Author: Ben Daviss

Researchers are reinventing wood for the 21st century, making it transparent and embedding it with electronic sensors. The reason: concrete, steel, and glass – the staples of commercial construction – are not only finite resources but making them also emits an estimated 11 percent of the world’s excess CO2. Growing a steady supply of construction...

Bioscientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have brought a new version of the E. coli bacterium into the world. What’s notable is that this one can live without eating. Biologists generally divide life into two groups: one eats food and the other absorbs carbon dioxide and sunlight. Weizmann’s group has, for the first time,...

Diagnosing the early signs of Alzheimer’s Disease – before obvious symptoms develop – is still tricky. But it may become less so due to work done by Spanish scientists at Madrid’s Complutense University. Using noninvasive imaging methods, the researchers found that different layers of tissue in the retinas of Alzheimer’s patients’ thickened and thinned in...

At the University of Sheffield, plant biologists have looked into what they call “the beating heart” of photosynthesis – the process by which plants live and grow.  The researchers deciphered the workings of a protein that manages the electrical current flowing between two components of chlorophyll which convert sunlight to energy. The breakthrough makes it...

UBQ Materials, an Israeli start-up, is claiming a revolutionary process that turns household garbage – rotting fruit, cereal boxes, plastics, old bones – into new plastic ready for manufacturers to use. The proprietary process heats the waste to about 750°F and breaks down organic materials. Fibers in the organics blend with the plastic to strengthen...

Don’t go to the doctor. Go to the bathroom. Human urine is a treasury of health data. It can offer clues to more than 600 illnesses and health conditions; testify to a person’s exercise habits, sleep patterns, and other issues; and spot changes quickly to flag danger signs. But how to capture those sudden hints...

A new study from asset management firm BNP Paribas sees the oil industry’s future path shrinking from today’s superhighway to a country lane over the next 25 years. The study looked at the transportation “energy at the wheels” to be gained over the next 25 years through a $100 billion investment in oil compared to...

At the University of Leeds, British biologists have been able to undo key symptoms of aging by tickling people’s ears. A lobe in humans’ outer ear holds a strand of the vagus nerve, a neurological highway carrying messages between the gut and brain. It plays several central roles in the parasympathetic nervous system, the branch...

As part of the world’s quest for increasingly scarce potable water, chemists at the University of California at Berkeley have fashioned a material that pulls water vapor out of air, even in a desert, and delivers it as liquid water. The material is a metal-organic framework or MOF; think of metal atoms as balls linked...

Because of the medical profession’s overreliance on antibiotics, including its routine use in livestock, antibiotic resistance is reaching epidemic proportions: the drugs have killed off most bacteria that cause illnesses ranging from pneumonia to food poisoning, leaving alive only those with a genetic mutation that makes a bug immune to antibiotics. These “superbugs” are reproducing...