Researchers at Northwestern University have created a robotic fish that can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a ribbon-like fin inspired by the black ghost knifefish – a night fish that lives in rivers of the Amazon basin. It hunts for prey using a weak electric field around… »
The fruit fly has evolved a method for arranging the tiny, hair-like structures it uses to feel and hear the world. A team of researchers in Israel and at Carnegie Mellon University were inspired by that method and they think it could be used for more effectively deployed wireless sensor networks, such as environmental monitoring,… »
Researchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have broken one of the major roadblocks on the path to growing transplantable tissue in the lab, because they found a way to grow the blood vessels and capillaries needed to keep tissues alive. In a combination with their previous research, the team could grow… »
If nothing else, the world around us had much more time to shape itself to the current layout we can see around us. By learning from nature, and implementing those ideas, we can improve the efficiency of current designs and technologies, or even come up with new technologies just by mimicking nature. Biomimicry has been… »
Making living logic gates today is not as hard as it was previously predicted by scientists. As we mentioned in one of our previous articles regarding genetically modified yeast cells, these systems suffer from the signal noise that occurs after a single cell has been stuffed with many functions. A team of researchers from the… »
In order to survive in a tumultuous environment, sea urchins literally eat through stone. Sea urchins use their teeth to carve out nooks where they hide from predators and protect themselves from the waves. Despite constant grinding and scraping on stone, urchin teeth never get dull. This ability has puzzled scientists for decades, but researchers… »
Synthetic biology is a relatively new area of research that combines biology and technology. Genetically modified cells can be altered in order to communicate with each other as if they were electronic circuits. A group of researchers in Gothenburg has managed to alter yeast cells in to build complex systems that could help the body’s… »
Researchers from the University of Greenwich are using ethical synthetic biology to create “living” materials that could be used to clad buildings and absorb the CO2 from the air. In collaboration with an architectural practice and a building materials’ manufacturer, the idea is to use protocells – bubbles of oil in an aqueous fluid sensitive… »
