Lifeboat Foundation

Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the “kombucha mother” used to ferment tea.

Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), the researchers were able to produce cellulose embedded with enzymes that can perform a variety of functions, such as sensing environmental pollutants. They also showed that they could incorporate yeast directly into the material, creating “living materials” that could be used to purify water or to make “smart” packaging materials that can detect damage.

“We foresee a future where diverse materials could be grown at home or in local production facilities, using biology rather than resource-intensive centralized manufacturing,” says Timothy Lu, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering.

A team of biophysicists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Penn State College of Medicine set out to tackle the long-standing question about the nature of force generation by myosin, the molecular motor responsible for muscle contraction and many other cellular processes. The key question they addressed—one of the most controversial topics in the field—was: how does myosin convert chemical energy, in the form of ATP, into mechanical work?

The answer revealed new details into how myosin, the engine of muscle and related motor proteins, transduces energy.

In the end, their unprecedented research, meticulously repeated with different controls and double-checked, supported their hypothesis that the mechanical events of a molecular motor precede—rather than follow—the biochemical events, directly challenging the long-held view that biochemical events gate the force-generating event. The work, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, was selected as an Editor’s Pick for “providing an exceptional contribution to the field.”

From the best smartphone of the show to the best health-focused device, this is the cream of the crop when it comes to CES announcements and reveals. We’ve seen a tech-filled face mask that solves a lot of the problems of normal masks, as well as rollable smartphone displays.

Here are the best products we’ve seen at CES 2021, with 15 picks across several categories earning our accolades.

# OnThisDay 1979: On the 10th anniversary of the first moon landing, James Burke went to NASA, to reflect on the heart-stopping minutes preceding “The eagle has landed.”

Cancer cells can hibernate like bears during chemotherapy, a team of doctors has discovered. The cancer cells can act as a living organism, slowing down their activities to survive until the drugs are cleared from the system.

George Will, a political commentator for nearly half a century at The Washington Post, is known to also enjoy weighing in on sports on occasion, most notably baseball. He is fond of repeating the simple but critical observation that these games are a matter of “seconds and inches.”

In digital games, the same maxim applies, but even more so. Fractions of inches matter when targeting the enemy. And critical time is not measured in seconds but in thousandths of seconds.

With that in mind, developers at Canadian startup Brink Bionics have developed a device that promises to boost gamer proficiency by slashing the delay time between an intent to act and execution of the actual action.

Intel 11th Gen vPro Chips Adds Hardware-Enabled Ransomware Detection.

Patch Tuesday January 2021 — Microsoft Issues Patches for Defender Zero-Day and 82 Other Windows Flaws.