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Certain strands of spider silk are attracted to statically charged objects, according to a new study, enhancing an arachnid's ability to catch prey.

The algorithm that regulates the flow of ants is evolving toward minimizing operating costs rather than immediate accumulation.

Turns out even ants can profit from a siesta on a hot day and they use network security and repair mechanisms. Maybe there is still something undiscovered that we can apply for our own networks.

The map will be free but apparently not reading this article :-(

I am certain that this is just the first in a series - highlighting the big dilemma of geo engineering: it's so cheap to do ....

Bacterial wires explain enigmatic electric currents in the seabed: Each one of these 'cable bacteria' contains a bundle of insulated wires that conduct an electric current from one end to the other. Cable bacteria explain electric currents in the seabed Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix.

WOW!!!! don't want to even imagine what we do to these with the trailing fishing boats that sweep through sea beds with large masses .... "Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria," says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University. He could interrupt the electric currents by pulling a thin wire horizontally through the seafloor. Just as when an excavator cuts our electric cables. In microscopes, scientists found a hitherto unknown type of long, multi-cellular bacteria that was always present when scientists measured the electric currents. "The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables really fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane," says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University. Kilometers of living cables The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. "Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale," says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria. In an undisturbed seabed more than tens of thousands kilometers cable bacteria live under a single square meter seabed. The ability to conduct an electric current gives cable bacteria such large benefits that it conquers much of the energy from decomposition processes in the seabed. Unlike all other known forms of life, cable bacteria maintain an efficient combustion down in the oxygen-free part of the seabed. It only requires that one end of the individual reaches the oxygen which the seawater provides to the top millimeters of the seabed. The combustion is a transfer of the electrons of the food to oxygen which the bacterial inner wires manage over centimeter-long distances. However, s

The Forest Products Laboratory of the US Forest Service has opened a US$1.7 million pilot plant for the production of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) from wood by-products materials such as wood chips and sawdust. Prepared properly, CNCs are stronger and stiffer than Kevlar or carbon fibers, so that putting CNC into composite materials results in high strength, low weight products.

"Applications for the film extend beyond getting rid of wrinkles, though. It can safely deliver medications for 24 hours at a time as well as protect the user's skin, particularly over wounds. Additionally, the XLP material can reduce moisture loss. "

Hard work in functional materials is driving the development of new wearable electronics that could be advantageous for communications and sensing is being pursued in the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Institute. Through embroidering circuits into fabric with 0.1 mm precision full integration of electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing is now possible.

The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions. The reason why you shouldn't use Excel (or Numbers or OpenOffice or ...) without knowing what it actually really does!

Very interesting presentation on how the brain can back-propagate error signals during learning (using time-derivatives to encode errors). Hinton discusses how back-propagation can be achieved with very limited / unsophisticated tools and in excessively noise environments.

Belgian startup company. Medical wearables will transform healthcare and patient care - they promise.

Ants found in the Pacific islands of Fiji behave as miniature farmers, carefully sowing and fertilising the seeds of at least six types of plant, a study said Monday.

A light-bulb moment? Plants seem to pipe sunlight directly down into underground roots to help them grow. Light receptors in stems, leaves and flowers have long been known to regulate plant growth. Roots also have these receptors, but it has been unclear how they sense light deep in dark soil.

Sterilizing food with solar wind??

A long read but very interesting and well written.

PS: Does this quote from the article not sound a lot like Inception? 'In any given situation, the brain will retrieve old memories to inform an organism's behavior. If the memory is relevant to the situation, the organism can act on the information; if it is not relevant, then the organism can learn from the situation and create a new memory. With reconsolidation, researchers argued, there seemed to be a brief window in between the retrieval of an old memory and the creation of a new memory in which the old memory is vulnerable to manipulation.'

These people want to construct a synthetic human genome