Physics Express, and could help improve the fabrication of materials for electric cars and solar cells.

Researchers at Kanazawa University report in Nature Communications the mechanism making some lung-cancer patients resistant to the drug osimertinib. In addition, they suggest a combined drug treatment resolving osimertinib resistance in the case of cancer cells expressing low amounts of AXL, a protein belonging to the class of receptor tyrosine kinases.

Scientists have found an ingredient that makes a vaccine more effective through an approach more often seen in materials science – testing molecules that self-assemble into larger structures.

A Hokkaido University research group has successfully demonstrated that carbon-carbon (C-C) covalent bonds expand and contract flexibly in response to light and heat. This unexpected flexibility of C-C bonds could confer new properties to organic compounds.

Researchers at Osaka City University produce malic acid, which contains 4 carbon atoms, through artificial photosynthesis by simply adding metal ions like aluminum and iron. This solves a problem with current artificial photosynthesis technology of only producing molecules with 1 carbon atom and paves the way to exploring the use of CO2 as a raw material.

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba demonstrate that the hypnotic and teratogenic effects of thalidomide are separable. Thalidomide is a medication with several different effects, one of which is promoting sleep in the context of insomnia. In a new study, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have discovered that thalidomide exerts its hypnotic effects through mechanisms distinct from those for the drug’s notorious teratogenicity. These are striking results showing how thalidomide induces sleep independently of its known effects on the teratogenic cereblon pathway. These findings could be helpful in developing novel thalidomide-like hypnotic drugs without thalidomide’s teratogenic effects. The study was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Researchers at Osaka City University create a quantum algorithm that removes spin contaminants while making chemical calculations on quantum computers. This allows for predictions of electronic and molecular behavior with degrees of precision not achievable with classical computers and paves the way for practical quantum computers to become a reality.

An Ehime University group led by Dr. Ishibashi and Prof. Asahi reported that when a nanosecond laser pulse was irradiated to diarylethene nanoparticles which show the photo-induced isomerization reaction from the colored closed-form to the colorless open-form, the ring-opening reaction was at most 80 times more effective than that in the solution phase. The amplification could be well explained as a ‘photosynergetic effect’ coupled with nanoscale photothermal conversion and a photochemical reaction. There are very few reports of such a nanosecond laser pulse induced amplified photochemical reaction in nanoparticles, indicating a new photoenergy conversion method.

An international consortium of researchers under the aegis of CMIP6 has calculated new estimates for the melting of Earth’s ice sheets due to greenhouse gas emissions and its impact on sea levels, showing that the ice sheets could together contribute more than 40 cm by the end of 2100.

Applying cutting-edge experimental and computational tools to basic science, researchers in Australia and Singapore have discovered a technique that could enable future cell therapies for placenta complications during pregnancy.

Professor Hyeon K. Park, affiliated with South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has been selected, as the 7th Laureate of S. Chandrasekhar Prize of Plasma Physics.

A team of scientists has unraveled the molecular mechanism behind one of the causes of colorectal cancer, and a treatment target.

Scientists at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, show that it is possible to distinguish between left-handed and right-handed people by noninvasively monitoring just their brain activity during passive tactile stimulation. These results are key in haptic research (the study of sensory systems) and have various important implications for brain–computer interfaces, augmented reality, and even artificial intelligence.

This study selected the Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata) as a model animal for the fetal transfer of OH-PCBs in humans, and revealed OH-PCB concentrations and their relationships in the maternal and fetal brains. The key finding from this study is that OH-PCBs can reach the developing brain of the fetus as early as the first trimester of pregnancy. These OH-PCBs may exceed the levels that induce adverse effects on neurodevelopment.

Measuring the temperature of objects at a nanometer-scale has been a long challenge, especially in living biological samples, because of the lack of precise and reliable nanothermometers. An international team of researchers has realized a quantum technology to probe temperature on a nanometer-scale, and have observed a ‘fever’ in tiny nematode worms under pharmacological treatment. This strengthens the connection between quantum sensing and biology and ushers in novel thermal imaging technologies in biomedical research.

Professor Dennis Yuk Ming LO from the Faculty of Medicine at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CU Medicine) was just announced as a winner of The 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for discovering that fetal DNA is present in maternal blood and can be used for the prenatal testing of Down syndrome and a variety of genetic diseases. Professor Lo’s prenatal testing technology is now performed over 7 million times annually with women in over 90 countries. The Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the “Oscars of Science”, aims to honour paradigm shifting research in the categories of Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics and was created and funded by founders of a number of leading enterprises in the global technology sector in 2012. The awardees are nominated in an open online process. Each laureate receives US$3 million (equivalent to HK$24 million) in prize money, which is the most generous science award to date and attracts considerable attention in the global scientific community.

Scientists at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, develop a novel “heterostructured” photocatalyst using titanium and copper, two abundant and relatively inexpensive metals. Their cost-effective synthesis procedure, coupled with the high stability of the photocatalyst, provides an economically feasible way to convert waste carbon dioxide and water into useful hydrocarbon fuels using endless sunlight.

Researchers at Kanazawa University report in Nature Communications the discovery that in the developing fly brain, neurons stemming from the same parent cell experience repulsion. This lineage-dependent repulsion is regulated by a protein known as Dscam1.

Scientists are learning about species adaptation by comparing their stem cell-related genes.

Duke-NUS, the only graduate-entry medical school in Singapore, has joined the TriNetX global research network to increase clinical trial adoption and to facilitate better collaboration with other global healthcare organizations (HCOs). This latest member for TriNetX in Asia will provide the network with access to de-identified data from more than a million patients.

A new catalyst design enables unprecedented control over the modification of fatty acid derivatives that opens the door to creating useful substances in a green and efficient manner.

The ever-increasing workload of data centers calls for new ways to store and access data. Researchers from the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, have developed a new approach to manage databases in solid state drives, providing marked performance improvements in read/write delays and offloading database computation tasks from CPUs to increase efficiency and reduce power consumption.

Researchers from Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Engineering have discovered a novel iron-based superelastic alloy capable of withstanding extreme temperatures—both high and low.