Transistors that control electron flow are the foundation of electronic gadgets, but human bodies and all other living things send signals and perform “work” using ions or protons. Seamlessly interfacing these biologic and electronic realms could now become a reality with the development of a new type of transistor that controls proton – rather than […]
Traditionally associated with boredom, very little research has been done to uncover the biological function of yawning. Now, Princeton researchers propose that yawning is triggered by increases in brain temperature and its function is to cool the brain. Their study, published in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, is the first to show that yawning frequency in […]
Concerns about the biological safety of nanotechnology are increasing voiced by the medical community, but Euro researchers say that their experiments with rats show that the brain can effectively deal with any bits of nanowaste that might find their way there. Their work appears in the journal Nano Letters. The researchers, from Lund University in […]
Scientists have been pondering the fundamental creative force behind life on Earth for millennia, and now, thanks to almost a year’s worth of number-crunching on a supercomputer, Rice University physicist and bioengineer Michael Deem thinks he has the answer: a changing environment may organize the structure of genetic information itself. “Our results suggest that the […]
British researchers at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society today announced a new kind of “biofuel cell” that produces electricity from ordinary air mixed with small amounts of hydrogen. Because the new cell uses bacterial enzymes rather than platinum as a catalyst, it offers a much less expensive path to the much-hyped hydrogen […]
New York University researchers have developed a model of the intra-cellular mammalian biological clock that reveals how the rapid interaction of molecules with DNA produces reliable 24-hour rhythms. They also found that without the inherent randomness of molecular interactions within a cell, biological rhythms may dampen over time. In research appearing in theProceedings of the […]
Researchers at the University of Southern California say malnutrition in the first few years of life leads to antisocial and aggressive behavior throughout childhood and late adolescence. “These are the first findings to show that malnutrition in the early postnatal years is associated with behavior problems through age 17,” said Jianghong Liu, lead author of […]
