SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
Sea lilies, despite their name, aren’t plants. They’re animals related to starfish and sea urchins, with long feathery arms resting atop a stalk that keeps them anchored to the ocean floor. Sea lilies have been around for at least 480 million years – they first evolved hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs. For … Read more
Researchers in the Organic Photonics and Nano-optics goup at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics have developed optical nanoantennas made from a conducting polymer. The antennas can be switched on and off, and will make possible a completely new type of controllable nano-optical components. Plasmons arise when light interacts with metallic nanoparticles. The incident light sets … Read more
In the waves offshore of Southern California, germ warfare occurs in a struggle as old as life itself. It’s where USC marine biologists completed a comprehensive new study that shows the tactics bacteria and viruses employ to gain advantages against each other. What they found is that an unlikely standoff occurs, regardless of time, season … Read more
Combination therapies have become a standard treatment of several complex diseases. High-throughput screening (HTS) makes it possible to profile phenotypic effects of thousands of drug combinations in patient-derived cells and other pre-clinical model systems. However, due to the massive number of potential drug and dose combinations, large-scale multi-dose combinatorial screening requires extensive resources and instrumentation, … Read more
Can two layers of the “king of the wonder materials,” i.e. graphene, be linked and converted to the thinnest diamond-like material, the “king of the crystals”? Researchers of the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea) have reported in Nature Nanotechnology the first experimental observation of a … Read more
Living beings contain their own assembly and operating instructions in the form of DNA. That’s not the case with inanimate objects: anyone wishing to 3D print an object also requires a set of instructions. If they then choose to print that same object again years later, they need access to the original digital information. The … Read more
Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is of great interest to scientists due to its subsurface ocean, making it a prime target for those searching for life elsewhere. New research led by Carnegie’s Doug Hemingway reveals the physics governing the fissures through which oceanwater erupts from the moon’s icy surface, giving its south pole an unusual “tiger … Read more
Graphene, a two-dimensional structure made of carbon, is a material with excellent mechanical, electronic and optical properties. However, it did not seem suitable for magnetic applications. Together with international partners, Empa researchers have now succeeded in synthesizing a unique nanographene predicted in the 1970s, which conclusively demonstrates that carbon in very specific forms has magnetic … Read more
Uncovering where we come from and how we have evolved involves a trip into the ancient history of life. Delving deep into our past, we find that the eukaryotic cells that eventually became animals like you and me, branched from other types of cell long ago. But the precise way this branching occurred and the … Read more
Impressions of competence from faces predict important real-world outcomes, including electoral success and chief executive officer selection. Presumed competence is associated with social status. And previous research has shown that people are sensitive to how rich or poor other individuals appear. “Our work show that on top of that, people are susceptible to these cues … Read more