Blog

Thin films of crystalline materials called perovskites provide a promising new way of making inexpensive and efficient solar cells. Now, an international team of researchers has shown a way of flipping a chemical switch that converts one type of perovskite into another—a type that has better thermal stability and is a better light absorber.

A team of researchers led by scientists from the American Museum of Natural History has found that catsharks are not only able to see the bright green biofluorescence they produce, but that they increase contrast of their glowing pattern when deep underwater. The study, conducted with a custom-built “shark-eye” camera that simulates how the shark sees underwater, shows that fluorescence makes catsharks more visible to neighbors of the same species at the depths that they live and may aid in communication between one another

MIT researchers have devised a new set of proteins that can be customized to bind arbitrary RNA sequences, making it possible to image RNA inside living cells, monitor what a particular RNA strand is doing, and even control RNA activity.

A new reef system has been found at the mouth of the Amazon River, the largest river by discharge of water in the world. As large rivers empty into the world’s oceans in areas known as plumes, they typically create gaps in the reef distribution along the tropical shelves—something that makes finding a reef in the Amazon plume an unexpected discovery.

A recent survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 74 percent of Americans think manners and behavior have deteriorated in the United States over the past several decades. A large majority of Americans believe that politicians should be held to a higher standard than the general public, but few think they are living up to that expectation.

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.