Blog

Liquid crystals combine such contradictory features as the chaos of liquid molecules, and the ordering characteristics of crystals. Thanks to an innovative application of antimatter, it has been demonstrated at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow that the structures formed by certain molecules of liquid crystals must in fact be different than previously thought.

Phone calls and text messages reach you wherever you are because your phone has a unique identifying number that sets you apart from everybody else on the network. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using a similar principle to track cells being sorted on microfluidic chips.

Analysis of hairs from muskoxen in the Arctic tundra indicates they had limited amounts of forage available and relied heavily on body stores during snow-heavy winters, according to a study published April 20, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jesper Bruun Mosbacher from the Arctic Research Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, and colleagues.

The 13-million-year-old fossils of an extinct crocodylian, named ‘the storyteller,’ suggest that South American and Indian species evolved separately to acquire protruding, ‘telescoped’ eyes for river-dwelling, according to a study published April 20, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi from the University de Montpellier, France, and colleagues.

Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding will allow them to cut off the microbes’ ability to survive what doctors and nature can throw at them.

In a new paper published in Nature Chemistry, Dr. Lingbing Kong in Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry takes an in-depth look at capsular polysaccharides, or ‘sugar armour’ – the outermost layer of bacteria that provides a key defensive shield for pathogens (including against antibiotics).

New research on male Barbary macaques indicates that these primates have a flexible metabolic physiology, which help them survive by changing the speed of chemical reactions within their bodies, and consequently levels of energy, depending on temperature and availability of food.

Solar flares are intense bursts of light from the sun. They are created when complicated magnetic fields suddenly and explosively rearrange themselves, converting magnetic energy into light through a process called magnetic reconnection – at least, that’s the theory, because the signatures of this process are hard to detect

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.