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When you can turn your phone into a pocket-sized scanner you know you’re in business, a capability that is quite useful for anyone who needs to walk in and out of collaborative meetings to seed and complete projects. Written or even keyboarded notes of meeting “minutes” pale when compared to an actual saved picture of the whiteboard tale of proceedings, where arguments and counter-arguments from the group resulted in ideas planted, cross-linked with other ideas, expanded, redirected into action steps, and so on.

A proposed pathway to construct quantum computers may be the outcome of research by a University of Oklahoma physics team that has created a new molecule based on the interaction between a highly-excited type of atom known as a Rydberg atom and a ground-state atom. A unique property of the molecule is the large permanent dipole moment, which reacts with an electric field much like a bar magnet reacts with a magnetic field.

By modifying the CRISPR-Cas genome editing system, Whitehead Institute researchers are now able to manipulate Candida albicans’ genome systematically—an approach that could help identify novel targets for therapies against this serious pathogen for which there are a limited number of anti-fungal agents.

We’d like to believe that our opinions are nuanced, balanced, high-minded, wise and above all, unique, but alas they are not—or so says Twitter. Most often, those we engage with on the popular social media site are like-minded, and the ensuing electronic maelstrom of 140-character missives most often serves to reinforce, pulling us and them further along in the direction we were already trending toward—so that at the end of the day, we all tweet to the converted.

The natural, untreated cotton in tampons readily absorbs chemicals commonly used in toilet paper, laundry detergents and shampoos. These chemicals – known as optical brighteners -are used to enhance whites and brighten colours, and show up under ultra-violet (UV) light, a phenomenon often seen in glowing t-shirts under certain lighting in bars and clubs.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), writing about GPS, said: “The military relies heavily on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), but GPS access is easily blocked by methods such as jamming. In addition, many environments in which our military operates (inside buildings, in urban canyons, under dense foliage, underwater, and underground) have limited or no GPS access.” This raises the questions of what DARPA plans as a step up

Scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Institutes of Health have devised and demonstrated a new, shape-shifting probe, about one-hundredth as wide as a human hair, which is capable of sensitive, high-resolution remote biological sensing that is not possible with current technology.

The widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has prompted many bacteria to mutate, an adaptation that often renders the drugs useless. The increasing threat of resistance worries infectious disease experts who fear that the era of public health successes brought by the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s is seriously eroding, or soon even may be at an end.

One of the dominant theories of our evolution is that our genus, Homo, evolved from small-bodied early humans to become the taller, heavier and longer legged Homo erectus that was able to migrate beyond Africa and colonise Eurasia. While we know that small-bodied Homo erectus – averaging less than five foot (152cm) and under 50kg – were living in Georgia in southern Europe by 1.77 million years ago, the timing and geographic origin of the larger body size that we associate with modern humans has, until now, remained unresolved.

Los Alamos National Laboratory mechanical and thermal engineering researchers’ efforts to solve the complex problem of how ocean currents affect the infrastructure of floating oilrigs and their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulations received recognition from ANSYS Inc., a company that provides computer-based engineering simulation capabilities.