“Difficult” bacteria has chainmail to protect it from antibiotics.
Science News reveals the secret that makes Clostridium difficile infections so tough to treat – an outer barrier called “the S layer” that protects the […]
microbiology
Living robots – “xenobots” – can reproduce themselves.
Science News is not panicking at all about the prospect of robots that can replicate copies of themselves that can then replicate copies of themselves: […]
Planning for a funeral on Mars.
Discover magazine discusses an unusual problem we haven’t had to face yet. How will Mars colonists handle their first funerals in an environment where human […]
We can grow brain tissue in a $5 microchip. (And it’s reusable.)
New Scientist reveals the cost of building a brain from scratch has just gone way, WAY down: The device, dubbed a “microfluidic bioreactor”, is a […]
“Xenobots” are tiny robots made from living cells – self-healing swarms that can form bodies… and memories.
Eurekalert introduces the next generation of living robots. Tufts University biologists and computer scientists have created a second generation of tiny, biological machines they’re calling […]
Science Art: Coronavirus spike protein structure, by David Veesler, University of Washington,2016
Click to embiggen This is not an alien forest. It is also not a picture of the COVID19 virus. It’s an illustration from 2016 of […]
Science Art: Hefezellen
An image of yeast, originally made by NASA (though the context is now unclear, since the web page Wikimedia Commons sourced the photo from no […]
Scientists have woken up 100-million-year-old microbes.
BBC is not intimidating us all with news that researchers with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology have treated a colony of dormant […]
Turning the virus into a videogame.
Ireland’s RTÉ Brainstorm reveals how researchers are turning ordinary personal computers into a virus-killing supercomputer and recruiting gamers to solve puzzles that figure out COVID-19 […]
Science Art: Aerial image and satellite derived image of Florida lakes, by Richard P. Stumpf, U.S. Geological Survey.
Click to embiggen From the USGS: This image is a cropped rendition of two aerial images that demonstrate satellite-derived cyanobacteria concentrations in surface waters from […]
Science Art: Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus particles (orange) found near the periphery of an infected cell (green).
Click to embiggen A snapshot of SARS virus particles – the coronavirus responsible for Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome – taken at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the […]
Possible pangolin exoneration as coronavirus source.
Fans of the scaly anteater otherwise known as the pangolin can take heart in Nature‘s latest report, that might not have been the source of […]
A salmon parasite can survive without oxygen, without mitochondria, and with a lot of mystery.
Science News reports on the humble jellyfish-relative that lives in the bodies of Pacific salmon and undersea worms, and gets along fine without any mitochondria […]
Living concrete photosynthesizes, reproduces itself – thanks to gelatin..
The New York Times covers a building material that could be a boon to the planet, a bacteria-enriched concrete that cleans the air and grows […]
Gut bacteria can help the brain conquer fear; antibiotics can make PTSD recovery harder.
Science magazine explores the gut-brain connection further with a study that finds gut bacteria can help us get over our fear responses… unless antibiotics have […]