Maddy Chapman

1 week ago | iflscience.com | Tom Hale |Maddy Chapman

Creating lifelike tissues in a lab is not easy, especially when it comes to making sure all the cells get enough nutrients and oxygen. There are ways around this, but most current methods can’t deliver this evenly on a large scale. To solve this, researchers at the University of Tokyo developed a new tool called a perfusable hollow fiber bioreactor. The system uses tiny, tube-like fibers that act like artificial blood vessels, distributing nutrients and oxygen throughout the entire tissue.

1 week ago | iflscience.com | Stephen Luntz |Maddy Chapman

Sound waves are variations in air pressure. Our ears are so finely tuned to amplifying them over a certain range of frequencies, that we can sense pressure changes through them that are undetectable through other means. However, when the pressure variations are large enough, we can feel them through our body, as anyone who has stood next to a speaker at a loud concert knows. Those changes apply a force to cells, be they free-living or part of an organism.

1 week ago | iflscience.com | Ben Taub |Maddy Chapman

Furthermore, the researchers noted that deviations from this typical growth chart correlate with differences in cognitive abilities among young children. Based on this observation, they say that brain scans like those used in the study “may provide an effective tool to monitor normative functional development”. To reach these conclusions, the study authors analyzed a total of 1,091 functional MRI scans of neurotypical children from birth to six years of age.

1 week ago | iflscience.com | Alfredo Carpineti |Maddy Chapman

Axions have some very specific properties in how they interact with other particles and even light. Dark matter is a bit of a misnomer because it should be invisible matter, since we cannot see it. However, axions have an extremely weak but specific interaction with light, which can potentially be used to find them. We've discovered something that's actually axion-like, which has never been done before.

1 week ago | iflscience.com | Russell Moul |Maddy Chapman

The idea that the seeds of life may have originated on another planet is far from new, but is there any value to it? “How, then, did life originate on Earth?,” the distinguished speaker, William Thomson, asked his audience during a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS).