University of Bath

Imagine touching the armrest of your sofa to change the channel on your television, or pressing against a lightbulb stencil on the wall to turn on your smart light – these functions and many more like them are now possible thanks to new research.

Desalination is an important technology that may help unlock more drinking water, and now two independent teams have developed new types of solar-powered desalination systems using very different mechanisms.

Currently, in order to determine if someone has a urinary tract infection, their urine sample has to be sent off to a lab – it takes days to get results. Now, scientists have created a smartphone-enabled system that works in less than 25 minutes.

A team of international researchers has achieved a world-first breakthrough, decades in the making, creating artificial neurons with the ability to behave exactly like real living neurons. The innovation has potential for treating numerous diseases.

Living cells follow instructions encoded in DNA to construct organisms. It’s long been thought that one DNA sequence would always create the same protein, but now researchers have found the first exception to this “universal rule,” a microbe that chooses between two different translations each time.

​For millions of diabetics, performing finger-prick blood tests to monitor blood glucose levels is an unpleasant part of daily life. If a new glucose-monitoring adhesive skin patch reaches commercialization, however, such jabs may become a thing of the past.

The plastic microbeads that give products like toothpaste a smooth texture pose a big problem. They're small enough that they don't get caught by sewage filtration systems, and can be ingested by wildlife once in the sea. With that in mind, scientists have developed biodegradable microbeads.​

You already know that sugar isn't the best thing for your health, but new research might just give you another reason to avoid the white stuff. Scientists say they've discovered a molecular link between blood sugar levels and an enzyme that just might be the tipping point in Alzheimer's disease.

When pine trees are harvested, the needles are simply discarded. Before too long, however, that may change. Scientists have recently developed a renewable plastic, made with a chemical derived from pine needles.

It turns out that dinosaurs might not have been the only casualty of an ancient asteroid strike here on Earth. New analysis of the fossil record indicates that a full 93 percent of mammals living at the time also went extinct, a number significantly higher than previously thought.

Researchers at the University of Bath have created a battery that runs on"pee power," and could bring energy to parts of the world that might not otherwise have access to it.​

Scientists at the University of Bath have developed a more cetacean-friendly sonar system called Acoustic Zoom that is not only less disruptive to marine life, but also improves resolution beyond that of current methods.