A DNA robot that can walk across biological cell membranes is the first one that can control living cells’ behaviour. The researchers who made the robot hope that it could improve cell-based precision medicine. A team led by Hong-Hui Wang and Zhou Nie from Hunan University, China, has created a synthetic molecular robot that walks […]

Can specific dietary guidelines help people living with bipolar disorders better manage their health? Maybe someday, according to a new study by Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Clinical trial results showed that a diet designed to alter levels of specific fatty acids consumed by participants may help patients have less variability in their mood. […]

While marijuana use may impact some genes linked to autism in men’s sperm, abstaining from cannabis consumption over time may significantly lower many of those effects, according to a study by Duke Health researchers. This study, appearing online in Environmental Epigenetics on Sept. 21, followed several other studies at Duke that linked cannabis use to alterations […]

The study of numbers has driven mathematics since antiquity. The constantly evolving field of arithmetic connects numbers and geometry, and is used in everyday applications, particularly in cryptography. Aside from being a bad draw at Scrabble, the letters N, Z, D, Q, R, and C symbolise series of numbers for mathematicians. For example, N designates […]

A new sensor can detect not only whether a virus is present, but whether it’s infectious – an important distinction for containing viral spread. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators developed the sensor, which integrates specially designed DNA fragments and nanopore sensing, to target and detect infectious viruses in minutes without the […]

A species of roundworm that is widely used in biological research can sense and respond to sound, despite having no ear-like organs, according to a new study from the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute. The findings, scheduled to publish Sept. 22 in the journal Neuron, offer a new biological tool for studying the genetic […]

[embedded content] Northwestern University engineers have added a new capability to electronic microchips: flight. About the size of a grain of sand, the new flying microchip (or “microflier”) does not have a motor or engine. Instead, it catches flight on the wind — much like a maple tree’s propeller seed — and spins like a […]

Having good room ventilation to dilute and disperse indoor air pollutants has long been recognized, and with the COVID-19 pandemic its importance has become all the more heightened. But new experiments by indoor air researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) show that certain circumstances will result in poor mixing of room air, meaning […]

Eight teams featuring dozens of robots from more than 30 institutions, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, will converge in a former Kentucky limestone mine from Sept. 21 to 24 to participate in a series of complex underground scenarios. The goal: to demonstrate cutting-edge robotic autonomy capabilities and compete for the chance to […]

The melting of polar ice is not only shifting the levels of our oceans, it is changing the planet Earth itself. Newly minted Ph.D. Sophie Coulson and her colleagues explained in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters that, as glacial ice from Greenland, Antarctica, and the Arctic Islands melts, Earth’s crust beneath these land […]