KAIST-led chemists filmed azobenzene's first picoseconds with ultrafast X-rays, finding a nitrogen-centred twist behind a switch debated for nearly 50 years. Designers of light-driven materials and molecular machines now have a measured mechanism to work from.
Reality
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An Institute for Basic Science team read more than 1,000 mouse brain transcriptomes from 17 autism lines and found two opposing gene-expression profiles that responded differently to fluoxetine and lithium. In seven lines, sex decided which one.
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Chemists at the Institute for Basic Science mapped products across 960 condition sets of the 135-year-old Biginelli reaction and found a branch that combines seven starting molecules into one bicyclic product.
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An international team converted a century of ultraviolet images of Venus into a laboratory quantity, the absorption coefficient of the liquid inside the cloud droplets, and the value it requires is high enough that only very strong absorbers or very high concentrations qualify.
Reality
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Instead of naming the century-old unknown absorber, a team writing in Astrobiology asked how dark the bulk liquid in Venus's cloud droplets has to be, turning a remote-sensing puzzle into a number a laboratory spectrometer can check.
Reality
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A Nature paper reports direct positional isomerisation of pyridines by nitrogen insertion and deletion, turning what were separate syntheses for each isomer into one starting material.
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A screen of 337 virus genomes found stabilizing elements; one, Pt1, pushed linear mRNA half-life from 7.6 to 23.1 hours by recruiting nuclear poly(A) polymerases in the cytoplasm.
Reality
- Evidence58
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- Insufficient
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives66
- Confidence52