Princeton group outlines novel mathematical approach
It has been 20 years since the futurist Eric Drexler daringly predicted a new world where miniaturized robots would build things one molecule at a time. The world of nanotechnology that Drexler envisioned is beginning to come to pass, with scientists conjuring new applications daily.
Now Salvatore Torquato, a Princeton University scientist, is proposing turning a central concept of nanotechnology on its head. If
As a boy growing up in Brazil 40 years ago, Marc A. Meyers marveled at the lightweight toughness of toucan beaks that he occasionally found on the forest floor. Now a materials scientist and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, Meyers said makers of airplanes and automobiles may benefit from the first ever detailed engineering analysis of toucan beaks conducted in his lab.
“Our computer modeling shows that the beak is optimized to
North Carolina Sea Grant researchers have isolated a new peptide antibiotic from the American oyster that may have implications for managing many diseases in oysters.
The new antimicrobial peptide “American oyster defensin” (AOD) may protect against bacteria in Crassostrea virginica, a species that is native to North Carolina and important economically to Atlantic and Gulf Coast fisheries.
“This peptide may be helpful in selecting disease-resistant oysters for aquaculture and fi
Unspoken rules of existence in tropical rain forests mean no one species will take up too much space and squeeze others out, says new research conducted in part at the University of Alberta that shows how ecological communities regulate themselves.
Dr. Fangliang He is part of a research team that studied fundamental questions plaguing scientists since Darwin’s time: why are some species so common while others are rare? How do common and rare species interact? And how do
Scientists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have coaxed six atoms into spinning together in two opposite directions at the same time, a so-called Schrödinger “cat” state that obeys the unusual laws of quantum physics. The ambitious choreography could be useful in applications such as quantum computing and cryptography, as well as ultra-sensitive measurement techniques, all of which rely on exquisite control of nature’s smallest particle
Technique identifies candidate amino acid sites that control protein functions
With more and more protein sequence data available, scientists are increasingly looking for ways to extract the small subset of information that determines a protein’s function. In addition to sorting out what makes related proteins differ, such information can also help scientists engineer proteins to do new jobs.
Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Labor
The first large-scale study to see whether trained volunteers and lay people can use defibrillators to save the lives of cardiac arrest (CA) victims has concluded that their use by lay people is safe, and if the response time can be shortened to within eight minutes there is the potential to save the lives of 15 out of 100 people who collapse suddenly with CA.
Brescia in Italy – a large mixed rural and urban county with an area of more than 4,800 square kilometres and a population of wel
A collaboration of researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Virginia, led by Dr. Anindya Dutta, has created an artificial mammalian origin of replication that will facilitate the future study of mammalian DNA replication.
Dr. Dutta and colleagues recruited known mammalian replication initiation factors (either ORC or CDC6) to a defined GAL4 DNA-binding site on a plasmid, demonstrating that replication initiation factor recruitment is sufficient to specify a DNA replic
Dr. Michael Snyder (Yale University), Dr. Elizabeth Grayhack (University of Rochester Medical Center) and colleagues have constructed an unprecedented yeast genomic library, which will serve as an important research tool for the entire scientific community. The authors cloned over 5000 yeast open reading frames (ORFs) into a movable C-terminally tagged expression vector – creating what the authors call a “moveable ORF” or “MORF” collection.
To illustrate the utility of their MORF co
A paper published in the December 1st issue of Genes & Development reveals a novel role for the p53 tumor suppressor pathway in organogenesis during embryonic development. Dr. Jinrong Peng and colleagues show that the zebrafish Def protein is an organ-specific factor that represses expression of a newly identified p53 isoform to coordinate digestive organ growth. def-mutant zebrafish display hypomorphic digestive organs that result from defects in organ expansion and maturation.
Fu
A Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center study of children who were hospitalized from motorized go-cart accidents found that the average hospital stay was almost five days and that more than half of children required at least one operation – and almost a third required two or more operations.
“Many parents don’t seem to be aware of the potential dangers of private go-karts,” said David Cline, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist and one of the study researchers. “M
Heavy use of marijuana may put adolescents who are genetically predisposed to schizophrenia at greater risk of developing the brain disorder, according to research presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Using a sophisticated brain imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), researchers at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York, studied the brains of groups of adolescents: healthy, non-drug users; heavy marijuana smok
The first phase of a two-year healthy schools and communities project between partners in Kent and Pas-de-Calais started in September 2005. The official Kent launch will take place in Dover on 27 January 2006.
Titled Bien-être, the British partners in this European Development Fund (ERDF) Interreg IIIa project are the Kent and Medway NHS Health and Europe Centre based at the European Institute of Social Services at the University of Kent; East Kent Coastal Teaching Primary Care Tru
The world’s largest mass extinction was probably caused by poisonous volcanic gas, according to research published today.
The research, published in the journal Geology, reveals vital clues about the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, when mammal-like reptiles known as synapsids roamed the earth.
Many scientists had previously thought that an asteroid hitting the earth or a deep-sea methane release had caused the extinction,
GIOVE A, the first Galileo satellite, departed from ESA’s test facility at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in The Netherlands on the morning of 29 November, bound for the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The spacecraft, packed in its transport container and accompanied by its support equipment, was taken by road from the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, where it was loaded onto an Antonov transport plane.
The attitude of a business owner, market demand and available skills top the list of key influence’s on a firm’s growth, an internet survey by The University of Nottingham Institute for Enterprise and Innovation has revealed.
Respondents to The UK Business Barometer were asked to rate five different potential key influences on a firm’s growth — attitude of owner; determine by market demand; available skills; access to finance; access to the latest technology — from
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