Chlamydia bacteria (green), use a dual-function enzyme called ChlaDUB1 to build a shell around themselves with pieces of the host cell’s Golgi apparatus (red).
Credit: Robert Bastidas – Duke University

The bacterium remodels human cells for its own nefarious purposes. When Chlamydia trachomatis, the bacterium that causes one of the most common sexually transmitted infections worldwide, infects a human cell, it hijacks parts of the host to build protective layers around itself.

Inside this makeshift fortress, the bug grows and reproduces, eventually bursting out in search of a new target and killing the host cell. While scientists have known for years that Chlamydia protects itself in this way, they were missing the mechanics until now...

This is a white button mushroom equipped with 3D- printed graphene nanoribbons (black), which collect electricity generated by densely packed 3D-printed cyanobacteria (green).
Credit: Sudeep Joshi, Stevens Institute of Technology

In their latest feat of engineering, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have taken an ordinary white button mushroom from a grocery store and made it bionic, supercharging it with 3D-printed clusters of cyanobacteria that generate electricity and swirls of graphene nanoribbons that can collect the current.

The work, reported in the Nov...

Artist’s impression of the hot white dwarf GALEXJ014636.8+323615 (white) and its ultra-hot circumstellar magnetosphere (purple) trapped with the magnetic field (green). Credit: N. Reindl. Click for a larger image

Solving a decades-old mystery, an international team of astronomers have discovered an extremely hot magnetosphere around a white dwarf, a remnant of a star like our Sun. The work was led by Dr Nicole Reindl, Research Fellow of the Royal Commission 1851, based at the University of Leicester, and is published today (7 November) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

White dwarfs are the final stage in the lives of stars like our Sun...

The left side of the figure illustrates the retina transplantation procedure. The right side of the figure represents examples of orientation tuning curves recorded from three rats: a normal rat, a rat with a transplant and a rat with a degenerated retina (blind). Displayed below the tuning curves are the responses to sinusoidal grating stimuli. The response patterns indicate that neurons in the brains of transplant recipients are very similar to those of the rats with normal vision.

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, have discovered that neurons located in the vision centers of the brains of blind rats functioned normally following fetal retina cell transplants, indicating the successful restoration of vision...