in Brief

Nathan Danielson

Graphene gets
itself in a fold
AN ANCIENT art form just got
bang up to date. Graphene
sheets of carbon just one atom
thick has been folded like
origami. The technique could be
used to build nano-robots and
tiny, flexible circuits.
A team led by Itai Cohen of
Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York, coated a single layer of
graphene with a layer of silicon
dioxide glass. Where they were
bonded to carbon atoms, the glass
molecules responded differently
depending on temperature, pH
and charge, bending some and
holding others still. These
responses let the team predict
how the graphene would expand
and contract, and thus fold.
This really represents the
limit, says Cohen. Theres not
going to be any way to make the
sheet thinner. The team presented
Newborn neurons viewed for withan unpleasant experience. They then deactivated
the newborn neurons presentin areas of the brain
the work at the American Physical
Society annual meeting in
the first time in live brains responsible for learning and memory using Baltimore, Maryland, this week.
optogenetics, which switches off specific cells with light.
THERE they are! New neurons vital for memory have After this, the mice were unable to tell the difference
been seen in a live brain. The work could aid treatments between the scary and safe cues, becoming fearful
New microbe has a
for anxiety and stress disorders. of them all (Neuron, doi.org/bc7v). It suggests that
Attila Losonczy at Columbia University Medical Center newborn cells do something special that allows animals taste for plastics
in New York and his team implanted a tiny microscope to tell apart and separate memories, says Losonczy.
into the brains of live mice, the brain cells of which An inability to discriminate between similar sensory NATURE has beaten us to it again.
had been modified to make newly made neurons glow. information triggered by different events, such as the A bacterium that breaks down
The mice then ran on a treadmill as the team tweaked sound of a gunshot and a car backfiring, is often seen in and consumes one of the worlds
the surrounding sights, smells and sounds. panic and anxiety disorders such as PTSD. This suggests most problematic pollutants has
Theresearchers paired a small electric shock with that new neurons, or a lack of them, plays a part in such turned up, living off plastic debris.
some cues, so the mice learned to associate these conditions and could guide novel treatments. Kohei Oda of the Kyoto Institute
of Technology in Japan and his
team found Ideonella sakaiensis
Building quantum circuits is childs play A non-quantum computer by analysing microbes on
can be taught to shrink circuits, polyethylene terephthalate (PET)
QUANTUM computers arent based on a technique called but requires a helping hand. samples from the environment.
ready for the big time yet, but you topological error correction, We needto give it a huge amount They hope this will lead to new
could help program their circuits which many researchers are using of examples to learn from, says ways to dispose of plastic, using
and make them a reality by in the quest to create large-scale Devitt. Players solutions to either the bacteria themselves or
playing a game. quantum computers. meQuanics puzzles will form the two enzymes they produce
Simon Devitt of the RIKEN The technique works by this collection of examples. for the job (Science, doi.org/bc8g).
Center for Emergent Matter carving circuits from a 3D grid In the game, circuits appear Large quantities of PET have
Science in Saitama, Japan, and of quantum bits, or qubits. The as3D puzzles. Players aim to accumulated in environments
his colleagues have turned the larger the circuit, the more qubits minimise them using a variety of across the globe, says Oda. His
problem of programming a you need and the more difficult tools to manipulate the circuits team is now trying to engineer a
quantum computer into a game it is to build. The trick is to make without breaking the rules of bacterial strain that is even better
called meQuanics. The game is the circuits as small as possible. theunderlying theory. at gobbling it.

19 March 2016 | NewScientist | 17