Engineers at Duke University and the New York University's Tandon School of Engineering have demonstrated a method for ensuring that an increasingly popular method of genetic identification called "DNA fingerprinting" remains ...
Biotechnology
May 21, 2020
0
118
Increasingly, shoppers are choosing nutraceuticals, cosmetics and herbal remedies with natural ingredients, and these products are readily available in many drug stores and supermarkets. But some consumers, health professionals ...
Biochemistry
Jun 26, 2019
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0
RNA sequencing is a technique used to analyze entire genomes by looking at the expression of their genes. Today, such genome-wide expression analyses are a standard tool for genomic studies because they rely on high-throughput ...
Biotechnology
Apr 19, 2019
0
104
A new screening process could dramatically accelerate the identification of nanoparticles suitable for delivering therapeutic RNA into living cells. The technique would allow researchers to screen hundreds of nanoparticles ...
Bio & Medicine
Oct 01, 2018
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52
In the same way that barcodes on your groceries help stores know what's in your cart, DNA barcodes help biologists attach genetic labels to biological molecules to do their own tracking during research, including of how a ...
Biotechnology
Jun 21, 2018
5
142
The first direct comparison of in vitro and in vivo screening techniques for identifying nanoparticles that may be used to transport therapeutic molecules into cells shows that testing in lab dishes isn't much help in predicting ...
Bio & Medicine
Mar 05, 2018
0
143
The dry, mothball-scented stacks of a herbarium might seem to be far away from the cutting edge of plant science. However, the curated plant specimens stored there contain irreplaceable genetic, morphological, ecological, ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 13, 2018
0
8
Wildlife traffickers do their best to make animal and plant parts unidentifiable. When customs officials find bones, maybe all they can say, is that the bones belonged to large cats. Then they have to ask: are those tiger ...
Ecology
Nov 20, 2017
0
197
The European and Mediterranean species of the paper wasp genus Polistes were recently revised by scientists at the SNSB-Zoologische Staatssammlung München (ZSM).
Plants & Animals
Nov 13, 2017
0
2
Chironomids are also called non-biting midges or lake flies. Xiaolong Lin is a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) University Museum in Trondheim. He devotes almost all his time to ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 26, 2017
0
32
A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional (1D). Later they evolved into rectangles, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns in 2 dimensions (2D). Although 2D systems use a variety of symbols, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well. Barcodes originally were scanned by special optical scanners called barcode readers; later, scanners and interpretive software became available on devices including desktop printers and smartphones.
The first use of barcodes was to label railroad cars, but they were not commercially successful until they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task for which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread to many other tasks that are generically referred to as automatic identification and data capture (AIDC). The very first scanning of the now ubiquitous Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode was on a pack of Wrigley Company chewing gum in June 1974.
Other systems have made inroads in the AIDC market, but the simplicity, universality and low cost of barcodes has limited the role of these other systems until the first decade of the 21st century, over 40 years after the introduction of the commercial barcode, with the introduction of technologies such as radio frequency identification, or RFID.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
