Researchers wanting to make use of locusts’ keen sense of smell to sniff out certain chemicals have found that injecting their brains with nanoparticles seems to make odour identification more reliable Source link
A tiny, bipedal robot that combines muscle tissue with artificial materials can walk and turn by contracting its muscles. While biohybrid robots that crawl and swim have been built before with lab-grown muscle, this is the first such bipedal robot that can pivot and make sharp turns. It does this by applying electricity to one … Read more
An illustration of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), which can be genetically modified to transform foods Shutterstock/ART-ur By editing the genomes of yeast, we can make bread with a stronger rise, potato chips that contain fewer potential carcinogens and rice wine that tastes like bananas. Yeasts have been used in food production for millennia. The microorganisms direct … Read more
The Lego robot Sentosa et al., 2023, PLoS ONE A robot made of Lego can quickly perform an important step for creating machines made of DNA. “This started as a final project in an undergraduate lab course,” says Rizal Hariadi at Arizona State University, who tasked his class with building tools using “frugal science”. The … Read more
A computer chip made of glass and silicone, with channels that hold liquids Hui Lab at UC Irvine A pneumatic computer made of glass and silicone uses pressure instead of electricity to encode data. It can enable a chip-sized device to perform procedures that are usually done by technicians in labs. Lab-on-a-chip devices have been … Read more
A protein in the silk of the giant golden orb-weaver spider (Nephila pilipes) allows it to heal when wet Benambot/iStockphoto/Getty Images A synthetic material made from a protein in spider silk and laced with graphene can rapidly repair itself and form healable electrical circuits. Hsuan-Chen Wu at the National Taiwan University and his colleagues collected … Read more