Category: futurism
Researchers discover a massive ceremonial structure of the ancient Mayans using lasers.
Close-up views of glasswing butterflies reveal the secrets behind the insect’s see-through wings: sparse, spindly scales and a waxy coating.
At some point in the next few months, Microsoft will start encouraging people to upgrade to Windows 11. If we’re lucky, the company will have learned from its “Get Windows 10” debacle and will not launch a glorified malware application. Regardless of how the company approaches the topic, however, you can bet we’re all going to get blitzed with advertising one way or another.
But that lovely event/hostage-taking is still in the future. For now, Microsoft would appreciate it if everyone stopped downloading the leaked version of Windows 11 that popped up last week. In the process, the OS developer has confirmed what everybody already knew — Windows 11 is, in fact, an official thing that’s happening.
In ‘Tsunami: The World’s Greatest Waves,’ two scientists chronical hundreds of eyewitness accounts to show the human cost of life at the water’s edge.
Infinite search parameters for Google search engine achieved.
Webmaster Level: Advanced.
Your site’s news feed or pinboard might use infinite scroll —much to your users’ delight! When it comes to delighting Googlebot, however, that can be another story. With infinite scroll, crawlers cannot always emulate manual user behavior—like scrolling or clicking a button to load more items—so they don’t always access all individual items in the feed or gallery. If crawlers can’t access your content, it’s unlikely to surface in search results.
To make sure that search engines can crawl individual items linked from an infinite scroll page, make sure that you or your content management system produces a paginated series (component pages) to go along with your infinite scroll.
The coelacanth was thought to live for about 20 years, but a new study suggests it’s nearer 100.
An absurdly powerful laser can trap an air bubble in a layer of metal, so that it’ll float no matter what.
In the future, Weston would like to see ReFirm become part of the certification. “To not only make sure that you’re shipping the device secure, but that it’s being scanned regularly by this ReFirm firmware technology and you’re keeping the firmware up to date.”
Despite the name, ReFirm might not stay restricted to firmware. Microsoft has static and dynamic analysis tools it can add to the product, which Weston compared to VirusTotal’s frequent updates with new analysis options. “I can keep putting layers of tools in that analysis pipeline. I think this has the opportunity to be a VirusTotal-like product that, rather than looking for malware, is looking for vulnerabilities in an arbitrary object. We’re focused on firmware because that seems like the right application, but it could be VM snapshots or many, many other things.”
There’s good news for fans of the open-source Binwalk tool, too. Microsoft will be investing heavily in that, because it’s already widely used by multiple teams across the company who have feature requests, says Weston: “I think we probably have a few years’ worth of backlog ideas already!”
Alpha-actinin can cross-link actin filaments and anchor them to the Z-disk in sarcomeres. Sarcomeres are a structural unit of myofibril in striated muscle. The FATZ (filamin, α-actinin-and telethonin-binding protein of the Z-disk) protein can interact with α-actinin and other core Z-disk proteins that contribute to myofibril assembly and maintenance. In a new report now on Science Advances, Antonio Sponga and an international research team in Austria, Germany, Russia, Poland and the U.K. detailed the first structure and cellular validation of the α-actinin-2 complex with a Z-disk partner, FATZ-1, to form a conformal ensemble. The FATZ-1 formed a tight fuzzy complex with α-actinin-2 with a proposed interaction mechanism via molecular recognition elements and secondary binding sites. The obtained integrative model revealed a polar architecture of the complex in combination with the FATZ-1 multivalent scaffold function to organize interaction partners and stabilize.
Sarcomere
The contracting muscles can regulate voluntary animal movement and involuntary heart beating, and sarcomeres are the basic contractile units of striated muscle cells. They are composed of arrays of thin (actin) and thick (myosin) filaments that slide past each other during contraction. The Z-disk can form the boundary between adjacent sarcomeres, where anti-parallel actin filaments are anchored. A suitably stable anchoring structure must be generated by the interaction between myosin and actin. The Z-disk can fulfill this role by acting as a mechanical hub and a signaling platform to allow the transmission of tension during contraction and the duration and transmission of information of biomechanical stress. As a result, any mutations that disrupt the Z-disk architecture and function could risk causing skeletal and cardiac dysfunction.