Water used for hand-washing is relatively easy to treat for reuse, and now engineers at ETH Zurich have built and tested a standalone hand-washing station for use in public places and developing countries that can do just that.
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Bacteria continue to evolve resistance to our best drugs, but probiotics help keep bad bugs at bay. Now, MIT researchers have found a way to combine probiotics and antibiotic drugs into an uneasy alliance that seems to work better than either treatment alone.
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Superbugs are evolving to outfox even our very best medicines, presenting a real and emerging danger to humans in every corner of the globe. A new study has explored how they develop in newborns in particular, and how a mother’s breastmilk might help fend them off.
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A cheap new diagnostic test from researchers at UC Berkeley promises to effectively identify antibiotic-resistant bacteria in just minutes from a urine sample. The test is currently being commercialized with a view on rolling it out into hospital and clinical settings as soon as possible.
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Maintaining the right microbial balance is crucial to your health, but antibiotics and poor diet have reduced the diversity of human microbiota. To preserve that diversity before it’s gone for good, a team of scientists is now calling for the creation of a microbial “Noah’s Ark.”
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The 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who tapped into evolution to produce vital chemicals. It was awarded to Frances H. Arnold for directing the evolution of enzymes, and to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter, who manipulated phages to create new antibodies.
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Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have now developed “spacesuits” that wrap around bacteria to not only protect them from the elements, but turn them into biohybrids that capture carbon dioxide and turn it into useful chemicals.
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Not all pathogenic bacteria needs to evolve a variant to avoid destruction from antibiotics. A new study has revealed that some bacteria can effectively enter a state of hibernation, waiting for the effects to antibiotics to pass, resulting in persistent and chronic infections.
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American scientists have developed a smartphone app that can identify types of bacteria in one hour, down from a typical turnaround of 18 to 28 hours. The reduced detection time should mean faster diagnosis, treatment and recovery for patients, as well as reduced costs.
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Get enough bacteria in one place and they settle down into longer-term colonies, building sticky biofilms that protect them from our best cleaning efforts. But now, researchers from the University of Illinois have designed a technique that uses microbubbles as a scrubber to blast biofilms away.
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