Time again for your weekly headlines from across the scientific world:
- Can human beings use DNA as a long-term data storage device? Scientists from the UK’s European Bioinformatics Institute have developed a technique to store data in DNA with a 99.9% accuracy. Some of the first items stored: Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Watson and Crick’s paper describing the structure of DNA.
- Ever wonder what happens in the brain while you read silently? A new study in Journal of Neuroscience shows that the areas of the brain associated with voice are activated when a person silently reads, and is evidence that different areas of the brain (visual and auditory) work together to communicate.
- Researchers from IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have worked together to create special antimicrobial hydrogels. These water soluble, biodegradable gels disrupt biofilm production to kill even drug resistant bacteria.
- Have your headphones ever stopped working because the wire breaks? There may be a solution. Chemical and molecular biologists from North Carolina State University have made new wires that are elastic and self-repairing thanks to self-healing polymers and liquid conductive wires.
- Stem cell biologists at Kyoto University have developed kidney tissue from induced pluripotent stem cells. This is an important first step towards developing functional kidney replacements, which could save the lives of the more than 4500 people who die waiting for a kidney transplant every year.
Make sure to check back next week for more headlines from the scientific community, and check out all of the cutting edge research from JoVE, the world’s first peer-reviewed, pub-med indexed video methods journal.