News by Subject Biology

Global solar energy production is taking a major hit due to air pollution and dust. The first study of its kind shows airborne particles and their accumulation on solar cells is cutting energy output by more than 25 percent in certain parts of the world. The regions hardest hit are also those investing the most in solar energy installations -- China, India and the Arabian Peninsula.

Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis and Princeton University developed a new way to dive into the cell's tiniest and most important components. What they found inside membraneless organelles surprised them, and could lead to better understanding of fatal diseases including cancer, Huntington's and ALS.

Using an off-the-shelf camera flash, researchers turned an ordinary sheet of graphene oxide into a material that bends when exposed to moisture. They then used this material to make a spider-like crawler and claw robot that move in response to changing humidity without the need for any external power.

Your cancer has metastasized. No one wants to ever hear that. Now researchers have developed a method to thwart cell migration and thus halt metastasis in vitro. In past tests in vivo, the treatment has wiped out tumors with no observable signs of toxicity or recurrence.

Caltech team develops new viral vectors for efficiently delivering genes to neurons throughout the body and across the blood-brain barrier

EPFL scientists show how some pathogenic bacteria -- such as the mycobacteria that cause tuberculosis -- use a previously unknown mechanism to coordinate their division. The discovery could help develop new ways to fight them.

Discovering the function of a gene requires cloning a DNA sequence and expressing it. Until now, this was performed on a one-gene-at-a-time basis, causing a bottleneck. Scientists at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Medical School have invented a technology to clone thousands of genes simultaneously and create massive libraries of proteins from DNA samples, potentially ushering in a new era of functional genomics.

A new UW microscope could provide accurate real-time results during cancer-removal surgeries, potentially eliminating the 20 to 40 percent of women who have to undergo multiple lumpectomy surgeries because cancerous breast tissue is missed the first time around.