Many foods produced on an industrial scale include raw ingredients mixed together in enormous stainless steel machines that can be difficult to clean. With repeated use, equipment surfaces get minute scratches and grooves, providing bacteria and biofilms the perfect place to hide. While surface scratches may appear small to the naked eye, they are like a canyon to bacteria, which are only a few micrometers in size. Surface-trapped food residue and bacteria then increase the risk of contamination from microorganisms such as Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli.
During the Late Pleistocene period (between 125,000 to 12,000 years ago) two bear species roamed Europe: omnivorous brown bears (Ursus arctos) and the extinct mostly vegetarian cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
Until now, very little is known about the dietary evolution of the cave bear and how it became a vegetarian, as the fossils of the direct ancestor, the Deninger's bear (Ursus deningeri), are extremely scarce.
July 27, 2018--Inhaled vaporized cannabis does not appear to improve or worsen exercise performance and activity-related breathlessness in patients with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a randomized controlled trial published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.
A new drug discovery system allows scientists to specifically target members of an important family of enzymes, called phosphatases, which were previously considered mostly "undruggable".
Scientists from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge, UK, demonstrated the capabilities of the new system by identifying a molecule that could successfully target a phosphatase to reduce the accumulation of Huntington's disease-associated proteins in the brains of mice.
Growing a batch of carbon nanotubes that are all the same may not be as simple as researchers had hoped, according to Rice University scientists.
Rice materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his team bucked a theory that when growing nanotubes in a furnace, a catalyst with a specific atomic arrangement and symmetry would reliably make carbon nanotubes of like chirality, the angle of its carbon-atom lattice.
WASHINGTON, July 26, 2018 -- Air conditioners pull off the seemingly magical feat of making the air inside a home, car or shopping mall deliciously chilly. The source of that sweet relief is chemistry. In this video, Reactions explains how refrigerants and physical chemistry combine to help you beat the summer heat: https://youtu.be/PT38gaGciP4.
ATLANTA--A thin gap has been discovered on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram (HRD), the most fundamental of all maps in stellar astronomy, a finding that provides new information about the interior structures of low mass stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, according to a study led by astronomers at Georgia State University.
Chemical engineers testing methods to improve efficiency of diesel engines while maintaining performance are getting help from a summer staple: Tiki torches.
A team of engineers at the University of Notre Dame is using the backyard torches as part of an effort to mimic the soot oxidation process in a diesel engine -- when soot in diesel exhaust collects in the walls of a particulate filter and has to be burned off -- according to a study recently published in Catalysts.
Water is vital for life.
But as our climate changes, the availability of water is also changing, leaving animals with limited or unreliable supplies of this critical resource.
A plant's defense systems help each other. When one system fails, another one can - at least in part - take over.
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology 's (NTNU) Department of Biology have been collaborating with colleagues from Imperial College London and The Sainsbury Laboratory to discover more about how plants defend themselves. Their results have been published in the 26 June 2018 issue of Science Signaling.
Identifying the danger