Astronomers have discovered a unique stellar system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense neutron star, all packed within a space smaller than Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The closeness of the stars allows the scientists to make the most accurate measurements yet of the system’s complex gravitational interactions, measurements that might resolve one […]
Gear mechanisms, previously thought to only exist in man-made machines, have also evolved in nature, according to scientists who say they have made the first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure. The gears were identified in the hind-leg of juvenile Issus leafhoppers and they bear a remarkable resemblance to the cogs found on […]
New insights into the classical game theory match-up known as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” might help explain the presence of generosity in nature, an inclination that can sometimes seem counter to the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest. Biologists have long been puzzled about why there is so much apparent cooperation, generosity, and altruism, in […]
A new meta-study appearing in Current Directions in Psychological Science reviews research with infants and toddlers, and finds that we aren’t born afraid of spiders and snakes, but we can learn these fears very quickly. One theory about why we fear spiders and snakes is that natural selection may have favored people who stayed away […]
The journal Emerging Infectious Diseases reports the worrying discovery that birds captured in the Arctic tundra are carrying antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The Swedish researchers behind the finding were surprised that antibiotic resistance had spread into what were thought to be relatively pristine ecosystems. Taking samples from 97 birds in northeastern Siberia, northern Alaska, and northern Greenland, […]
The longstanding belief that each of the brain’s 100 billion neurons communicate strictly by a digital code looks to be incorrect. Writing in Nature, Yale neurologist David McCormick reported that communicating brain cells use a mix of analog and digital coding at the same time. “This study reveals that the brain is very sophisticated in […]
A new research facility called the Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) has been created by an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The researchers involved believe that nature can inspire design and engineering solutions that are efficient, practical and sustainable. Associate Professor of Biology and CBID co-director Marc […]
Chemical engineers at Purdue University have shown how to make yeast cells double the activity and boost productivity of a type of enzyme plants need to create important chemicals such as anticancer compounds. The work is related to efforts aimed at developing techniques to use plants and microorganisms as natural factories for producing pharmaceuticals. Such […]
Scientists from Columbia University, IBM and the University of New Orleans today announced a new, three-dimensional designer material assembled from two different types of particles only billionths of a meter across. In the June 26 issue of the journal Nature, the team describes the precision chemistry methods developed to tune the particles’ sizes in increments […]
