1. Microbeads are found in cosmetics and personal care products such as toothpaste, sunscreen, hair gel and shower gel.
2. Microscope picture of cellulose microbeads

On World Ocean Day, researchers announced they developed biodegradable cellulose microbeads from a sustainable source that could potentially replace harmful plastic ones that contribute to ocean pollution. Microbeads are little spheres of plastic less than 0.5 mm in size that are added to personal care and cleaning products including cosmetics, sunscreens and fillers to give them a smooth texture. However they are too small to be removed by sewage filtration systems and so end up in rivers and oceans and ingested by birds, fish and marine life.

It is estimated that a single shower can result in 100,000 plastic particles enterin...

1. Flatworm amputation, and space-exposed and Earth-bound worm sample schematics.
2. Amputation of double-headed worm from space results in double-headed morphology
3. Bacterial community composition of Earth-only and space-exposed D. japonica.

Flatworms (D. japonica) that spent 5 weeks aboard ISS are helping researchers led by Tufts University scientists to study how an absence of normal gravity and geomagnetic fields can have anatomical, behavioral, and bacteriological consequences, according to a paper to be published June 13 in Regeneration. The research has implications for human and animal space travelers and for regenerative and bioengineering science.

Planaria are frequently used for studies because of their remarkable ability to regenerate when parts of their bodies are amputated...

The Cosmic Web: A section of the virtual universe, a billion light years across, showing how dark matter is distributed in space, with dark matter halos the yellow clumps, interconnected by dark filaments. Cosmic void, shown as the white areas, are the lowest density regions in the Universe. Credit: Joachim Stadel, UZH

Researchers from the University of Zurich have simulated the formation of our entire Universe with a large supercomputer. A gigantic catalogue of about 25 billion virtual galaxies has been generated from 2 trillion digital particles. This catalogue is being used to calibrate the experiments on board the Euclid satellite, that will be launched in 2020 with the objective of investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Over 3 years, a group of astrophysicists from t...