A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and The Ohio State University has developed a soft polymer material, called magnetic shape memory polymer, that uses magnetic fields to transform into a variety of shapes. The material...
The complex 3-D structure of one of the world's most lethal families of plant viruses has been revealed in unprecedented detail by scientists at the UK's University of Leeds.
Geminiviruses are responsible for diseases affecting crops such as cassava and...
By adding combinations of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms to stubborn, hard-to-evaporate metals like tungsten and platinum, University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers were able to transform the elements into thin films in a cheaper and safer way.
University of...
Pushing the limits of cryo-electron microscopy, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have captured freeze-frames of the changing shape of a huge molecule, one of the body's key molecular machines, as it locks onto DNA and loads the machinery for...
An advanced imaging technique reveals new structural details of S-DNA, ladder-like DNA that forms when the molecule experiences extreme tension. This work conducted at Sandia National Laboratories and Vrije University in the Netherlands provides the first experimental evidence that...
A cube one-40th the size of a human red blood cell can glow when it detects flammable gas. The nanocube, designed by chemists at the University of Tokyo, is part of a research project to develop artificial systems that...
Tiny factories float inside our cells and provide them with almost all the energy they need: the mitochondria. Their effectiveness decreases when we get older, but also when we face many diseases such as diabetes, cancer or Parkinson's. This...
Pressure treating—which involves putting lumber inside a pressurized watertight tank and forcing chemicals into the boards—has been used for more than a century to help stave off the fungus that causes wood rot in wet environments.
Now researchers at the...
Russian scientists with colleagues from the U.K., Spain, Brazil, Japan and Austria have fully described the mechanism of fungal luminescence. They report that fungi utilize only four key enzymes to produce light and that transfer of these enzymes into...
As electronic devices saturate all corners of public and personal life, engineers are scrambling to find lightweight, mechanically stable, flexible, and easily manufactured materials that can shield humans from excessive electromagnetic radiation as well as prevent electronic devices from...
Benedetto Marelli, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, was a postdoc at Tufts University's Omenetto Lab when he stumbled upon a novel use for silk. Preparing for a lab-wide cooking competition whose one requirement was to...
