Leaning into the Turn

Microbes turn industrial waste into a nanocatalyst

Research posted today on ES&T’s Research ASAP website (10.1021/es0509836) describes how, in one elegant step, selected bacteria can recover precious metals from industrial waste solutions and deposit them as nanocrystal catalysts on their cell surfaces. By using the metal-covered biomass to clean up toxic chromium wastes, the researchers demonstrated the approach’s potential as a sustainable te...

How Bacteria Turn Fiber into Food

Most people think of fiber as being the part of our food we can’t digest—but with the help of symbiotic bacteria in our guts, we can actually get some nutrition from the complex carbohydrates such as cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin that make up plants’ cell walls. The bacteria produce an arsenal of enzymes that break down these carbs into simple sugars, which are then in turn fermented to ...

How Did Dinosaur Bones Turn Into Fossils?

If fossilization was simply replacement of bone with stone, fossil and living bones wouldn't be as chemically similar as they are, and the intricate details found in fossilized dinosaur bones would not have survived [1]. Even more intriguing is the fact that some of the proteins in bone have survived the fossilization process, in dinosaurs and "older" fossils [2], a fact very consistent with a ...

Sonoluminescence: How Bubbles Turn Sound into Light

Sonoluminescence, the transduction of sound into light, is a phenomenon that pushes fluid mechanics beyond its limit. An initial state with long wavelength and low Mach number, such as is realized for a gas bubble driven by an audible sound field, spontaneously focuses the energy density so as to generate supersonic motion and a different phase of matter, from which are then emitted picosecond ...

To the Framingham data, turn, turn, turn.