Osaka Metropolitan University researchers enhanced Saccharomyces cerevisiae to increase its tolerance for high 2,3-butanediol concentrations. This was achieved by introducing mutations into the genomic DNA and successfully obtaining a mutant strain that proliferates 122 times more than the parent strain.

Ocean data assimilation systems combine data assimilation with numerical ocean models to predict ocean conditions. Researchers recently created the Yin-He Global Ocean Data Assimilation and Forecast System (YHGO) to provide more accurate estimations of oceanic conditions than older platforms.

Researchers at Peking University and collaborators have revealed evidence of Mott insulator with thermally induced melting behavior in kagome compound Nb₃Cl₈. Using graphene-based chemical potential mapping, the team directly measured a strongly temperature-dependent Mott gap that remains robust up to 300 K, providing a new platform to study strong electron correlations and flat-band physics under ambient conditions.

Tokyo, Japan – Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have re-engineered the popular Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) for simulating the flow of fluids and heat, making it lighter and more stable than the state-of-the-art. By formulating the algorithm with a few extra inputs, they successfully got around the need to store certain data, some of which span the millions of points over which a simulation is run. Their findings might overcome a key bottleneck in LBM: memory usage.

Fluorine is critical for biomedicine. This element can help drug compounds be more potent and last longer in the body, and its radioactive isotope, fluorine-18, powers medical imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET). But scientists have long struggled with adding fluorine to the most common chemical bonds—carbon–hydrogen (C–H) bonds—in a way that’s precise, efficient and compatible with the molecules used to create many modern medicines. There’s been particular interest in constructing carbon–fluorine bonds stereoselectively—that is, attaching fluorine from a specific direction in space to create the needed fluorinated stereoisomer (“mirror image” form) of the target molecule. Stereoselective C–H fluorination has remained one of the most challenging synthetic transformations, and the limited approaches developed to date have relied on expensive specialty chemicals or complicated, multi-step procedures. Now, chemists at Scripps Research have developed a long-sought method to stereoselectively attach fluorine atoms to complex, drug-like molecules in a single step using cheap, readily available fluoride salts.