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Credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
TROY, N.Y. Envisioning an animal-free drug supply, scientists have for the first time reprogrammed a common bacterium to make a designer polysaccharide molecule used in pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals. Published today in
Nature Communications, the researchers modified E. coli to produce chondroitin sulfate, a drug best known as a dietary supplement to treat arthritis that is currently sourced from cow trachea.
Genetically engineered E. coli is used to make a long list of medicinal proteins, but it took years to coax the bacteria into producing even the simplest in this class of linked sugar molecules called sulfated glycosaminoglycans that are often used as drugs and nutraceuticals..
Newly designed gold-black phosphorus nanosheets by scientists are capable of converting nature gas into greener energy methanol with selectivity as high as
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Credit: Mj Riches
In the 1995 movie Outbreak, Dustin Hoffman s character realizes, with appropriately dramatic horror, that an infectious virus is airborne because it s found to be spreading through hospital vents.
The issue of whether our real-life pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, is airborne is predictably more complex. The current body of evidence suggests that COVID-19 primarily spreads through respiratory droplets - the small, liquid particles you sneeze or cough, that travel some distance, and fall to the floor. But consensus is mounting that, under the right circumstances, smaller floating particles called aerosols can carry the virus over longer distances and remain suspended in air for longer periods. Scientists are still determining SARS-CoV-2 s favorite way to travel.
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IMAGE: Nanoparticle of gold [Au] above metal mirror, showing molecular vibration for organic molecule BPT view more
Credit: André Garcia Primo, UNICAMP)
Optomechanical microcavities are extremely small structures with diameters of less than 10 micrometers (about a tenth of a human hair) inside which light and mechanical vibrations are confined. Thanks to their small size and to efficient microfabrication techniques that enable them to hold intense light energy and interact with mechanical waves, microcavities can be used as mass and acceleration sensors and in Raman scattering (a spectroscopy technique deployed to analyze materials, including gases, liquids, and solids). A sound understanding of these phenomena can contribute in future to advances in areas such as biomedicine, including the development of sensors to detect molecules that serve as cancer markers, for example.
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IMAGE: Mouse with a head-mounted Bluetooth wireless system that transmits neuronal signals from cortex implanted microneedle electrodes view more
Credit: COPYRIGHT (C) TOYOHASHI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Overview:
A research team at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Applied Chemistry and Life Science, and the Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS) at Toyohashi University of Technology has developed a lightweight, compact, Bluetooth-low-energy-based wireless neuronal recording system for use in mice. The wireless system weighs 3 with the battery, having advantages of high signal quality, good versatility, and low cost, compared to wired recording with a commercial neurophysiology system. The study was published online in