Word: bacterias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Research in the chemist's lab focuses on the vancomycins. Like many other antibiotics, vancomycins are produced in nature by the bacteria Streptomyces...
OPTICAL TWEEZERS. With a single beam of infrared laser light, scientists can seize and manipulate everything from DNA molecules to bacteria and yeast without harming them. Among other things, optical tweezers can keep a tiny organism swimming in place while scientists study its paddling flagella under a microscope. Optical tweezers can also reach right through cell membranes to grab specialized structures known as organelles and twirl them around. Currently, researchers are using the technology to measure the mechanical force exerted by a single molecule of myosin, one of the muscle proteins responsible for motion. Scientists are also examining the swimming...
Such marvels, of course, will not materialize overnight. Cautions IBM physicist Donald Eigler: "The single-atom switch looks small until you realize it took a whole roomful of equipment to make it work." Still, computer chips the size of bacteria and motors as small as molecules of myosin are rapidly moving out of the world of fantasy and into the realm of possibility. "For years, scientists have been taking atoms and molecules apart in order to understand them," says futurist K. Eric Drexler, president of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. "Now it's time to start figuring...
Then a close presidential adviser took a leave of absence after it was disclosed that he owned a company that distributed powdered milk in a state welfare program. Conflict of interest? Yes. But read on: the milk contained dangerous levels of bacteria and was reported to be radioactive...
Could cancer be an infectious disease? In some cases the answer is at least partly yes. Viruses are thought to play a role in liver and uterine cancer and some forms of lymphoma. Now comes the news that bacteria may actually be a major culprit in the world's second most common malignancy: stomach cancer, which afflicts an estimated 700,000 a year worldwide...