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Scientists finally crack nature’s most common chemical bond | College of Chemistry (berkeley.edu)

Illustration: A catalyst (center) based on iridium (blue ball) can snip a hydrogen atom (white balls) off a terminal methyl group (upper and lower left) to add a boron-oxygen compound (pink and red) that is easily swapped out for more complicated chemical groups. The reaction works on simple hydrocarbon chains (top reaction) or more complicated carbon compounds (bottom reaction). The exquisite selectivity of this catalytic reaction is due to the methyl group (yellow) that has been added to the iridium catalyst. The black balls are carbon atoms; red is oxygen; pink is boron. UC Berkeley image by John Hartwig.

The most common chemical bond in the living world — that between carbon and hydrogen — has long resisted attempts by chemists to crack it open, thwarting efforts to add new bells and whistles to old carbon-based molecules.

Scientists uncover a critical component that helps killifish regenerate their fins

The findings are a step toward closing the gap on how we could one day deploy regenerative medicine in humans | Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Spontaneous injuries like the loss of a limb or damage to the spinal cord are impossible for humans to repair. Yet, some animals have an extraordinary capacity to regenerate after injury, a response that requires a precise sequence of cellular events. Now, new research from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research has unveiled a critical timing factor—specifically how long cells actively respond to injury—involved in regulating regeneration.

A recent study published in iScience on September 20, 2024, sought to understand exactly how an organism knows how much tissue has been lost post-injury. Led by former Predoctoral Researcher Augusto Ortega Granillo, Ph.D., in the lab of Stowers President and Chief Scientific Officer Alejandro Sánchez…

First neutrinos detected at Fermilab short-baseline detector

Scientists working on the Short-Baseline Near Detector at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have identified the detector’s first neutrino interactions.

Display of a candidate muon neutrino interaction observed by the Short-Baseline Near Detector. When a neutrino enters SBND and interacts with an argon nucleus, it creates a spray of charged particles that the detector records. Physicists can then work backwards from these secondary particles to where the neutrino interaction occurred. Credit: SBND collaboration

The SBND collaboration has been planning, prototyping and constructing the detector for nearly a decade. And, after a few-months-long process of carefully turning on each of the detector subsystems, the moment they’d all been waiting for finally arrived.

“It isn’t every day that a detector sees its first neutrinos,” said David Schmitz, co-spokesperson for the SBND collaboration and associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago. “We’ve all spent years…