Elmar Fuchs - Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water 2014 Protons and the electrical conduction in a floating water bridge. Elmar Fuchs Wetsus, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands The Ninth Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water... By: Conference on the Physics Chemistry and Biology of Water … Continue reading →

Installation view of The Livings Hy-Fi, the winning project of The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1s 2014 Young Architects Program. Photograph by Kris Graves. The products discussed at BioFabricate arent what I thought theyd be. Ive been asked plenty of times (and Ive asked plenty of times), whats the killer product for synthetic biology? BioFabricate convinced me that thats the wrong question. We may never have some kind of biological iPod. That isnt the right way to think. What I saw, instead, was real products that you might never notice.Bricks made from sand that are held together by microbes designed to excrete the binder.Bricks and packing material made from fungus (mycelium).Plastic excreted by bacteriathat consume waste methane from sewage plants. You wouldnt know, or care, whether your plastic Lego blocks are made from petroleum or from bacteria, but theres a huge ecological difference. You wouldnt know, or care, what goes into the bricks used in the new school, but the construction boom in Dubai has made a desert city one of the worlds largest importers of sand. Wind-blown desert sand isnt useful for industrial brickmaking, but the microbes have no problem making bricks from it. And you may … Continue reading →

A Series of Super-Sharp Snapshots Demonstrates a New Tool for Tracking Life's Chemistry Human biology is a massive collection of chemical reactions, from the intricate signaling network that powers our brain activity to the bodys immune response to viruses and the way our eyes adjust to sunlight. All involve proteins, known as the molecules of life; and scientists have been steadily moving toward their ultimate goal of following these life-essential reactions step by step in real time, at the scale of atoms and electrons. Now, researchers have captured the highest-resolution snapshots ever taken with an X-ray laser that show changes in a proteins structure over time, revealing how a key protein in a photosynthetic bacterium changes shape when hit by light. They achieved a resolution of 1.6 angstroms, equivalent to the radius of a single tin atom. "These results establish that we can use this same method with all kinds of biological molecules, including medically and pharmaceutically important proteins," said Marius Schmidt, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who led the experiment at the Department of Energys SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. There is particular interest in exploring the fastest steps of chemical reactions driven by enzymes -- proteins that … Continue reading →