Virtually all of your gadgets tote lithium ion batteries—but while they’re the best you can hope for at the moment, new engineering means that pure lithium batteries are now a possibility , and they could double the life of your phone. Read more…
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A New Pure Lithium Battery Could Double Your Phone’s Life
Over a century and a half ago, Charles Darwin first described the remarkable adhesive capabilities of barnacles. He couldn’t figure out how their natural superglue worked, though. And it took until now to finally unlock the barnacle glue’s mysteries . Read more…
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After 150 Years, Scientists Finally Know How Barnacle Glue Works
Rambo Tribble writes Researchers in Britain are reporting that they have found a way to prevent bacteria from forming the “wall” that prevents antibiotics from attacking them. “It is a very significant breakthrough, ” said Professor Changjiang Dong, from the University of East Anglia’s (UAE) Norwich Medical School. “This is really important because drug-resistant bacteria is a global health problem. Many current antibiotics are becoming useless, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Many bacteria build up an outer defence which is important for their survival and drug resistance. We have found a way to stop that happening, ” he added. This research provides the platform for urgently-needed new generation drugs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Find "Achilles Heel" of Drug Resistant Bacteria
A new research paper just published in the scientific journal Plos One brings us new fuel for nightmares: Spiders not only eat other insects but also kill and eat fish often much larger than them. And it’s not only one or two species, but many species at a global scale. Read more…
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Scientists discover that spiders kill and eat fish too
In the days of the Soviet Union, western antibiotics couldn’t make it past the Iron Curtain. So Eastern Bloc doctors figured out how to use viruses to kill the bacteria infecting their patients. Now, with antibiotic-resistant bacteria vexing modern medicine, that eerie yet effective method might come our way. In post-antibiotic world, infection is cure! Read more…
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Soviet Doctors Cured Infections With Viruses, and Soon Yours Might Too
There’s no denying that graphene is a wonderful material —strong, flexible, and highly conductive—but it’s taking a long time to become a commercial reality. Now, scientists working with a material called cadmium arsenide believe it offers many of the same benefits—but could actually be far easier to use in the real world. Read more…
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Cadmium Arsenide: A 3D Alternative to Graphene That’s Way More Useful
Why does the zebra have stripes? It’s not a riddle — scientists say they’ve actually found an answer. And no, it’s not camouflage for hiding under a slatted roof. The stripes actually serve as an insect repellent. Read more…
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We Finally Know Why Zebras Have Stripes
Despite the warm wood and cheery red accents, Smitten Ice Cream can feel a bit like a mad scientist’s shop. There’s the industrial-sized tank of liquid nitrogen that greets you inside the entrance of its new flagship location in Oakland. And there’s the billowing clouds of nitrogen when the stainless steel ice cream machines churn out personalized scoops to order. Read more…
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The Futuristic Liquid Nitrogen Machine That Makes Ice Cream To Order
Bennett Haselton writes with a bit of online detective work done with a little help from some (internet-distributed) friends: “A website that was temporarily inaccessible on my Comcast Internet connection (but accessible to my friends on other providers) led me to investigate further. Using a perl script, I found a sampling of websites that were inaccessible on Comcast (hostnames not resolving on DNS) but were working on other networks. Then I used Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay volunteers 25 cents apiece to check if they could access the website, and confirmed that (most) Comcast users were blocked from accessing it while users on other providers were not. The number of individual websites similarly inaccessible on Comcast could potentially be in the millions.” Read on for the details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Crowdsourcing Confirms: Websites Inaccessible on Comcast
When you’re working with tiny nanoparticles, you need extremely delicate tools. Like, say, tweezers that can manipulate particles 1, 000 times thinner than a human hair without physically touching them. That’s exactly what researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences have come up with: optical nanotweezers that use light to move tiny particles in three dimensions . It’s not sci-fi anymore. Read more…
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World’s Tiniest Tweezers Grab Nanoparticles Using Nothing But Light