Frustration is usually something best avoided. But for scientists, understanding how “frustrated” systems behave is the key to understanding a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism. In such systems, frustration describes the interacting components when they cannot settle into a state that minimizes […]
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Sex Life Of Bacteria Under The Microscope
The pressures to evolve antibiotic resistance and other new abilities in response to a changing environment, force bacteria to “steal” genetic information from other better-adapted types of bacteria through the bacterial equivalent of sex, known as horizontal gene transfer. This lets the bacteria evolve the networks of chemical reactions that enable them to do new […]