Understanding how representative currently known proteins are of the overall potential diversity can help inform strategies for a wide range of applications, including therapeutic, biocatalysis, or biomaterials development. Published in PNAS, an OIST-led international team investigated the relationship between protein evolution and sequence space, identifying the limiting factors behind protein diversification. Their findings reinforce theories of DNA recombination as a driving force of ancestral protein formation and highlight the limitations of many cutting-edge AI protein design methods.

AMHERST, Mass. — Scientists in the Riccio College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Santa Barbara have demonstrated key laser and ion trap components necessary to help drastically shrink the size of quantum computers, an achievement aligned with the shrinking of integrated microprocessors in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that allowed computers to move from room-sized behemoths to today’s ultrathin smartphones.

Virtual reality feels more “real” when users can touch a physical prop, but most haptic proxies follow a one-object-one-model approach that is costly and hard to deploy. A new fabric topological haptic proxy (FTHP) integrates origami-inspired constraints and embedded sensing fibers so a single cloth can switch among flat, folded and transforming states for different interactions. A lightweight neural network decodes the signals and achieves about 92.4% action recognition accuracy.

The chemical composition of meteorites and asteroids acts as a kind of fingerprint, providing information about the origin of the building materials that formed the Earth. 

Using a new analysis of existing data, the researchers show that this material must exclusively come from the inner solar system. 

The material that formed the Earth is similar to that found on Mars and the asteroid Vesta. The Earth is thus part of a trend line extending from the Sun. 

This close relationship also enables predictions to be made about the composition of Venus and Mercury, from which we have no known samples.