When scientists assess how dangerous a bacterium is, the first question often seems simple: Can it be stopped or killed? In microbiology and antibiotic research, one of the classic readouts has been whether a bacterium can grow in the presence of a given treatment. The bacterium either grows or it does not. The drug either stops it or it does not.

But infection is not just a survival contest...

Four and a half billion years ago, Earth and Mars were born in the rotating cloud of gas and dust that would eventually become our solar system. Yet exactly how the planets formed remains one of the most disputed questions in planetary science.

Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen are adding new evidence to the debate. Using a novel approach, they have reconstructed the earliest stages of the planets’ formation by analyzing their chemical composition.

And the results surprised them.

“The most surprising result was that Earth and Ma...

Brown fat burns fuel to make heat, and this activity is controlled by the body clock: It drops during sleep and rises before waking. But a cold morning or a skipped meal makes demands the clock never planned for. How the body keeps to a fixed energy timetable while still improvising has long been a puzzle.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) now show that SLC25A34, a little-studied protein in the mitochondria of fat cells, acts as a switch that connects the body clock, temperature and diet to how fat cells store and spend energy. The study was published in Science.

“We usually think of the body clock, the response to temperature and the response to food as separate systems...

Next-generation computing technologies could be one step closer to emulating how neurons respond and communicate with each other, thanks to research examining how electrons and ions move through materials.

Among them, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of materials with potential for advanced electronics.

In a recently published paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Texas A&M University chemical engineering professor Dr. Perla Balbuena and postdoctoral researcher Dr...