Special E. coli bacteria produce diesel on demand. It sounds like science fiction but a team from the University of Exeter, with support from Shell, has developed a method to make bacteria produce diesel on demand. While the technology still faces many significant commercialisation challenges, the diesel, produced by special strains of E. coli bacteria, is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel and so does not need to be blended with petroleum products as is often required by biodiesels derived from plant oils. This also means that the diesel can be used with current supplies in existing infrastructure because engines, pipelines and tankers do not need to be modified.
Biofuels with these characteristics are being termed 'drop-ins'. Professor John Love from Biosciences at the University of Exeter said: "Producing a commercial biofuel that can be used without needing to modify vehicles has been the goal of this project from the outset. E. coli bacteria naturally turn sugars into fat to build their cell membranes.
Hybrid Medical Animation. Respiration Process 1/6. Mayfly with springtail hitchhiker: Amber specimen -- 16 million years old -- reveals unknown animal behaviors. Stunning images, including video footage, from a CT scan of amber have revealed the first evidence of any creature using an adult mayfly for transport. Researchers at the University of Manchester say this 16-million-year-old hitchhiker most likely demonstrates activity that is taking place today but has never previously been recorded.
Entombed in amber the tiny springtail can be seen resting in a v-shaped depression at the base of one of the mayfly's wings. It appears to have secured itself for transport using its prehensile antennae. Dr David Penney and colleagues from the Faculty of Life Sciences and the School of Materials used a high resolution CT scanner to take over 3,000 X-rays from different angles. The scientists then created slices, showing the fossil in cross sections. Dr Penney says: "The images are really impressive.
Springtails are minute creatures (usually only 1-2mm long) related to true insects. Phoresy in adult mayflies has never before been recorded. Bioengineers introduce 'Bi-Fi' -- The biological 'Internet' If you were a bacterium, the virus M13 might seem innocuous enough. It insinuates more than it invades, setting up shop like a freeloading houseguest, not a killer. Once inside it makes itself at home, eating your food, texting indiscriminately. Recently, however, bioengineers at Stanford University have given M13 a bit of a makeover. The researchers, Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering, have parasitized the parasite and harnessed M13's key attributes -- its non-lethality and its ability to package and broadcast arbitrary DNA strands -- to create what might be termed the biological Internet, or "Bi-Fi.
" Their findings were published online Sept. 7 in the Journal of Biological Engineering. Using the virus, Ortiz and Endy have created a biological mechanism to send genetic messages from cell to cell. Medium and message M13 is a packager of genetic messages. Rates and ranges. Horticultural hijacking: The dark side of beneficial soil bacteria. It's a battleground down there -- in the soil where plants and bacteria dwell. Even though beneficial root bacteria come to the rescue when a plant is being attacked by pathogens, there's a dark side to the relationship between the plant and its white knight. According to research reported by a University of Delaware scientific team in the September online edition of Plant Physiology, the most highly cited plant journal, a power struggle ensues as the plant and the "good" bacteria vie over who will control the plant's immune system.
"For the brief period when the beneficial soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis is associated with the plant, the bacterium hijacks the plant's immune system," says Harsh Bais, assistant professor of plant and soil sciences, whose laboratory group led the research at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. "It's the first time we've shown classically how suppression by a benign bacteria works," Bais says. Gut microbes help the body extract more calories from food. You may think you have your food all to yourself, but you're actually sharing it with a vast community of microbes waiting within your digestive tract. A new study from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine reveals some gut microbes increase the absorption of dietary fats, allowing the host organism to extract more calories from the same amount of food. "This study is the first to demonstrate that microbes can promote the absorption of dietary fats in the intestine and their subsequent metabolism in the body," said senior study author John Rawls, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology at UNC.
"The results underscore the complex relationship between microbes, diet and host physiology. " Previous studies showed gut microbes aid in the breakdown of complex carbohydrates, but their role in dietary fat metabolism remained a mystery, until now. The study was carried out in zebrafish, which are optically transparent when young. Are our bones well designed? Insects and crabs have a leg up on us. Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have recently shown that the legs of grasshoppers and crabs have the ideal shape to resist bending and compression. If human leg bones were built the same way, they could be twice as strong. "Like all Arthropods, grasshoppers and crabs have so called exoskeletons made from a very special material called cuticle," said Professor David Taylor, of the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
"This exoskeleton protects the animal like a knight's suit of armour. Recently we have shown that this cuticle is in fact one of the toughest natural materials. " "In terms of evolution, having your bones on the outside has been a pretty good concept," said his colleague Dr Jan-Henning Dirks. So what makes this exoskeleton so successful? "This relation of wall-thickness to radius can tell us a lot about the mechanical stability of the structure," said Taylor. Desarrollo Embriológico del Sistema Urinario.
7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes. People who doubt evolution tend to have one main argument: "If evolution is true, why do we still see monkeys running around today, all chimp-like? Where are all the monkey-men I was promised? " Well, if you or someone you know refuses to believe that organisms change over time without proof on a monkey-man level, here are a buttload of animals in the middle of getting their evolve on. Well, seven anyway. Elephants are Evolving to Lose Their Tusks (and Avoid Poachers) Here's a joke: What did the elephant say to the poacher?
Getty"Stop! Sorry about that. GettyAnd ever since animal rights got involved, unemployment has shot up 300 percent. So elephants have decided to take matters into their own hands ... or trunks or weirdly rounded three-toed feet or whatever. By 2005, it was estimated that the tuskless population had risen to between 5 and 10 percent. GettyJust like your debilitating lisp after reading that out loud Russian Dogs are Evolving to Learn the Subways Getty Check it: Via MSNBC. Grasshoppers frightened by spiders affect whole ecosystem. Hebrew University, Yale researchers show how grasshoppers 'stressed' by spiders affect the productivity of our soil.
How do grasshoppers who are being frightened by spiders affect our ecosystem? In no small measure, say researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Yale University in the US. A grasshopper who is in fear of an attacker, such as a spider, will enter a situation of stress and will consume a greater quantity of carbohydrate-rich plants -- similar to humans under stress who might eat more sweets.
This type of reaction will, in turn, cause chemical changes in the grasshopper and in its excretions, affecting the ecosystem it inhabits. How does this happen? When the scared grasshopper dies, its carcass, now containing less nitrogen as a result of its diet change, will have an effect on the microbes in the ground, which are responsible for breaking down animals and plants. Research on this biological-ecological phenomenon was carried out by Dr. BioVisions. Scientists take first step towards creating 'inorganic life'
Scientists at the University of Glasgow say they have taken their first tentative steps towards creating 'life' from inorganic chemicals potentially defining the new area of 'inorganic biology'. Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry in the College of Science and Engineering, and his team have demonstrated a new way of making inorganic-chemical-cells or iCHELLs.
Prof Cronin said: "All life on earth is based on organic biology (i.e. carbon in the form of amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars, etc.) but the inorganic world is considered to be inanimate. "What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology.
" The cells can be compartmentalised by creating internal membranes that control the passage of materials and energy through them, meaning several chemical processes can be isolated within the same cell -- just like biological cells. First plants caused ice ages, new research reveals. New research reveals how the arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages. Led by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, the study is published in Nature Geoscience. The team set out to identify the effects that the first land plants had on the climate during the Ordovician Period, which ended 444 million years ago. During this period the climate gradually cooled, leading to a series of 'ice ages'. This global cooling was caused by a dramatic reduction in atmospheric carbon, which this research now suggests was triggered by the arrival of plants.
Among the first plants to grow on land were the ancestors of mosses that grow today. The research suggests that the first plants caused the weathering of calcium and magnesium ions from silicate rocks, such as granite, in a process that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming new carbonate rocks in the ocean. The team used the modern moss, Physcomitrella patens for their study. InnerSuper. Newly Discovered Legless Amphibians Are Horrifying | Caecilian Family Discovered in India | Amphibians & Vertebrates. Newly discovered legless amphibians live out their lives in underground burrows, tending their slimy pink young, which emerge from their eggs as miniature adults.
If they sound like something out of a monster movie, they look it too: These creatures, part of a group of animals called caecilians, could pass for enormous earthworms. But they're actually vertebrates with backbones, more like salamanders or frogs. The discovery of new vertebrates is rare, especially outside of tropical rain forests, but the new caecilians come mostly from human-inhabited areas in northeastern India. They've escaped notice for so long because these burrowers spend their lives underground, out of sight of human eyes. To discover the new family, researchers led by the University of Delhi's S.D. Biju and his colleagues, who report their findings Tuesday (Feb. 21) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, dubbed the new family Chikilidae. Biologists' discovery may force revision of biology textbooks: Novel chromatin particle halfway between DNA and a nucleosome. Basic biology textbooks may need a bit of revising now that biologists at UC San Diego have discovered a never-before-noticed component of our basic genetic material.
According to the textbooks, chromatin, the natural state of DNA in the cell, is made up of nucleosomes. And nucleosomes are the basic repeating unit of chromatin. When viewed by a high powered microscope, nucleosomes look like beads on a string. But in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Molecular Cell, UC San Diego biologists report their discovery of a novel chromatin particle halfway between DNA and a nucleosome. While it looks like a nucleosome, they say, it is in fact a distinct particle of its own. "This novel particle was found as a precursor to a nucleosome," said James Kadonaga, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research team and calls the particle a "pre-nucleosome. " "These findings suggest that it is necessary to reconsider what chromatin is.