When babies in the African countries of Guinea Bissau and Uganda were given the tuberculosis vaccine, something remarkable happened. Instead of the vaccine only protecting against the target bacteria – Myocbacterium tuberculosis – the tuberculosis vaccine offered broad protection against a range of unrelated infections, including respiratory infections and serious complications such as sepsis. Australian researchers have now pinpointed the biological mechanism behind the [...]

Thousands of years ago, across the Eastern Mediterranean, multiple Bronze Age civilizations took a distinct turn for the worse at around the same time. The Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire both collapsed, and there was a widespread societal crisis across the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, manifesting as declining populations, destruction, reduced trade, and significant cultural [...]

IN OCTOBER 2014, virologist Edward Holmes took a tour of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a once relatively overlooked city of about 11 million people in the central Chinese province of Hubei. The market would have presented a bewildering environment for the uninitiated: rows of stalls selling unfamiliar creatures for food, both dead and alive; [...]

Self-healable ionic sensing materials with fatigue resistance are imperative in robotics and soft electronics for extended service life. The existing artificial ionic skins with self-healing capacity were prepared by network reconfiguration, constituting low-energy amorphous polymer chains. Consequently, these materials suffer from a low fatigue threshold and are susceptible to crack propagation. In an article [...]

As demand for solar energy rises around the world, scientists are working to improve the performance of solar devices—important if the technology is to compete with traditional fuels. But researchers face theoretical limits on how efficient they can make solar cells. One method for pushing efficiency beyond those limits involves adding up-conversion nanoparticles to [...]

When shrimp shell nanoparticles were mixed into cement paste, the material became substantially stronger — researchers propose an innovation that could lead to less seafood waste and fewer carbon dioxide emissions from concrete production. A team of Washington State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists created nanocrystals and nanofibers of chitin, the second-most common biopolymer [...]

A black-and-white video shared on social media showed a microscopic corkscrew-shaped helix as it appeared to consume a sperm, transport it, and ultimately lead the little swimmer into the wall of an immature egg, or oocyte. The video was released widely after being shared with Twitter by the Weird Science account on September 21, [...]

Polymers containing quantum dots (QDs) are considered crucial components of next-generation consumer items, but ambiguity remains regarding how these compounds may negatively affect public health and the environment. A pre-proof paper from the Journal of Hazardous Materials examines how the transport of quantum dots out of polymeric materials and into the environment relates to their surface and [...]

A new copper coating that kills bacteria quicker and in greater amounts than current formulations could soon be available for hospitals and other high-traffic facilities. Although current formulations made of pure copper are antibacterial and self-sanitizing, they kill certain types of bacteria with a thicker cell wall (Gram-positive bacteria), more slowly than bacteria with [...]

A vaccination as tumor therapy - with a vaccine individually created from a patient's tissue sample that " attaches" the body's own immune system to cancer cells: the basis for this long-term vision has now been achieved by a team of researchers from the MPI for Polymer Research and the University Medical Center Mainz, [...]