The cell membrane, the wall-like boundary between the cell interior and its outside environment, is primarily made up of two kinds of biomolecules: lipids and proteins. Different lipid species closely pack together to form a double layer, or "bilayer,"...
Antibiotic resistance is one of the world's most urgent public health threats. In the United States alone, tens of thousands of deaths result each year from drug-resistant strains of common bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecium, which...
When we think about sponges, we tend to think of something soft and squishy. But researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are using the glassy skeletons of marine sponges as inspiration...
A research team from Caltech and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has demonstrated a promising way to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethylene—an important chemical used to produce plastics, solvents, cosmetics and other important products globally.
The scientists developed...
A simple manufacturing technology based on chitin, one of the most ubiquitous organic polymers on Earth, could be used to build tools and shelters on Mars, according to a study published September 16 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Javier...
Researchers have shown how industries could work together to recycle cigarette butts into bricks, in a step-by-step implementation plan for saving energy and solving a global littering problem.
Over 6 trillion cigarettes are produced each year globally, resulting in 1.2...
A new bacterial molecule with the unsavory tendency to track down and kill others of its own kind has been discovered in the human microbiome by researchers at Princeton's Department of Chemistry. Named Streptosactin, it is the first small...
Ultraviolet light endangers the integrity of human genetic information and may cause skin cancer. For the first time, researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have demonstrated that DNA damage may also occur far away from the point of...
Traditional leather and its alternatives are typically obtained from animals and synthetic polymers. Leather can be considered a co-product of meat production with both livestock farming and the leather production process increasingly considered to be ethically questionable and environmentally...
Roughly 1 billion cars and trucks zoom about the world's roadways. Only a few run on hydrogen. This could change after a breakthrough achieved by researchers at the University of Copenhagen. The breakthrough? A new catalyst that can be...
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...
