Bioengineers used a modular, step-by-step chemical technique to create algae that carry antibiotic payloads.
What dead whales can teach us about finding aliens.
Posted on Big Think, direct link at.
Posted on BigThink.
A study published Wednesday in the JAMA Psychiatry journal shows that four key genetic variations are more common in military veterans who have taken their own life or considered it.
Scientists from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, found the pattern while analyzing blood samples from a database that included 633,778 U.S. veterans, cross-referenced with the International Suicide Genetics Consortium of more than 549,000 individuals.
The obtained samples were sequenced to create genetic profiles compared to participants’ medical records, showing that 121,211 recorded cases of attempted suicide or thoughts about killing themselves.
If everything goes to plan, double SpaceX Falcon 9 launches are set to liftoff just minutes apart between 4 and 5 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 16.
Well… that’s me uninvited to the bioethicist’s christmas party…
Bioethicists frequently dictate what patients can and cannot do with their own bodies, and yet the general public very rarely questions this. Maybe it’s time we started to question what right bioethicists have to dictate what we can and cannot do with our own bodies?
‘We can learn a lot more using sound than we can with some of the other tools,’ says one researcher.
A message that resonates
Posted in biological, particle physics
Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have shown how adding a tiny resonator structure to an ultrafast electron pulse detector reduced the intensity of terahertz radiation required to characterize the pulse duration (ACS Photonics, “Streaking of a Picosecond Electron Pulse with a Weak Terahertz Pulse”).
To study proteins—for example, when determining the mechanisms of their biological actions—researchers need to understand the motion of individual atoms within a sample. This is difficult not just because atoms are so tiny, but also because such rearrangements usually occur in picoseconds—that is, trillionths of a second.
One method to examine these systems is to excite them with an ultrafast blast of laser light, and then immediately probe them with a very short electron pulse. Based on the way the electrons scatter off the sample as a function of the delay time between the laser and electron pulses, researchers can obtain a great deal of information about the atomic dynamics. However, characterizing the initial electron pulse is difficult and requires complex setups or high-powered THz radiation.
