Spiders are master builders, expertly weaving strands of silk into intricate 3D webs that serve as the spider's home and hunting ground. If humans could enter the spider's world, they could learn about web construction, arachnid behavior and more....
While eating takeout one day, University of Chicago scientists Bozhi Tian and Yin Fang started thinking about the noodles—specifically, their elasticity. A specialty of Xi'an, Tian's hometown in China, is wheat noodles stretched by hand until they become chewy—strong...
In the quest for abundant, renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, scientists have sought to harvest the sun's energy through "water splitting," an artificial photosynthesis technique that uses sunlight to generate hydrogen fuel from water. But water-splitting devices have yet...
In India and other countries in Southeast Asia, curcumin is often used as a spice in cooking, particularly chicken or fish. It is known for its therapeutic effect and as a way to kill germs present in raw meat....
Electrons are able to move within molecules when they are excited from outside or in the course of a chemical reaction. For the first time, scientists have now succeeded in studying the first few dozen attoseconds of this electron...
In the search for clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels, one promising solution relies on photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells—water-splitting, artificial-photosynthesis devices that turn sunlight and water into solar fuels such as hydrogen.
In just a decade, researchers in the field have...
Dr. Shalini Prasad (front), interim department head of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, holds the THC biosensor her team developed. In back, from left, are electrical engineering Ph.D. student Devangsingh Sankhala, research engineer...
In 1996, when a computer won a match against reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov, it was nothing short of a sensation. After this breakthrough in the world of chess, the board game Go was long considered to be...
It's a popular phrase used to describe people, things, and ideas that just don't mix—"like oil and water." Except it's not entirely true. Oil and water can mix, and can be very difficult to completely separate when brought together....
Using a unique method involving nanocapsules made out of DNA, researchers studied a little-understood signaling process (lit up in color in the neurons above) that plays a key role in the brain.
Credit: Veetil et. al
A team of...
Scientists for the first time have found strong evidence that RNA and DNA could have arisen from the same set of precursor molecules even before life evolved on Earth about four billion years ago.
The discovery, published April 1 in Nature...
