Bertocchini and her team attributed the peaks to a breakdown product, ethylene glycol, likely generated by a caterpillar enzyme or an enzyme in its gut microbes (Curr. From that microbe, the scientists plucked two enzymes that degraded PET to its monomers of terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol (Science 2016, DOI: headlines claimed the microbe could help with recycling, but breakdown took six weeks on a small plastic sample, too slow for immediate applications. Yang, who wasn’t involved with the work, pointed out another caveat of the study in a technical comment in Science: The team in Japan worked with low-crystallinity PET film, which worked better for screening purposes but is relatively easy to degrade compared with the higher-crystallinity PET in water bottles and other common products (2016, DOI: Science

This microbe contains PETase and MHETase, two enzymes that depolymerize PET to its monomers (scheme shown).

An open letter to Stewart Butterfield: Why Slack will never replace email
Hello Mr Butterfield,
I’m Dvir Ben Aroya, an entrepreneur who has spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve workplace communications, and now focus on Spike — the first conversational email for teams. However, I must say:
Your goal of replacing email with Slack is in complete conflict with the efficient flow of communication that gets real work done.As-is, Slack’s addictive qualities are making it become the Facebook of work communication — and before it causes more damage to workers’ productivity and well-being, we have to limit its reach. Reader’s response to Slack’s claim to replace email, on Quartz.The best of both worlds — but only the best
The answer is a product designed to take the best of each mode of communication and strip away the bad — from both email and Slack — making sure to bake in efficiency and respect for people’s time at a product level.

In Germany he published forty-odd books but only two of his novels were translated into English during his lifetime: Aus grosser Zeit (Days of Greatness) in 1978 and Hundstage (Dog Days – not to be confused with Günter Grass’s Hundejahre, Dog Years) ten years later. He kept insisting that Germans were victims as well as perpetrators during the Second World War, a position that became less contentious around the turn of the century, with the publication of Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (about the bombing of German cities by the Allies) and Grass’s novel Crabwalk (about the sinking of a German hospital ship by a Russian submarine), but which in an earlier postwar period was associated with the right. So much of Kempowski’s work is taken up with the Second World War, and/or with the history of his family, that Homeland initially looks like a departure: it’s not about his ancestors and it’s set at the time he was writing it, in the late 1980s.

Viruses consist of a short string of DNA or RNA packaged in a protein shell called a capsid, which protects the genomic material and facilitates its insertion into a host cell. Such microscopic geodesic domes quickly became the standard way to represent icosahedral viruses, and, for a while, it seemed that Caspar and Klug had solved the problem. Twarock’s tilings therefore applied to a wider range of viruses, including the polyomaviruses and papillomaviruses that had evaded Caspar and Klug’s classification.

In their first week of repeated marathons, the runners burned about 6,200 calories a day on average, a steep increase over their typical energy expenditure from the week before — and about what would be expected, based on their new level of activity. The researchers found that in any event that lasted longer than about 12 hours, participants’ energy expenditure tended to increase substantially and then, over time, decline, until it plateaued at somewhere near two and a half times their everyday, resting metabolic rate. Our bodies seem somehow to have become capable of recognizing when we are in danger of breaching the barrier beyond which we cannot easily replenish lost energy — about two and a half times our basic metabolic rate, according to Herman Pontzer, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, who oversaw the new study with John Speakman and others.

The day before the raid, police separately raided the home of a journalist at the Sunday Telegraph, one of Australia’s bestselling papers, in connection with a story about secret plans to expand the state’s surveillance powers to include snooping on people’s e-mails, text messages and bank accounts. Last year a former spy, known as Witness , and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, were charged for (years ago) exposing Australia’s bugging of the government of Timor-Leste during sensitive negotiations over rights to offshore oil and gas. Mr McBride, whose trial is due to start in a couple of weeks (and whose obstetrician father is credited with exposing the side-effects of thalidomide, a drug for morning sickness that caused babies to be born with deformed limbs), says the government is using the security apparatus “to fight its own people now”.

If so, what flavour of Basic? (PowerBasic, PureBasic, VB.NET, or some custom flavour) What are your reasons for using Basic? How do other developers react when you tell them you program in Basic?

The use of Bitcoin causes around 22 megatons in CO2 emissions annually – comparable to the total emissions of cities such as Hamburg or Las Vegas. For their study, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) analyzed such data as the IPO filings of hardware manufacturers and the IP addresses of Bitcoin “miners”. Several studies have attempted to quantify the CO2 emissions caused by Bitcoin mining.

For a large part of human prehistory, people around the world practised trepanation: a crude surgical procedure that involves forming a hole in the skull of a living person by either drilling, cutting or scraping away layers of bone with a sharp implement. Many trepanned skulls show signs of cranial injuries or neurological diseases, often in the same region of the skull where the trepanation hole was made. Now Gresky, Batieva and other archaeologists have teamed up to describe all 12 of the obelion trepanations from Southern Russia.

He was particularly interested in the global Black experience, and his collection included works by and about Black people in the Caribbean and South and Central America; rare materials in Latin from the early modern period; and works in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and many African languages, including Swahili, Kikuyu, Zulu, Yoruba, Vai, Ewe, Luganda, Ga, Sotho, Amharic, Hausa, Xhosa, and Luo. Porter was concerned about assigning value to the materials she collected—their intellectual and political value, certainly, but also their monetary value, since at the time other libraries had no expertise in pricing works by Black authors. As Thomas C. Battle writes in a 1988 essay on the history of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, [5] the breadth of the two collections showed the Howard librarians that “no American library had a suitable classification scheme for Black materials.”