A toxin dangerous to humans may help E. coli fend off aquatic predators, enabling strains of E. coli that produce the toxin to survive longer in lake water than benign counterparts, a new study has found. Read more »
New technology is paving the way for low-cost electronic devices that work in direct contact with living tissue inside the body. Read more »
Scientists have reconstructed the genome of medieval strains of the pathogen responsible for leprosy by exhuming centuries-old human graves to investigate why the incidence of leprosy decreased after the Middle Ages. Read more »
Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is generating key medical discoveries at a rate that far exceeds our ability to translate them into robust clinical assays. New enzyme-free, digital, highly multiplexed gene-expression technology (eg, the nCounter platform by NanoString) has the three key characteristics required to accelerate translation of genomic discoveries into robust clinical assays. Read more »
In 2009, the Australian Government committed $120 million to the purchase of a new research vessel for the Marine National Facility, dubbed the RV Investigator. On 31 January 2012, construction on the vessel began in Singapore. To coincide with World Oceans Day on 8 June, a time-lapse video showing its progress so far has been released. Read more »
On-the-spot tests for environmental toxins, medical diagnostics, food safety and more can now be performed on smartphones. Read more »
Two new optical techniques show promise for counting individual viruses outside the laboratory. Read more »
A multinational team of researchers has identified genetic markers that predict educational attainment by pooling data from more than 125,000 individuals in Australia, the US and 13 western European countries. Read more »
People with high IQ scores aren’t just more intelligent - they also process sensory information differently. Read more »
Over a century ago, the HMS Challenger set out on the world’s first global scientific survey of life beneath the ocean surface. Now, researchers at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) have used this data to attribute the ocean’s rising temperature to human-produced global warming. Read more »
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health report they have discovered in mouse studies that a small molecule released in the spinal cord triggers a process that is later experienced in the brain as the sensation of itch. Read more »
NASA is looking for ideas that it can use to transform future aerospace missions, enable new capabilities or significantly alter current approaches to launching, building and operating aerospace systems - and it is offering $500,000 over two years to further analyse and develop the innovative concepts. Read more »
Academic researchers have found that breathing motor vehicle emissions triggers a change in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, altering its cardiovascular protective qualities so that it actually contributes to clogged arteries. Read more »
The brain acts as a timekeeper for each cell’s 24-hour body clock, keeping this clock in sync with the world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods and more. But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brain cells of people with depression, meaning they operate out of sync with the usual ingrained daily cycle. Read more »
Researchers have shown in a mouse model that infection with roundworms (nematodes) can not only combat obesity but ameliorate related metabolic disorders. Read more »
Neurobiologists have reproduced a sense of touch - showing how an organism can sense a tactile stimulus, in real time, through an artificial sensor in a prosthetic hand. Read more »
IBM scientists have unveiled the world’s smallest movie, made with one of the tiniest elements in the universe: atoms. Named A Boy and His Atom, the Guinness World Records-verified movie used thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action. Read more »
In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory, an insect called a RoboBee took flight achieving vertical take-off, hovering and steering. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings and then sped along a pre-set route through the air. Read more »
Through the national network for metabolite analysis and identification, Metabolomics Australia, Murdoch University’s Separation Science and Metabolomics Laboratory recently received $1 million for infrastructure and equipment. Read more »
A custom-built programmable 3D printer, created by Oxford University scientists, can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues. The material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies. Read more »