Underground in places nobody likes to look, bacteria are doing terrible things to our sewage pipes. The concrete pipes that carry our waste are literally dissolving away, forcing engineers into a messy, expensive battle against tiny microbes. Read More >>
Thanks to what looks like a little square of jelly, you could tell your milk has gone bad without even opening the (gross-smelling) container. The gel is actually a nanorod-embedded smart tag that changes from red to green, mimicking the growth of bacteria in milk without touching it. Read More >>
Looks like it's time to start giving 10-year-olds a little more credit where there scientific claims are concerned. According to a new study from Aston University in Birmingham they were right all along—five seconds really does make a difference in terms of food safety. Read More >>
How does it work? It's the same principle behind how snow forms in the atmosphere (and in artificial snow machines, too—we'll get to that later). An ice crystal needs to form around a nucleus, which can be a bit of dust, soot, pollen, or, as we've seen, bacteria. Pure water doesn't have to crystallise into ice until it's as cold as -48 C below zero. In the demo here, the water has been supercooled to about -29 C, but it only freezes over after the P. syringae is added. Read More >>
We design buildings to make human lives better—but should we also design them to make bacteria healthier? A new study posits just that, suggesting that the microbial communities that live among us are deeply influenced by the design of our buildings. Read More >>
Prepare your immune system because what you're about to read will make you sick. No, seriously, it's dangerous. Like Contagion level dangerous. Read More >>
With a breakthrough that will finally help Halloween top Christmas as the best holiday ever, scientists at the Berlin based biotech lab Organo Balance claim to have developed sweets that don't cause cavities. You'll still get sick and pack on the pounds from gorging on sweets, but if you forget to brush your teeth, your chompers won't rot out of your head. Read More >>
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you never had to worry about germs crawling around on your kitchen countertop? Well, thanks to a new discovery by Australian scientists, that could soon be a reality. And it doesn't require a drop of disinfectant. Read More >>
Scientists recently discovered a new type of botulinum toxin (a.k.a. botox) that they believe is the deadliest substance known to man. Because they've yet to discover an antitoxin, researchers won't publish the details of gene sequence due to security concerns—a first for the scientific community. Thank God. Read More >>
Here's something to bring up the next time you're eating after being a winner winner: you don't actually have to wash the raw chicken with water before you cook it. Read More >>
Horrible as it sounds the incident wasn't actually malicious, just questionably ethical and poorly executed. The three patients in question all had end stage glioblastoma multiforme, which basically means "aggressive, fatal brain tumors." According to documentation, the purposeful infection was supposed to "create a wound infection that would attack tumour cells." It didn't, and all three patients eventually died due to complications. Read More >>
Next time you're in Beijing trying to escape the heat by going to KFC and ordering a refreshing beverage, you might want to think again, or at least order that lemonade WITHOUT ice. Read More >>
It's safe to say that anytime bacteria develops human-like traits, we should be startled. We've long known that the tiny little critters have ways of smelling and tasting, and then earlier this year, we learned about their simplistic economics system. Now, scientists have learned that they use social networks, too. Read More >>
While it's still questionable whether or not humans could really thrive in space, we now know that, even if our own bodies are doomed to become weak and decrepit, any bacteria we tote along have every chance of living full, happy lives. Because according to new research, space might be exactly what bacteria need to become a thicker, stronger, superpowered mutant versions unlike anything we've ever seen on Earth. Read More >>
Think of bacteria, and you probably think of illness, infection, and other unpleasantries. But this picture shows that they have a beautiful side after all. Read More >>
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