Tech & Engineering
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 22-Dec-2025 22:11 ET (23-Dec-2025 03:11 GMT/UTC)
Can vertical farms really feed the UK sustainably? New study weighs climate costs and benefits
University of SurreyPeer-Reviewed Publication
- Journal
- Food and Energy Security
Enzymatic kinetics in an ultra-high-throughput format
National University of SingaporePeer-Reviewed Publication
Pharmaceutical scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a method that can measure the kinetic efficiency of an enzyme against more than 200,000 potential peptide substrates in a single experiment.
Characterising the interactions between enzymes and their substrates is a fundamental task in biochemistry, essential for engineering new biocatalysts, understanding disease mechanisms, and designing therapeutics. While existing techniques can study many enzymatic reactions in parallel, scaling such methods to comprehensively analyse an enzyme's preferences across a vast space of possible substrates remains a practical challenge.
Assistant Professor Alexander Vinogradov from the NUS Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences has developed a strategy called DOMEK (mRNA-display-based one-shot measurement of enzymatic kinetics) that addresses this need.
- Journal
- Chem
Integrated metabolic analysis reveals cancer's energy secrets
The University of OsakaPeer-Reviewed Publication
Researchers at The University of Osaka and Kanazawa University have developed a novel method for analyzing cancer metabolism, revealing new insights into cancer's inefficient energy process. This breakthrough, published in Metabolic Engineering, combines biological experiments with advanced information science techniques to uncover the role of cancer-specific inefficient metabolism.
- Journal
- Metabolic Engineering
- Funder
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Extramural Collaborative Research Grant of Cancer Research Institute, Kanazawa University
Mapping the Universe, faster and with the same accuracy
Sissa MedialabPeer-Reviewed Publication
If you think a galaxy is big, compare it to the size of the Universe: it’s just a tiny dot which, together with a huge number of other tiny dots, forms clusters that aggregate into superclusters, which in turn weave into filaments threaded with voids—an immense 3D skeleton of our Universe.
If that gives you vertigo and you’re wondering how one can understand or even “see” something so vast, the answer is: it isn’t easy. Scientists combine the physics of the Universe with data from astronomical instruments and build theoretical models, such as EFTofLSS (Effective Field Theory of Large-Scale Structure). Fed with observations, these models describe the “cosmic web” statistically and allow its key parameters to be estimated.
Models like EFTofLSS, however, demand a lot of time and computing resources. Since the astronomical datasets at our disposal are growing exponentially, we need ways to lighten the analysis without losing precision. This is why emulators exist: they “imitate” how the models respond, but operate much faster.
Since this is a kind of “shortcut,” what’s the risk of losing accuracy? An international team including, among others, INAF (Italy), The University of Parma (Italy) and the University of Waterloo (Canada) has published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP) a study testing the emulator Effort.jl, which they designed. It shows that Effort.jl delivers essentially the same correctness as the model it imitates—sometimes even finer detail—while running in minutes on a standard laptop instead of a supercomputer.- Journal
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Portable, self-cleaning, electrochromic window towards enhanced solar modulation
International Journal of Extreme ManufacturingPeer-Reviewed Publication
- Journal
- International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing
Designing a sulfur vacancy redox disruptor for photothermoelectric and cascade‑catalytic‑driven cuproptosis–ferroptosis–apoptosis therapy
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Journal CenterPeer-Reviewed Publication
The therapeutic efficacy of cuproptosis, ferroptosis, and apoptosis is hindered by inadequate intracellular copper and iron levels, hypoxia, and elevated glutathione (GSH) expression in tumor cells. Thermoelectric technology is an emerging frontier in medical therapy that aims to achieve efficient thermal and electrical transport characteristics within a narrow thermal range for biological systems. Here, we systematically constructed biodegradable Cu2MnS3-x-PEG/glucose oxidase (MCPG) with sulfur vacancies (SV) using photothermoelectric catalysis (PTEC), photothermal-enhanced enzyme catalysis, and starvation therapy. This triggers GSH consumption and disrupts intracellular redox homeostasis, leading to immunogenic cell death. Under 1064 nm laser irradiation, MCPG enriched with SV, owing to doping, generates a local temperature gradient that activates PTEC and produces toxic reactive oxygen species (ROS). Hydroxyl radicals and oxygen are generated through peroxide and catalase-like processes. Increased oxygen levels alleviate tumor hypoxia, whereas hydrogen peroxide production from glycometabolism provides sufficient ROS for a cascade catalytic reaction, establishing a self-reinforcing positive mechanism. Density functional theory calculations demonstrated that vacancy defects effectively enhanced enzyme catalytic activity. Multimodal imaging-guided synergistic therapy not only damages tumor cells, but also elicits an antitumor immune response to inhibit tumor metastasis. This study offers novel insights into the cuproptosis/ferroptosis/apoptosis pathways of Cu-based PTEC nanozymes.
- Journal
- Nano-Micro Letters