Up to 30 % of the food we eat is directly or indirectly dependent on pollination by bees. But due to pesticides and other toxins, climate change and habitat loss, we are seeing a decline in the number and diversity of bees in the world. What if we could create artificial bees that helped us with food production? The Norwegian scientist Ola Gjønnes Grendal cooks up the materials needed to do just this.

Scientists have found microbes living in the charred soil that wildfires leave behind. They don’t know how some fungi and bacteria manage to thrive when everything else has died, but a new project aims to change that.

Chemical engineers at EPFL have developed a new method for atomic layer deposition, a technique commonly used in high-quality microelectronics. The new method can be used in materials with larger surfaces much more cheaply than current approaches, while preserving quality and efficiency, the scientists claim.

MIT engineers have devised a double-sided adhesive that can be used to seal tissues together. This adhesive binds wet surfaces within seconds and could be used to heal wounds or implant medical devices.

Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan have revealed in a new study that squids can camouflage by matching the color of a substrate to avoid predators. The scientists conducted a laboratory-based experiment to record the squid's camouflaging abilities and noticed that when the squids were positioned in the clean side of a tank, they were light in color, but when they were above algae, they became darker.

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) in a collaboration with the University of Groningen (UG) in the Netherlands, have developed a method to analyse which pairs of materials in next-generation perovskite solar cells will harvest the most energy.

A team of researchers led by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Seas) has found that Escherichia coli (E. coli) may use mechanical cues to keep their shape. “This research may reveal some basic principles of bacteria growth,” said Felix Wong, a graduate student at Seas and co-first author of the paper.

Scientists from the University of Oxford and Fudan University, Shanghai, have invented a way to create fake rhino horn using horse hair. Published in Scientific Reports they hope their method will provide a blueprint to create credible fakes that could eventually flood a market which has decimated the wild rhino population.

Ritter offers an improved precision dispenser that is suitable for the handling of viscous and highly volatile liquids.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have come up with a new study in which it claims to reveal for the first time that spawning fish can influence ocean turbulence in coastal regions. The team monitored water turbulence in a bay and noticed that increased levels of turbulence occurred every night despite the weather staying calm. On examining, they found out that the change occurred due to the recently spawned eggs of fishes.