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Two bacteria join forces to turn chemical signals into electricity, opening up low-cost sensing options

Bacterial sensors usually rely on emitting light to transfer information about what they’re sensing, but that method isn’t practical in many settings. That’s why most information transmission is done via electricity. And while electricity-emitting bacteria exist, manipulating them into useful sensors has been quite challenging. Rice University professor Caroline Ajo-Franklin’s group, working in collaboration with researchers from Tufts University and Baylor College of Medicine, recently developed a flexible bioelectrical sensor system called electroactive co-culture sensing system (e-COSENS). The study is published in Nature Biotechnology.

“Bioelectrical sensing is by no means a new concept,” said Ajo-Franklin, the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of Biosciences and corresponding author on this paper. “But e-COSENS is the first system that allows us to easily engineer bioelectronic sensors in a modular manner, like assembling Legos, allowing us to potentially use them to monitor everything from human health to environmental contaminants.”

Bioelectrical sensing requires bacteria that produce electricity and are easy for researchers to manipulate to respond to different substances. Ideally, the bacteria would be able to live in a variety of different places so that the system could be used in environments ranging from rivers to milk.

ALMA and JWST investigate giant disk galaxy’s formation and evolution

European astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a recently discovered giant disk galaxy known as ADF22.1. Results of the new observations, published April 8 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the formation and evolution of this galaxy.

ADF22.1, also known as ADF22.A1, is a giant disk barred spiral galaxy residing in a proto-cluster known as SSA22 at a redshift of 3.09. It has an effective radius of some 22,800 light years and a stellar mass of about 100 billion solar masses. Previous observations have found that it is a dusty star-forming galaxy (DSFG) hosting an intrinsically bright yet heavily obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN).

Giant disk galaxies with high stellar masses, like ADF22.1, are generally expected to be quiescent, bulge-dominated systems. Given that ADF22.1 is a starburst galaxy, it is perceived by astronomers as a unique laboratory to explore how early universe galaxies and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) accumulate their mass and ultimately evolve into the most massive elliptical galaxies.

Blood pressure drug effective for treating antibiotic-resistant bacteria, study finds

Infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria are difficult to treat and are responsible for over 2.8 million infections and more than 35,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. A new study in Nature Communications reports that a drug used to lower blood pressure could also be the basis of a promising new treatment for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

“MRSA commonly causes infections in both hospitals and the community. It infects people in different ways and can survive even when antibiotics are used, which makes treatment extremely difficult,” said corresponding author Eleftherios Mylonakis, M.D., Ph.D., chair, Houston Methodist Charles W. Duncan Jr. Department of Medicine.

“Scientists around the world are looking at various ways to provide treatment options outside of established antibiotics. The high cost of developing new drugs, and the time it takes to do so, led our team to explore the possibility of using existing medications, approved for other uses, to treat bacterial infections.”

Shrink, remove and modify: Team successfully ‘trims’ wheat chromosomes

For the first time, a research team at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) has succeeded in reducing the size of, or even completely removing, chromosomes in plants with large genomes, such as wheat. They achieved this by using the CRISPR/Cas gene-editing tool to target highly repetitive sections of DNA. The results of the study, published today in the journal Plant Communications, could significantly accelerate breeding processes.

While the targeted manipulation of entire chromosomes is well established in model organisms such as Arabidopsis thaliana, it has posed a significant challenge in crops with large genomes, such as wheat. The IPK research team has now set out to determine whether highly repetitive DNA sequences known as satellite DNA are suitable targets for the CRISPR gene-editing system. The idea was that cutting many of these identical sequences simultaneously could affect the entire chromosome. The team introduced CRISPR components into the plants using a virus-based system. This approach bypasses lengthy traditional transformation processes and enables highly efficient chromosomal modifications.

“In our study, we were actually able to demonstrate for the first time that chromosomes can be efficiently reduced in size by making targeted cuts in satellite DNA,” says Dr. Jianyong Chen, the study’s first author. This is a significant breakthrough, as such changes had previously only occurred by chance. You can think of it like a rope. If you cut a rope in several places at once, it becomes unstable and eventually snaps. The same thing happens to chromosomes when many cuts are made simultaneously.

Skin-deep microneedle sensor tracks drug clearance and reveals early kidney and liver dysfunction

Wearable technologies are starting to reshape how people manage health. Continuous glucose monitors that measure blood sugar levels in diabetes patients have already shown the power of tracking an important molecule in real time. The next leap is to track other medically important molecules. However, doing so is far more difficult because most of those molecules are present at much lower concentrations than glucose.

One area such wearable technologies could transform is drug therapy. Many powerful medications are still managed through blood tests that offer only occasional snapshots of how a patient’s body is processing treatment. For drugs that must be dosed precisely to avoid harm, clinicians can miss the point at which dosing becomes ineffective or begins to threaten the organs responsible for processing the drug.

A UCLA-led research team has now developed a microneedle sensor platform designed to address that problem through continuous, minimally invasive monitoring in skin. In a study published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers showed in rats that the sensors could operate continuously for six days, track drug concentrations over time and provide insight into kidney and liver function by measuring how quickly the body cleared those drugs.

Slime-like artificial muscle reshapes on command, heals after damage and turns one robot into many

Breaking away from conventional robots that perform only predefined functions once fabricated, researchers have developed a next-generation artificial muscle that can change its shape in real time, recover from damage, and even be reused. The study is published in Science Advances.

The researchers developed a new type of dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) using a phase-transitional ferrofluid (PTF) that behaves as a solid at room temperature but becomes fluid-like and highly flexible when exposed to external stimuli such as heat or magnetic fields.

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are soft transducers that convert electrical energy into mechanical motion and are often referred to as artificial muscles because of their ability to move rapidly and precisely like human muscles.

Ocean bottom seismometers could improve earthquake warning times in Pacific Northwest

If there is a magnitude 8 or 9 megathrust earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, data from ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) could improve earthquake detection times calculated by the ShakeAlert system.

At the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting, Zoe Krauss said ShakeAlert’s earthquake detection time could be improved by 5 to 9 seconds by incorporating data from six cabled OBS deployed offshore Oregon as part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Regional Cabled Network and five cabled OBSs deployed offshore Vancouver Island on Ocean Networks Canada’s (ONC) NEPTUNE cable.

There are currently only two cabled OBSs offshore Oregon, but the Cascadia Offshore Subduction Zone Observatory (COSZO) project will add four new OBS to the OOI network this summer, bringing these potential added detection times closer to reality.

Google Blocks 8.3B Policy-Violating Ads in 2025, Launches Android 17 Privacy Overhaul

Google this week announced a new set of Play policy updates to strengthen user privacy and protect businesses against fraud, even as it revealed it blocked or removed over 8.3 billion ads globally and suspended 24.9 million accounts in 2025.

The new policy updates relate to contact and location permissions in Android, allowing third-party apps to access the contact lists and a user’s location in a more privacy-friendly manner. This includes a new Contact Picker, which offers a standardized, secure, and searchable interface for contact selection.

“This feature allows users to grant apps access only to the specific contacts they choose, aligning with Android’s commitment to data transparency and minimized permission footprints,” Google said.

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