Every time you see a slippery rock in a stream or a slimy hull on a boat, you’re looking at biofilms—thin layers of microbes stuck to surfaces. These microscopic communities don’t just stick around by accident. They produce special proteins called adhesins, especially at one end of the cell, to glue
Florida’s cold front keeps the skies cloudy, pushing SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch to no earlier than 10:20 a. m. on March 19 from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 40. The rocket will ferry a new batch of Starlink satellites into orbit, heading northeast so that observers north of the Cape might spot it i
Scientists have made a new family of tiny sugar molecules that can form glowing gels in many different liquids. The key is adding special light‑producing groups to the sugar core: one version has a naphthalene tag, another uses a benzothiadiazole unit, and the third carries a coumarin ring. All thre
The Southernmost tip of our planet is getting a new job: listening to earthquakes. Scientists have set up very sensitive devices called seismometers at the South Pole, a place where noise from cities and weather is almost non‑existent. The first of these was installed by the US Geological Survey in
Scientists have created a better way to see the brain chemical GABA. The new sensor, called iGABASnFR2, is brighter and faster than the first version. It can change its glow quickly when GABA appears, so researchers see signals more clearly. The team made many tiny changes to the protein.
The body’s first line of defense relies on sensors that detect danger signals. One such sensor, cGAS, normally lives in the cell’s fluid part but also shows up in surprising places such as the nucleus, tiny nuclear fragments called micronuclei, mitochondria, and even on the cell surface. When cGA
A group of kids at a school in eastern France recently spotted something odd beside their playground: a skeleton standing upright inside a shallow pit. This find adds to several similar bodies that have been unearthed in the city of Dijon, each positioned sitting with its back to an eastern wall and
In tropical regions, millions of people carry intestinal worms that can linger for years and cause serious health problems. When these worm infections overlap with malaria, the outcome is not simply additive; one disease can change how the other behaves inside the host. Researchers used mice to stu
The chikungunya virus has come back in some overseas areas of France and on the mainland, which worries health officials about a possible spread to French Polynesia. Scientists studied how people mix in the islands and found that certain patterns could let the virus travel more easily. For exa
Research papers sometimes give us conflicting answers about big questions like how Alzheimer’s disease starts in the brain. One paper suggests the APOE4 gene plays a key role, while another says it’s not a big factor at all. The problem isn’t that scientists disagree. The issue is that figuring out
