Are left handed people smarter than right handed people? In a word: No.
Why do MRI machines make so much noise?
Insect exoskeletons provide insight on developing more durable materials.
A small molecule called kartogenin activates mesenchymal stem cells to produce cartilage.
Constant stress is bad for your health.
Researchers will attempt to fertilize human eggs that were generated by stem cells.
Penguins are so cute so I had to highlight this story. From Scientific American:
A group of geographers and ecologists from three continents has taken an unprecedented look at Antarctica’s emperor penguins. Using very high resolution (VHR) images from satellites 450 kilometers above Earth, the team has come up with the first total population count for an entire species. With a whopping 595,000 penguins, they found nearly twice as many emperor penguins as did previous studies, and they counted 46 colonies, up from the earlier total of 38.
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Inside the Lechuguilla cave
Antibiotic resistant bacteria are an increasing threat to our health care system. Because antibiotics are over-prescribed and also administered to livestock in their feed, bacteria have developed mechanisms to withstand antimicrobial drugs. As bacteria evolve to evade current antibiotics they become harder and harder to treat. While this may appear to be a problem created by modern medicine, there is evidence that the ability to develop drug resistance mechanisms is hard wired in bacteria. A group of scientist have uncovered species of drug resistant bacteria in a 4 million year old cave. From Scientific American:
But the capacity to fend off antibiotics might actually be lodged deep in bacteria’s evolutionary history. A new study has uncovered dozens of species of bacteria in a 4 million-year-old cave that harbor resistance to both natural and synthetic antibiotics.
A team of researchers descended to 400 meters in distant, untrafficked reaches of Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico to collect samples of bacteria. Few people have entered the cave’s deepest regions since its discovery in 1986, and surface water takes thousands of years to percolate through the nearby dense Yates Formation rock down to the cave. As a consequence, the area is a prime place to study naturally occurring antibiotic resistance, noted the researchers, whose results were published online April 11 in PLoS ONE.
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Wright and his colleagues found that of the 93 bacterial strains tested from the cave, most were resistant to more than one of the 26 different antimicrobials. And some bacteria were resistant to more than a dozen antibiotics used by doctors, such as telithromycin, ampicillin and daptomycin, which is currently a treatment of last resort to combat resistant infections. The cave bacteria were not likely to cause infection in humans, but could provide the genetic traits that confer resistance to that are.
Check out the research article on PLoS ONE.