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Facebook announced Friday that it will require any political ads on its platform to state who is paying for the message, and would verify the identity of the payer, in a bid to curb outside election interference.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-facebook-identities-political-ads.html

Researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Georgia have described how the protein that allows strep and staph bacteria to stick to human cells is prepared and packaged. The research, which could facilitate the development of new antibiotics, will appear in the April 6 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-pathogenic-bacteria-sticky-adhesion-protein.html

Suspensions of live bacteria in a viscous liquid do not act as expected when spun at certain speeds and now a team of researchers know why the bacterial aggregation appears to explode when the spinning stops.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-nova-like-explosion-bacteria.html

University of Groningen physicists have induced magnetism in platinum with an electric field created by a paramagnetic ionic liquid. As only the surface of the platinum is affected, this creates a switchable 2-D ferromagnet. The study was published in Science Advances on 6 April.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-d-platinum-magnet.html

U.S. institutions awarded 54,904 research doctorate degrees in 2016, only five fewer than the previous year's record high, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), a federally sponsored annual census of research degree recipients.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-doctorates-awarded-all-time-high.html

Best Buy is warning that some of its customers' payment information may have been compromised in a data breach.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-breach.html