A Taiwanese team led by NYCU and TSMC turns the interface between a monolayer semiconductor and its gate dielectric into a functional part of the transistor, sidestepping the long-standing trade-off between dielectric thinness and carrier transport.
Read the articleIn rhombohedrally stacked graphene, a team from MIT and Basel describes a family of neighboring superconductors: four characterized in the bare pentalayer, five further regions obtained by simple contact. The three that respond to the field withstand 8.5 T in the plane — dozens of times the limit that ought to destroy them — and one of them appears only at high field.
In more than a million people, ultra-rare variants that switch off the FNIP1 gene come with a favourable lipid profile, a higher share of lean mass and less visceral fat, alongside roughly 60% lower odds of cardiometabolic disease. In mice, by contrast, switching off FNIP1 alone does nothing: it is the whole pathway that has to be cut.
A team at Imperial College has made tobacco and lettuce chloroplasts produce porcine myoglobin — 2.7% and 1.5% of soluble protein. The protein folds correctly, but only about one molecule in three captures its heme. The authors see a possible bottleneck in pigment availability; their own arithmetic also invites a look at how it is inserted.