5,519 results
- Tech
Wash Those Hands!
A Florida-based company is now developing a laser-based scanning technology to scout for dirty hands. Installed in restaurant washrooms or daycare centers, it could identify fecal traces — evidence that hand washing was incomplete. Indeed, these sensors might even be coupled to a lock that allows workers back into a kitchen after a restroom break, notes Richard Stroman, vice president of eMerge Interactive, which is applying for a patent on the system. Kitchen or food-processing-plant workers who don't pass the laser test would be forced to go back and lather up again.
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They’re Sequencing a What?
Announcements of new targets for genome sequencing are bringing celebrity to lesser-known twigs on the tree of life.
- Materials Science
Sopping Up Heavy Metal: Hybrid material removes mercury from water
A hybrid material consisting of a bacterial protein and a temperature-sensitive polymer proves efficient at removing mercury from contaminated water.
- Chemistry
Nitrogen Unbound: New reaction breaks strong chemical link
Researchers have developed a new way to turn nitrogen into ammonia that could improve upon an energy-intensive, 90-year-old method used to make fertilizers.
- Earth
Limiting Dead Zones
To limit algal blooms and the development of fishless dead zones in coastal waters, farmers and other sources of nitrate are investigating novel strategies to control nitrate runoff.
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Gut Check
The normal microbial inhabitants of our intestines do a lot for their host.
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Tales from the crypts: Cells battle germs
Inhabiting tiny pits in the small intestine, so-called Paneth cells defend other cells in these crypts by discharging bacteria-killing bursts of enzymes and other molecules.
- Earth
Dead Waters
Coastal dead zones—underwater regions where oxygen concentrations are too low for fish to survive—are mushrooming globally, threatening to transform entire ecosystems.
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Bacteria give carpet a nasty smell
A compound produced by bacteria may be responsible for the "cat urine" smell of some new carpeting.
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Plants, bats magnify neurotoxin in Guam
Researchers have found that the natural neurotoxin BMAA gets magnified as it rises through a food chain on Guam, a finding that strengthens a recent hypothesis that attempts to explain a spike in neurological disease on that island.
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19320
This article could have been a little less disingenuous. It would still have been a very good article if you had used “sulfuric acid” instead of “odorless hydrogen sulfate” and admitted that the process still required a little alkali to neutralize this waste stream that is “carried away by water trickling over the foam.” Jim […]
- Health & Medicine
Cluster Buster: Might a simple sugar derail Huntington’s?
A study in mice with a disease resembling Huntington's shows that a simple sugar impedes the protein aggregation that kills brain cells.
