Science sleuths raise concerns about scores of bioengineering papers - Nature

Engineers introduce a 3D-printed, hybrid aluminum-and-rubber cloaking device that blocks an object’s thermal signature by guiding heat around it, rendering it invisible to infrared cameras. Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. An object doesn’t have to be visible to give away its location. Sometimes, the way it disrupts the flow of heat is enough to reveal that something is hiding there, much to the despair of camouflaged soldiers who have to endure thermal vision drones on the battlefield. Now, engineers have developed a device that can make that thermal signature almost disappear (although sadly it won’t work for infantry).

The Orion Nebula is a large star-forming region visible to the naked eye. Some of the young stars in the nebula are surrounded by disks of gas and dust in which planets form. Radiation from the massive central star, 1 Ori C1 (Theta-1 Orionis C1), gradually strips material from these disks, giving them shapes that resemble tadpoles. The disks are losing mass so rapidly that, given the age of the stars (around 1 million years), they should have disappeared long ago. The large gas shell surrounding the central star poses another puzzle. The star sets the surrounding gas in motion, causing the shell to expand at around 13 kilometers per second (8 miles per second).

"What makes SPRIZ so unexpected is that it uses a familiar mechanism—a tether—to do something different: it connects the two mitochondrial membranes while acting as a rigid pillar that holds them a set distance apart, so the room between them keeps a defined height," explains Dr. Luca Pellegrini, full professor at the University of Ottawa, who led the study. Credit: Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa Mitochondria are the tiny powerpacks that supply most of the energy our cells need. Their ability to generate this energy relies on a distinctive architecture: two membranes, one tucked inside the other, separated by a narrow gap called the intermembrane space (IMS). This tiny space helps sustain the chemistry of energy production, making its organization critical to how these cellular powerpacks function.