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Termite-gut microbes extract clean energy from coal

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   Source :  https://cbe.udel.edu/news/2019/01/07/could-termites-power-a-clean-coal-revolution/     When termites munch on wood, the small bits are delivered to feed a community of unique microbes living in their guts, and in a complex process involving multiple steps, these microbes turn the hard, fibrous material into a nutritious meal for the termite host. One key step uses hydrogen to convert carbon dioxide into organic carbon—a process called acetogenesis—but little is known about which gut bacteria play specific roles in the process. Utilizing a variety of experimental techniques, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now discovered a previously unidentified bacterium—living on the surface of a larger microorganism in the termite gut—that may be responsible for most gut acetogenesis. "In the termite gut, you have several hundred different species of microbes that live within a millimeter of one another. We know certai...
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Aqua-Fi: Underwater WiFi developed using LEDs and lasers

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Aquatic internet that sends data through light beams could enable divers to instantly transmit footage from under the sea to the surface. The  internet  is an indispensable communication tool, connecting tens of billions of devices worldwide, and yet we struggle to connect to the web from under water. "People from both academia and industry want to monitor and explore underwater environments in detail," explains the first author, Basem Shihada.  Wireless internet under the sea would enable divers to talk without hand signals and send live data to the surface. Underwater communication is possible with radio, acoustic and  visible light  signals. However, radio can only carry data over  short distances , while acoustic signals support long distances, but with a very limited data rate. Visible light can travel far and carry lots of data, but the narrow light beams require a clear line of sight between the transmitters and receivers. Now, ...
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Beating Human Hearts From Stem Cells

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Scientists Grow Full-Sized, Beating Human Hearts From Stem Cells It’s the closest we've come to growing transplantable hearts in the lab. IMAGE description : Regenerated heart - Heart tissue, seeded with induced cardiac cells, matures in a bioreactor that the researchers createdBernhard Jank, MD, Ott Lab, Center for Regenerative Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital via Eurekalert Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is the their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells. To combat the problems of organ shortage and decrease the chance that a patient's body will reject it, researchers have been working to create synthetic organs from patients' own cells. Now a team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has gotten one step closer, us...
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Why Birds are world's best engineers?

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The term “bird’s nest” has come to describe a messy hairdo, tangled fishing line and other unspeakably knotty conundrums.  Their tiny brains, dense with neurons, produce marvels that have long captured scientific interest as naturally selected engineering solutions — yet nests are still not well understood.  One effort to disentangle the structural dynamics of the nest is underway in the sunny yellow lab — the Mechanical Biomimetics and Open Design Lab — of Hunter King, an experimental soft-matter physicist at the University of Akron in Ohio. “We hypothesize that a bird nest might effectively be a disordered stick bomb, with just enough stored energy to keep it rigid,” Dr. King said. He is the principal investigator of an ongoing study, with  a preliminary review paper , “Mechanics of randomly packed filaments — The ‘bird nest’ as meta-material,” recently published in the Journal of Applied Physics. (He added that, obviously, the bird-nest stick bomb n...
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