In the earliest stage of life, animals undergo some of their most spectacular physical transformations. Once merely blobs of dividing cells, they begin to rearrange themselves into their more characteristic forms, be they fish, birds or humans. Understanding how cells act together to build tissues has been a fundamental problem in physics and biology.
Cranfield University research using data from smart meters has found that household water consumption changed significantly after the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, shifting from predominantly higher usage early in the morning to multiple peaks and continued demand throughout the day.
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Researchers have genetically engineered a probiotic yeast to produce beta-carotene in the guts of laboratory mice. The advance demonstrates the utility of work the researchers have done to detail how a suite of genetic engineering tools can be used to modify the yeast. There are clear advantages to being able to engineer probiotics so that they produce the desired molecules right where they are needed, says Nathan Crook, corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. You re not just delivering drugs or nutrients; you are effectively manufacturing the drugs or nutrients on site.
POSTECH professor Hyung Joon Cha s research team develops a drug-delivering adhesive patch that mimics the blood vessel formation mechanism.
The patch can be applied to any shape anyplace and was verified for the regenerations of myocardial infarction and severe skin loss.
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IMAGE: The above diagram shows part of the molecular assembly process from individually trapped atoms to ground state molecule using optical tweezers (lasers). view more
Credit: Photo courtesy of the Ni group
In 2018, Kang-Kuen Ni and her lab earned the cover of Science with an impressive feat: They took two individual atoms, a sodium and a cesium, and forged them into a single dipolar molecule, sodium cesium.
Sodium and cesium normally ignore each other in the wild; but in the Ni lab s carefully calibrated vacuum chamber, she and her team captured each atom using lasers and then forced them to react, a capability that gifted scientists with a new method to study one of the most basic and ubiquitous processes on Earth: the formation of a chemical bond. With Ni s invention, scientists could not only discover more about our chemical underpinnings, they could start creating bespoke molecules for novel uses like qubits for quantum computers.