Want to hunt down enemy bacteria? Look at the sugars on the germs' surface where they start building a 'structure' that helps the microbes resist efforts to kill them.
Scientists have determined that the bacterial cell-surface sugar, a polysaccharide called Psl, is anchored on the surface of the bacterium as a helix, providing a structure that encourages cell-to-cell interaction. When multiple bacterial cells join together with the help of such a structure, they form what is called a biofilm, a persistent community of bugs that is able to resist the effects of a human immune response, as well as antibiotic drugs.
Dartmouth researchers have determined that the presence of the rare element osmium is on the rise globally. They trace this increase to the consumption of refined platinum, the primary ingredient in catalytic converters, the equipment commonly installed in cars to reduce smog. A volatile form of osmium is generated during platinum refinement and also during the normal operation of cars, and it gets dispersed globally through the atmosphere.
Thinking your memory will get worse as you get older may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that senior citizens who think older people should perform poorly on tests of memory actually score much worse than seniors who do not buy in to negative stereotypes about aging and memory loss.
If you have recently given a close enough look at the search results that the CDF and DZERO experiments have been producing at a regular pace on the Higgs boson - every six months, that is: for summer and winter conferences - and your exposure to particle physics results is not broad enough, you might have gotten a biased perception of how searches for new particles are performed nowadays.
Fields are alive with the promise of medicine. Consider my list of dozen alkaloids found in nature. They exist in whole plant or its organ(s). Some of these chemical compounds are in minute amounts. For example, vincristine, the cancer chemotherapeutic compound in Catharanthus roseus, occurs at concentrations under 0.0003% on a dry basis. The root of Strychnos nux-vomica contains about 6% strychnine, a pesticide and a former stimulant.[1]
If you suffer from occasional or frequent heartburn, you know who you are. You may avoid eating certain foods, keep an arsenal of antacids beside your bed, and still suffer from pain caused by renegade stomach acid wrecking havoc on your esophagus.
For the 1 in 10 Americans who suffer from “heartburn” or occasional acid reflux, options and medications are plentiful, but for the 19 million Americans who suffer from severe acid reflux symptoms or GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease), medicine simply isn’t enough.
When want to understand something complex, we make something similar but simpler - a model. Models in engineering re-imagine complex structures as sticks, strings, and hinges. Biology uses simpler living systems, like yeast and mice. But plenty of scientific questions defy our tried-and-true modeling strategies. If a system is too complex or too slow for us to accurately simplify, we must wait for a model to present itself.
To ring traditional church bells, a team of human operators pulls ropes that spin the giant bells (some in the multiple tons) and the mechanics of the system impose strict rules on what can be played. Gone entirely is melody, replaced by the idiomatically frenetic and somewhat cacophonous sound of cascading tones played for maximum note density.
Within the two seconds it takes a bell to rotate, the tones are slightly offset so that each rings before any bell sounds twice.
When we emerge from a supermarket laden down with bags and faced with a sea of vehicles, how do we remember where we've parked our car and translate the memory into the correct action to get back there? A paper in PLoS Biology identifies the specific parts of the brain responsible for solving this everyday problem, which could have implications for understanding the functional significance of a prominent brain abnormality observed in neuropsychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia.
