Nano fiber feels forces and hears sounds made by cells

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a miniature device that's sensitive enough to feel the forces generated by swimming bacteria and hear the beating of heart muscle cells.

Bat species found to have tongue pump to pull in nectar

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers affiliated with the University of Ulm in Germany and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama has found that one species of bat has a method of collecting nectar that has never ...

Injured jellyfish seek to regain symmetry, study shows

Self-repair is extremely important for living things. Get a cut on your finger and your skin can make new cells to heal the wound; lose your tail—if you are a particular kind of lizard—and tissue regeneration may produce ...

Light-activated molecular machines get cells 'talking'

One of the main ways cells "talk" to each other to coordinate essential biological activities such as muscle contraction, hormone release, neuronal firing, digestion and immune activation is through calcium signaling.

'Veggie' dinosaurs differed in how they ate their food

Although most early dinosaurs were vegetarian, there were surprising differences in the way that these animals tackled eating a plant-based diet, according to a new study by scientists from the Natural History Museum and ...

Cellular tornadoes sculpt organs

How are the different shapes of our organs and tissues generated? To answer this question, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, forced muscle cells to spontaneously reproduce simple shapes in vitro. ...

New mechanism of force transduction in muscle cells discovered

The ability of cells to sense and respond to their mechanical environment is critical for many cellular processes but the molecular mechanisms underlying cellular mechanosensitivity are still unclear. Researchers at the University ...

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