We have beneficial bacteria because of symbiosis: the success of the host determines the survival and spread of the microbe. But if bacteria grow too much they may become deadly. In a new study, a research team from Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia found that a single genomic change can turn beneficial bacteria into pathogenic bacteria, by boosting bacterial density inside the host.

Ewa Chrostek and Luis Teixeira studied the symbiosis between a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) and the bacterium Wolbachia to answer how benign bacteria become pathogenic. Wolbachia is present in most insect species and protects some of them against viruses, including the dengue fever virus.

If you are not inclined to be faithful and your partner is not buying into your claim of sex addiction, psychologists may have a better alternative: genetics.

They made their determination by analyzing individual attitudes relating to non-committed sex and the length of the ring finger compared to the index finger. The questions were for 575 North American and British people about non-committed sex. The psychologists then measured photocopies of the right hands of 1,314 British people.

The link between volcanism and the formation of copper ore could lead to discovery of new copper deposits.

Copper has been in use for 6,000 years and it shows no signs of slowing down. The average home has about a hundred pounds of it and we are going to have more people and homes, not fewer. Volcanoes may be the answer.
 

Is it possible to teach intelligence? If so, debates about success being related to economic redistribution go out the window and all kids can can be taught the problem-solving skills that have been the metric for 'intelligence' over the last century.

The basis of general problem solving is the ability to use strategies acquired in one area to understand a wide range of other tasks. It's more than facts, though unfortunately facts are what international standardized tests - the kinds American kids are the middle of the pack in - focus us. American kids are instead taught how to think and that is the better way to go, because facts are now widely available thanks to technology. It is not longer a mark of intelligence to be able to recite things from memory.

A nonflammable electrolyte may bring us safer lithium-ion batteries. 

“With current lithium batteries safety is engineered through the battery management system,” says Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Nitash Balsara, co-founder of Blue Current, a startup company to further develop their invention. “Although they are generally considered safe, you still have an electrolyte in the battery that is flammable, and every so often something might go wrong. We want to take that anxiety out of the battery.”

By combining experimental data from X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, cryoelectron microscopy and lipidomics (the study of cellular lipid networks), researchers at the University of Oxford have built a complete model of the outer envelope of an influenza A virion for the first time. The approach, known as a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation, has allowed them to generate trajectories at different temperatures and lipid compositions - revealing various characteristics about the membrane components that may help scientists better understand how the virus survives in the wild or find new ways to combat it.