About: Ibrar Ayyub

Cities have their own distinct microbial communities but these communities don’t vary much between offices located in the same city, according to a new study. The work, published this week in mSystems, an open access journal from the American Society for Microbiology, offers insight into what drives the composition of microbes in built environments.

Researchers of the Environmental Microbiology Group of the UAB Department of Genetics and Microbiology have developed a paper-based biosensor covered with bacteria to detect water toxicity. This is an innovative, simple and inexpensive biological tool that can detect several contaminants and can be easy to use in economically restricted areas, such as developing countries.

This is the most interesting article to play with LCD. After going through the article, you can create any character/symbol which cannot be created using the ASCII values for example smiley. You can even create small games. Conventionally 16X2 LCD is use to display text or numerical values. It is possible to display special characters, […]

Microcontroller understands only digital language. However, the inputs available from the environment to the microcontroller are mostly analog in nature, i.e., they vary continuously with time. In order to understand the inputs by the digital processor, a device called Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) is used. As the name suggests this peripheral gathers the analog […]

Communication between two entities is important for the information flow to take place. In general the information transport system can be parallel in which the complete byte of data is sent at a time, with each bit having a separate dedicated line or it can be serial where only one communication line is available which […]

This article covers data transmission using 8 bit USART. The readers should have a basic understanding of serial communication and how to receive the serial data output. More  details on these topics  are available on Serial communication using AVR Microcontroller USART. The registers of USART system are already explained in previous article. Before transmitting the […]

Disastrous floods in the Balkans two years ago are likely linked to the temporary slowdown of giant airstreams, scientists found. These wind patterns, circling the globe in the form of huge waves between the Equator and the North Pole, normally move eastwards, but practically stopped for several days then—at the same time, a weather system got stuck over Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia that poured out record amounts of rain.

Epitaxy, or growing crystalline film layers that are templated by a crystalline substrate, is a mainstay of manufacturing transistors and semiconductors. If the material in one deposited layer is the same as the material in the next layer, it can be energetically favorable for strong bonds to form between the highly ordered, perfectly matched layers.

An analysis comparing the individual differences between over 40 strains of Zika virus (30 isolated from humans, 10 from mosquitoes, and 1 from monkeys) has identified significant changes in both amino acid and nucleotide sequences during the past half-century. The data, published April 15 in Cell Host & Microbe, support a strong divergence between the Asian and African lineages as well as human and mosquito isolates of the virus, and will likely be helpful as researchers flush out how a relatively unknown pathogen led to the current outbreak.

A simple but effective sensor for monitoring the respiration rate of individuals has been created. Taking advantage of the hygroscopic character of ordinary paper, scientists at Harvard University have developed an electrical sensor to detect the periodic changes of humidity by breathing in and out.