#condensates

P-Body BPoD

Membrane-less compartments within cells known as condensates contain concentrated molecules, and interact but are discrete from each other by virtue of phase-separation. Condensates are emerging as important regulators of cellular biochemistry. This study of condensates using live and super resolution imaging in fruit fly egg production, divulges the formation of a distinct kind of (processing) P-body condensate associated with the membrane of the protein transporting and folding organelle, the endoplasmic reticulum

Read the published research article here

Image captured with Leica Microsystems microscopy

Image from work by Samantha N Milano and colleagues

Department of Biological Sciences, Hunter CollegeCity University of New York New York NY, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in EMBO Reports, December 2024

Scientists have made Bose-Einstein condensates in space for the first time

The general idea when making a BEC is to inject atoms (in the case of CAL, rubidium and potassium) into an ultra-cold chamber to slow them down. A magnetic trap is then created in the chamber with an electrified coil, which is used along with lasers and other tools to move the atoms into a dense cloud. At this point the atoms “kind of blur into one another,” says David Aveline, a physicist at…

Physicists Think We Might Have a New, Exciting Dark Matter Candidate

Something in the Universe is creating more mass than we can detect directly. We know it’s there because of its gravitational effect on the stuff we can detect; but we don’t know what it is, or how it got here.

  We call that invisible mass “dark matter“, and physicists have just identified a particle that could be behind it.

The candidate culprit is a recently discovered subatomic particle…

...ehm, I figure that depends on what kinda kiss??

Uh, I guess. like. if we’re talkin’ about like... a platonic-family-type-kiss or a sloppy-make-out.

Uhm, if we’re talkin’ platonic-like...

Scientists Predict Coreless Vortex in Ultracold Atoms 

Swirling, persistent vortices can be created in superfluid helium. Generally no atoms sit at the eye of these miniature hurricanes. Things might be different in condensates of ultracold atoms. Theorists predict that for some elements a vortex of atoms can be produced which pivots around another sample of atoms at rest in the middle. Such a quantum gimbal has been observed in condensates of two atomic species but never before in a swarm of exclusively one type of atoms in a state of lowest energy.