No need to say goodbye to the print book. Amy Johansson/Shutterstock

By Andrew Prescott, King's College London

“Analog” and “digital” are the two polar opposites of our modern world.

The word “analog” has become our catch-all term for what we see as slow, one-way and limited in functional possibilities; while “digital” is our synonym for the dynamic, interactive and fluid.

Analog is old; digital new. Paper has always been the epitome of the analogue: a physical medium which can receive, present and preserve information but otherwise remains static and fixed.

The structure of an asymmetrical ABC transporter complex has been determined with the aid of a high-resolution cryo-electron microscope.

ABC transporters cause bacteria and other pathogens to become resistant to antibiotics. They can also help cancer cells to defend themselves against cytostatic agents and thus determine whether chemotherapy will succeed.   

"ABC transporters causes diseases such as cystic fibrosis, while on the other hand they are responsible for the immune system recognising infected cells or cancer cells," explains Professor Robert Tampé from the Institute for Biochemistry at the Goethe University. 

As both a word and an idea, 'medieval' carries centuries of connotation of a murky and brutal pre-scientific age. Swanson Scott/US Fish&Wildlife Service 

By Louise D'Arcens, University of Wollongong and Clare Monagle, Monash University

Like coffee but your liberal guilt won't let you enjoy it if the energy to heat the water might have come from natural gas or nuclear energy?

There may be hope for the future. Researchers at Lancaster University have used a Raspberry Pi to determine the optimum time for a cup of tea in terms of impact on the environment - it only allows a kettle to boil when the University’s wind turbine is producing electricity. Windy Brew is the brainchild of Dr. Will Simm, Dr. Peter Newman, Dr. Maria Angela Ferrario and Dr. Stephen Forshaw.

It envisions a future where man does not reshape nature, but where we are hostage to it. 

via: The Telegraph

By Jane Palmer, Genetic Literacy Project

Sometimes I think I’ve outsourced my consciousness to Google. Can’t remember something? Google it. Want to remember something? Google Doc it. Want to get noticed? Get on Google News. If Google ever does pull the plug it will take my career, my social life and my memories leaving me a mere shell of an intelligence thinking human being, such is my sad dependent state.

It's common sense that if you have ne mess and add another mess, you have created an even bigger mess.

But in arcane statistics, economics and social science, a bigger mess can lead to more order - a concept known as antifragility. 

In a paper published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, researchers found a counterintuitive interplay between two different types of disorder. One is thermodynamic disorder, or entropy. The other is the structural disorder—defects in an idealized system that can change its properties.

It's hard to have our steak and eat it too. Red meat was once implicated in a wave of studies and linked to heart disease and other maladies, before being absolved.

But the microbiome and the surge in advertising for probiotics to promote 'healthy' gut bacteria has implicated red meat again - this time by correlating a nutrient that the authors say is changed by gut bacteria into an atherosclerosis-causing metabolite, which means hardening of the arteries.