Credit: Image by IVPP [Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeonthropology]
The inner ear of a 400 million-year-old platypus fish has yielded new insights into early vertebrate evolution, suggesting this ancient creature may be more closely related to modern-day sharks and bony fish than previously thought.
A team of scientists from the University of Birmingham in the UK, and institutions in China, Australia and Sweden, used virtual anatomy techniques, including MicroCT scanning (using x-rays to look inside the fossil) and digital reconstruction to examine previously unseen areas within the braincase of these mysterious fossils.
They discovered the fish, called Brindabellaspis stensioi and nicknamed platypus fish because of its long beak, has an inner ear which is surprisingly compact in construction. Its closely connected components resemble the inner ears of modern jawed vertebrates such as sharks and bony fishes. Some features of it also appear very similar to a h
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Widespread use of antibiotics in human healthcare and livestock husbandry has led to trace amounts of the drugs ending up in food products. Long-term consumption could cause health problems, but it s been difficult to analyze more than a few antibiotics at a time because they have different chemical properties. Now, researchers reporting in ACS
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have developed a method to simultaneously measure 77 antibiotics in a variety of foods.
Antibiotics can be present at trace amounts in meat, eggs and milk if the animals aren t withdrawn from the drugs for a sufficient period of time before the products are collected. Also, antibiotics can accumulate in cereals, vegetables and fruits from manure fertilizer or treated wastewater applied to crops. Consuming these foods over a long period of time could lead to increased antibiotic resistance of bacterial pathogens or to an imbalance in the gut microbiome. However, most previous monitoring m
Chinese Government Sponsors Facial Recognition Technology to Detect Uyghurs
The Chinese Patent Office (CPO) published patent applications of newly developed technologies to detect Uyghurs. The research and the patent applications are sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
The CPO published a patent application (with application number CN201711408669, filed with the CPO on Dec. 22, 2017) titled “A kind of new HOG features Uyghur nationality facial image recognizer” (HOG is the abbreviation for a technical term, histogram of oriented gradients).
The patent application disclosed that “facial recognition … has wide applications in the field of social security,” “Uyghurs have different facial appearance from Han Chinese,” and “An Uyghurs face database has been built upon typical face images of Uyghurs of different sexes and ages collected from all areas of Xinjiang Autonomous Region,” in the published specification of the application. Th
Credit: @Science China Press
Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world. The number of deaths and incidences is increasing each year. The metal-based anticancer drugs were used clinically worldwide, but suffer from poor selectivity, serious side effects and drug resistance. Tumor-targeting drug development is the basis for precise cancer treatment.
Recently, Professor Hongke Liu of Nanjing Normal University, Professor Jing Zhao and Academician Zijian Guo of Nanjing University have made breakthrough achievements in anticancer drug development. They proposed a bio-orthogonally catalyzed lethality (BCL) strategy (Figure 1) and published their results in National Science Review (National Science Review, NSR). The BCL strategy uses tumors as manufacturing factories to generate a highly potential tumor-targeted drug Ru-rhein, which can selectively kill cancer cells and tumors in tumor-bearing mice, while no toxicity on normal cells. BCL strategy generates targeting dr
Written by AZoOpticsJan 21 2021
Robots are extensively used to paint airplanes, make cars, and sew clothing in factories. However, the assembly of microscopic components, for example, those used for biomedical applications, is yet to be automated.
Lasers could offer a solution to this problem. Scientists have now used lasers to develop miniature robots using bubbles that lift, drop, and control tiny pieces into interconnected structures. The study results have been published in the
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces journal.
With the miniaturization of manufacturing, objects with a length only a few hundred micrometers, or about the thickness of a sheet of paper, are now being developed. However, it is challenging to assemble such tiny pieces by hand.