Category: Slimey stuff
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Solving the mouth-puckering mystery of tannins
The distinctive sensation of tannins on the tongue will be familiar (overfamiliar, perhaps?) to many arXivblog readers. And if you’ve ever wondered what causes that mouth-puckering dryness, you now have an answer thanks to the dedicated and selfless work of Drazen Zanchi and colleagues at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Energies in Paris.…
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How religions spread like viruses
“Religions are sets of ideas, statements and prescriptions of whose validity and applicability individual humans can become convinced,” say Michael Doebeli and Iaroslav Ispolatov at the University of Vancouver. In other words, religions are memes, units of cultural inheritance just like songs, languages or political beliefs. Richard Dawkins proposed the idea that memes spread much…
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The incredible climbing droplets
Here’s a curious finding from the University of Bristol in the UK. Place a droplet onto an inclined plexiglass sheet and shake it up and down. I know what you’re thinking: even without the shaking the drop should dribble down the plate due to gravity unless it is pinned in place by surface tension. Vertical…
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The puzzle of knotted proteins
At one time, molecular biologists swore blind that proteins would never become knotted, at least not in the natural course of things. But in recent years, they’ve been forced to eat their words as one protein after another has been shown to have a knotted structure. The question is why; what purpose do knots…
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Could life have come from other stars?
Late in the last century, researchers calculated that an asteroid impact on Mars could jettison rocks towards Earth in a way that preserved bacterial life within them; the implication being that life could have evolved first on a warmer wetter Mars and later seeded life on Earth. Now Mauri Valtonen from Turku University in Finland and…
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Carbon nanotubes sucessfully deliver cancer drugs (in mice)
“A holy grail in cancer therapy is to deliver high doses of drug molecules to tumor sites for maximum treatment efficacy while minimizing side effects to normal organs,” write Zhuang Liu and colleagues at Stanford University before revealing the results of experiments they have carried out with a material that has the potential to be…
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How likely is an avian flu pandemic?
With winter approaching, many governments in the northern hemisphere are stocking up on Tamiflu and fine tuning their civil defense plans to cope with the disruption a bird flu outbreak might cause. But how likely is an outbreak? While various groups have written about how a pandemic might happen, Rinaldo Schinazi at the University of…
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Can entanglement exist in biological systems?
Can entanglement exist in biological systems? The usual argument against is that physicists have to work hard to produce entanglement in the carefully controlled conditions that exist in the lab. So it’s hardly likely that entanglement will ever be found in systems that are warm, wet and messy, like human bodies for instance. But Sandu…
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Group theory and spinal injuries
Medical science is stuck in the middle ages when it comes to understanding the causes of back pain and how to prevent it. If you want advice, “bend your knees when lifting” is all you’re likely to get. The standard theory describing spinal injuries is known as the principal loading hypothesis and assumes that any…
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Surfing solves puzzle of water snail locomotion
Snails move using a mechanism called adhesive locomotion. Through muscular contraction and expansion of their foot, they transmit a force to the ground through a thin layer of mucus which is adhesive at low strains but otherwise flows like a liquid. But what of water snails that move upsidedown along the underside of a liquid…