"Cockroach Brains Could Hold the Key to Next Generation of Antibiotics"
"We don't mean to alarm you, but your home could be infested with effective, life-saving antibiotics. Research coming out of the University of Nottingham over the weekend suggests that brain tissues extracted from certain insects like cockroaches and locusts have a powerful antibiotic quality, killing more than 90 percent of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Escherichia coli without doing harm to human cells in lab tests."
By Clay Dillow
"Nanowire-Coated Cotton Cleans Water by Zapping Bacteria to Death"
"Researchers have created a new “filter” that zaps bacteria with electric fields to clean drinking water. They say their system may find use in developing countries since it requires only a small amount of voltage (a couple of car batteries, a stationary bike, or a solar panel could do the job) and cleans water an estimated 80,000 times faster than traditional devices."
by Joseph Calamia
"Two Eyes in One"
"Nearly 500 million years ago, schizochroal trilobites roamed the oceans, guided by compound eyes with bifocal lenses. In extant animals, the structures of the eye range from those with accommodating lenses (us) to those with multilayered retinas, such as the complex eyes of jumping spiders. Now, to add to these varieties, Stowasser et al. have described a bifocal lens in the larva of the sunburst diving beetle Thermonectus marmoratus. Of its six pairs of eyes, the E2 eyes are tubular and face directly forward. They contain two retinas that are positioned at unequal distances from the lens, with photoreceptors oriented either parallel or perpendicular to the light path. Using a microscope to observe images formed by isolated lenses, the authors measured optical performance and determined that two distinct and well-focused images are produced on the proximal and distal retinas, indicating a true bifocal lens. Moreover, the images are separated vertically, leading to an improved contrast for each of the focused images."
by Lisa D. Chong
Review of a recent Current Biology article (vol. 20, p. 1482, 2010 by Stowasser et al.)
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