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White Noise Makes Beer Brew Faster, Scientists Claim

Music can make people do things faster, with running, dancing, and doing chores being good examples. It seems, however, that we’re not alone in picking up the pace at the sound of a good tune. Researchers have discovered that playing a sound commonly known as white noise can shorten fermentation—arguably the most important step in brewing beer—by 21 to 31 hours, without markedly changing the flavor. This could help breweries increase beer production without diminishing quality. How sound chang

The Weight of a Cell

Ella Watkins-Dulaney Microbes are so small that tens of thousands could fit in the space of the period at the end of this sentence. And yet, for two of the most widely studied kinds — S. cerevisiae and E. coli — we know their weight with remarkable precision: A single yeast cell weighs about 100 picograms and a single E. coli bacterium weighs about one picogram, or 60 million times less than a grain of sand. At first blush, measuring the weight of a single cell seems an impossible task. How ca

New Process Uses Microbes to Create Valuable Materials from Urine

Researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Irvine, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), have used biology to convert human urine into a valuable product. The team genetically modified yeast to take the elements present in urine and create hydroxyapatite – a calcium and phosphorus-based mineral naturally produced by humans and other animals to build bones and teeth. Commercially manufactured hydroxyapatite is used in surgery and dentistry to