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+13 +1
Newly Discovered Bacterial Crystals Are a Biophysics Mystery
Thiovulum majus is already a strange-enough form of bacteria...
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+13 +1
Energetic bacteria form frictionless superfluids
Microbe-filled solutions could be repurposed as small motors under certain conditions.
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+20 +1
4 Ways To Cook A Burger That's Safe To Eat But Doesn't Taste Like Leather
For many beef buffs, the idea of a hamburger cooked anything beyond medium rare is blasphemous. Unfortunately, not cooking your ground beef to at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit puts you at risk ingesting bacteria like E. coli or enterococcus, including some strains that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. But does cooking beef to a safe temperature mean you’re doomed to a dry, tasteless hockey puck sandwich?
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+42 +1
Man injects himself with 3.5 million year old bacteria in quest for eternal life
People do some pretty crazy stuff in the quest for eternal life. Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon tromped around the Caribbean and parts of Florida in a quest for the Fountain of Youth. The Nazi’s tried to kill Indy and his dad in their quest for the Holy Grail. Now, there’s a scientist in Russia who has injected himself with a 3.5 million year old bacteria in his quest for eternal life, or he’s auditioning to be the next villain on Stan Lee’s World of Heroes.
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+27 +1
The Future of Dieting Is Personalized Algorithms Based on Your Gut Bacteria
Healthy-eating plans of the future may be tailored to your own gut bacteria.
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+43 +1
3D printed teeth to keep your mouth free of bacteria
Lost a tooth? Soon your dentist could print you another – and it’ll help keep your mouth clean, too. Getting fitted for a false tooth or other dental treatment tends to involve a mouthful of foul-tasting gunk and plaster casts. But now dentists are moving to high-tech digital scanning and 3D printing. That switch opens the door to more advanced materials that could improve your oral hygiene.
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+32 +1
Plague in humans 'twice as old' but didn't begin as flea-borne, ancient DNA reveals
New research using ancient DNA has revealed that plague has been endemic in human populations for more than twice as long as previously thought, and that the ancestral plague would have been predominantly spread by human-to-human contact—until genetic mutations allowed Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), the bacteria that causes plague, to survive in the gut of fleas.
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+27 +1
A futuristic 'garden' that lets you grow food in your home just raised $230,000 on Kickstarter in 4 days
Imagine if you could grow organic fruits and vegetables right inside your home, year-round? That's what a startup called Grove wants to help you do with its Ecosystem, which they describe as "an intelligent, in-home garden." Grove Labs, a startup based in Sommerville, Massachusetts, was founded by two MIT students who wanted to give people the ability to grow their own food, regardless of their location or season.
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+20 +1
What Your Dust Says About You
Dust talks. That clump of gray fuzz hiding under the couch may look dull, but it contains multitudes: tiny errant crumbs of toast, microscopic fibres from a winter coat, fragments of dead leaves, dog dander, sidewalk grit, sloughed-off skin cells, grime-loving bacteria. “Each bit of dust is a microhistory of your life,” Rob Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina State University, told me recently. For the past four years, Dunn and two of his colleagues—Noah Fierer...
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+39 +1
Antibiotic resistance: World on cusp of 'post-antibiotic era'
The world is on the cusp of a "post-antibiotic era", scientists have warned after finding bacteria resistant to drugs used when all other treatments have failed. They identified bacteria able to shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - in patients and livestock in China. They said that resistance would spread around the world and raised the spectre of untreatable infections.
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+27 +1
Superbugs breach final antibiotic line of defence
Superbugs thought to have spread from animals have smashed through the last line in antibiotic defences and now pose a global threat, scientists say. Researchers identified a gene that makes infectious bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E.coli) highly resistant to polymyxins, the last group of antibiotics left after all others have failed. The discovery in China, described as “extremely worrying” by one scientist, suggests the gene can easily be...
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+15 +1
How a Jellyfish-Obsessed Engineer Upended Our Understanding of Swimming
John Dabiri has shown that seemingly simple animals are masters of water currents. By Ed Yong.
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+41 +1
Meet the Scientist Who Injected Himself with 3.5 Million-Year-Old Bacteria
Anatoli Brouchkov is a soft-spoken guy with silver hair, and when he lets out a reserved chuckle, his eyes light up like he was belly laughing. If you met him on the street, you’d never guess that he once injected himself with a 3.5 million-year-old strain of bacteria, just to see what would happen. When I spoke with him at VICE’s Toronto office in October, the permafrost scientist—also known as a geocryologist, currently stationed at Moscow State University...
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+49 +1
Drug resistance deadlier than cancer by 2050: Study
Infections resistant to medicines will kill more people per year than cancer by 2050, and cost the world $100 trillion annually, according to a U.K. government-backed report led by Jim O'Neill, the well-known former Goldman Sachs economist. The wide-ranging study, called the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, was commissioned by the U.K. government earlier this year amid growing concerns about drug-resistant "superbugs", including new strains of E. coli, malaria and tuberculosis.
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+43 +1
Tomorrow’s Heart Drugs Might Target Gut Microbes
If your cholesterol levels are high, your doctor might prescribe you a statin, a drug that blocks one of the enzymes involved in creating cholesterol. But in the future, she might also prescribe a second drug that technically doesn’t target your body at all. Instead, it would manipulate the microbes in your gut. Each of us is home to trillions of bacteria and other microbes—a teeming mass collectively known as the microbiome.
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+11 +1
The physics of life
From flocking birds to swarming molecules, physicists are seeking to understand 'active matter' — and looking for a fundamental theory of the living world. By Gabriel Popkin.
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+20 +1
Drug-Resistant Bacteria Is No Match For…Clay From Canada?
Antibiotic resistant bacteria pose a serious threat to public health, often infecting vulnerable populations like hospital patients. But researchers in British Columbia may have found a solution that was hiding just below their feet all along: clay. Mineral Canadian clay exhibits antibacterial activity against a group of pathogens that are highly resistant to antibiotics, according to new research from the University of British Columbia.
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+19 +1
Human Brain’s Bizarre Folding Pattern Re-Created in a Vat
Scientists have discovered exactly how the human brain gets its crinkly, wrinkly appearance in utero. By Tia Ghose.
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+46 +1
Inner Earth Is Teeming With Exotic Forms of Life
More than a mile below the surface, our planet supports diverse creatures that could give us clues about life across the solar system. By Sandeep Ravindran.
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+27 +1
Electron microscope reveals bacteria motor parts in incredible unprecedented detail
A new study of the exotic “motors” that bacteria use to swim reveals details of how they “swim” that may make it possible to design specific drugs that sabotage the flagella (tails) in targeted bacterial species. Using a newly installed high-powered electron microscope, researchers at Imperial College London, led by Morgan Beeby, PhD from the Department of Life Sciences, has been able visualize these motors in unprecedented detail.
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