Biotech

For many of us, food is something we buy at a supermarket or order at a café. We usually give little thought to the complex systems required to produce and deliver it—until they stop working. […]

Fruit flies, mice, zebrafish, yeast and the tiny worm C. elegans are model organisms that have carried modern biology on their backs.This article was originally published here

A new bioengineered neuronal circuit board “BioConNet” allows scientists to artificially engineer human brain-like wiring at scale and can be used to engineer any possible circuit. The fully programmable, open-source system allows generation of large-scale […]

Scientists have found a way to use common bacteria as tiny, green chemical factories to replace a process that currently relies on fossil fuels. In industrial hydrogenation, the hydrogen added to molecules to create products […]

Researchers at the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology have uncovered new evidence that two major types of gene-controlling DNA sequences, promoters and enhancers, operate with a shared logic and often perform the same […]

RIKEN researchers have discovered how an enzyme modifies gene expression by targeting certain stretches of messenger RNA (mRNA) while leaving others alone. This finding could contribute to the rational design of drugs that tweak the […]

The gilthead seabream, a species of commercial interest that migrates seasonally, does not form independent local populations in the northwestern Mediterranean but instead constitutes a single, functionally connected population on a large scale. Individuals spend […]

In a world-first discovery, researchers have found an electrical shark deterrent used at Cocos (Keeling) Islands was effective at reducing the number of fish taken off fishing hooks by sharks—a process known as depredation. The […]

Scientists have developed a new edge-of-field water-treatment system that reduces the load of excess nutrients washing into waterways from farm drainage systems. Their method combines a woodchip bioreactor with a two-step biochar water-treatment module. A […]

Nature does it again! The natural world has a knack for giving us the blueprints for some useful technologies, and the humble sea urchin is the latest contributor. Scientists have designed a new class of […]