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Categories: Biology: Biochemistry, Space: Astrophysics

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The deadly hospital pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii can live for a year on a hospital wall without food and water. Then, when it infects a vulnerable patient, it resists antibiotics as well as the body's built-in infection-fighting response. The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes it as one of the three top pathogens in critical need of new antibiotic therapies. Now, an international team, led by Macquarie University researchers Dr. Ram Maharjan and Associate Professor Amy Cain, have discovered how the superbug can survive harsh environments and then rebound, causing deadly infections. They have found a single protein that acts as a master regulator. When the protein is damaged, the bug loses its superpowers allowing it to be controlled, in a lab setting. The research is published this month in Nucleic Acids Research.

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Individual fish in schools scatter in unison when a predator is in their midst. Such precisely coordinated group movements and immobility during threats have long been observed in insects and mammals. Now, a brain pathway has been discovered that enables individual animals to rapidly coordinate a unified response, with no rehearsal required.

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Smallpox viruses are notorious for their ability to remain infectious in the environment for a very long time. A study has now shown that temperature is a major factor in this process: at room temperature, a monkeypox virus that is capable of replicating can survive on a stainless steel surface for up to eleven days, and at four degrees Celsius for up to a month. Consequently, it's very important to disinfect surfaces. According to the study, alcohol-based disinfectants are very effective against monkeypox viruses, whereas hydrogen peroxide-based disinfectants have proved inadequate.

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Researchers have mapped out what a commonly-used form of phage looks like, which will help design better uses in future.

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Inspired by clam fishermen reports, researchers used passive acoustic telemetry to gauge the interactions between two highly mobile rays. They monitored the tagged rays in the wild over two years to see how often and when they visited clam leases, designated underwater locations used to produce hard clams of all sizes from littlenecks to chowders. Results provide both good news and bad news for clammers. Rays spent even more time in these clam lease sites than clammers reported or suspected, but it's not necessarily where they prefer hanging out.

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There's something most species -- from baboons to humans to horses -- have in common: When they suffer serious adversity early in life, they're more likely to experience hardship later on in life.

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Scientists have discovered where butterflies originated and which plants the first butterflies relied on for food. To reach these conclusions, researchers created the world's largest butterfly tree of life, which they used as a guide to trace trace the evolution of butterflies through time in a four-dimensional puzzle that led back to North and Central America.

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Astronomers have described the first radiation belt observed outside our solar system, using a coordinated array of 39 radio dishes from Hawaii to Germany to obtain high-resolution images. The images of persistent, intense radio emissions from an ultracool dwarf reveal the presence of a cloud of high-energy electrons trapped in the object's powerful magnetic field, forming a double-lobed structure analogous to radio images of Jupiter's radiation belts.

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Scientists have precisely identified base pairs of the human genome that remained consistent over millions of years of mammalian evolution, and which play a crucial role in human disease. The team analyzed the genomes of 240 mammals, including humans and identified base pairs that were 'constrained' -- meaning they remained generally consistent -- across mammal species over the course of evolution. The most constrained base pairs in mammals were over seven times more likely to be causal for human disease and complex trait, and over 11 times more likely when researchers looked at the most constrained base pairs in primates alone.

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Astronomers have uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed. The explosion is more than ten times brighter than any known supernova and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole.

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Researchers have examined a specific type of stem cell with an intracellular toolkit to determine which cells are most likely to create effective cell therapies.

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A new study pinpoints 10 bacterial groups associated with Alzheimer's disease, provides new insights into the relationship between gut makeup and dementia.

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A new study has found humpback whales sing louder when the wind is noisy, but don't have the same reaction to boat engines.

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Researchers have discovered a new generic production mechanism of gravitational waves generated by a phenomenon known as oscillons.

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A new group of mitochondrial viruses confined to the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi Glomeromycotina may represent an ancestral lineage of mitoviruses.

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Astronomers have found that supermassive black holes obscured by dust are more likely to grow and release tremendous amounts of energy when they are inside galaxies that are expected to collide with a neighbouring galaxy.

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Globular clusters are the most massive and oldest star clusters in the Universe. They can contain up to 1 million of them. The chemical composition of these stars, born at the same time, shows anomalies that are not found in any other population of stars. Explaining this specificity is one of the great challenges of astronomy. After having imagined that supermassive stars could be at the origin, a team believes it has discovered the first chemical trace attesting to their presence in globular proto-clusters, born about 440 million years after the Big Bang.

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Astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth.

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Much of what is now considered modern medicine originated as folk remedies or traditional, Indigenous practices. These customs are still alive today, and they could help address a variety of conditions. Now, researchers have identified compounds in the leaves of a particular medicinal Labrador tea plant used throughout the First Nations of Nunavik, Canada, and demonstrated that one of them has activity against the parasite responsible for malaria.

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Bacteria can use certain radioactive elements to sustain their metabolism.