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.
Hybrid Medical Animation. Respiration Process 1/6. Mayfly with springtail hitchhiker: Amber specimen. 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. Bioengineers introduce 'Bi-Fi' 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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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. InnerSuper. Newly Discovered Legless Amphibians Are Horrifying. 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.