Canine peer review, stolen toxins, and more stories you might have missed this week

How did a single-celled yeast evolve to be as tough as wood? Could your next paper be reviewed by a dog? And is “biological sex” really a useful category for scientific research? Check out the answers below in some of our favorite selections from Science ’s daily newsletter, Science Adviser . Autonomous swimming microbots make a tiny splash Tiny robots that swim through our blood to deliver drugs or hunt down pathogens have been a staple of science fiction for decades. Although still distant, that vision came a step closer to reality last week, when electrical engineers at a meeting of the American Physical Society unveiled swimming microrobots that are smaller than grains of sand . Despite their diminutive size, the gizmos have enough computing power to perform a simple task on their own—rather than being constantly guided by external signals. Researchers programmed the bots to swim through a solution of hydrogen peroxide and measure the temperature of the fluid using simple sensors. Over the span of a few seconds, a robot would dance in a herky-jerky fashion, its movement spelling out the temperature in degrees Celsius. “The robot motion is, in fact, the data,” engineer Maya Lassiter told meeting attendees. How a single-celled yeast evolved to be as tough as wood The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is commonly called brewer’s yeast because it’s used to brew beer a...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research