People with home-brewed beer rigs and backyard distilleries already know how to employ yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. - they soon might be able to turn sugar-fed yeast into a microbial factory for producing morphine and potentially other drugs, including antibiotics and anti-cancer therapeutics. 

It might be the age of home-brewed pharmaceuticals, DIY Bio taken to the next level.

Do we hear sounds as they are, or do our expectations about what we are going to hear shape the way sound is processed? 

Through the use of computational neuroscience models, Bournemouth University’s Dr. Emili Balaguer-Ballester and colleagues are trying to map the way that the brain processes sound.

Light-emitting diodes are the future, and will quickly bypass government-mandated and subsidized compact fluorescent bulbs and the prospect of wearing a Haz-Mat suit if you break one. Why be limited to bulbs, though?

Why not a light-emitting fork? 

Physicist Amir Asadpoordarvish of Umeå University in Sweden did just that, using new light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs) sprayed onto a substrate that emit light using the current from an ordinary battery. A LEC is a solid-state thin-film device, which comprises an active material sandwiched between a cathode and an anode as its key constituent parts. To-date they have been fabricated on heavy, rigid parts.

A new study suggests that bread from certain wheat varieties have differentiated sensory properties and that could mean customized breeding for more personalized food in the future.

A research group at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) has developed the sensory profile of five different wheat varieties -three bread wheat (Triticum aestivum ssp. vulgare L.) and two spelt wheat (T. aestivum ssp. spelta) and has found significant differences among them. 

Investigators found that nearly half of the 50 chicken meat samples purchased from supermarkets, street markets, and butchers in Austria contained viruses that are capable of transferring antibiotic resistance genes from one bacterium to another - or from one species to another. 

"Our work suggests that such transfer could spread antibiotic resistance in environments such as food production units and hospitals and clinics," said corresponding author Friederike Hilbert, DVM.  

The United States remains mired in an economic downturn, with over 90 million unemployed and many of the employed making less than they made before 2009. The knock-on effects of the economic downturn have been explored in economy and psychology. Now researchers are examining the effects of unemployment on an even darker subject - cancer mortality.

One would think that dealing with unemployment was challenge enough. But according to the latest research published in ecancermedicalscience, rises in unemployment are associated with significant increases in prostate cancer mortality.