In an attempt to find new regulators of the immune system, a team of researchers at Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc. have created a successful method for discovering molecules that are involved in signalling pathways. As published this week in the Journal of Biology, the team conducted a functional genome-wide screen and discovered novel modulators of T-cell receptor signalling that could aid in the development of drugs that target the immune response.
T cells are an integral part of the immune r
An analysis of pesticides that accumulate in Arctic waterways is giving scientists insight into the fate of such pollutants once they settle in polar regions.
The Arctic holds a telltale record of how humans have used chemicals globally during the past several decades. These cold corners of the earth act as a sink of sorts – chemicals used in industry and agriculture worldwide slowly migrate to and settle there – in sizeable quantities – in water, snow, ice, soil and vegetation.
The Biosciences Federation, an umbrella organisation representing over 60,000 life scientists, will be launched today at the House of Lords.
The Federation has been formed by an amalgamation of the Institute of Biology and the UK Life Sciences Committee.
It has over 20 member societies, in disciplines as disparate as ecology and neuroscience.
The main aims of the Federation are to promote dialogue between life scientists and to provide a single coherent voice for bioscient
Scientists at the U.S Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are exploring the use of bacteria to increase the recovery of methane, a clean natural gas, from coal beds, and to decontaminate water produced during the methane-recovery process.
Methane gas, which burns without releasing sulfur contaminants, is becoming increasingly important as a natural gas fuel in the U.S. But the process of recovering methane, which is often trapped within porous, unrecovered or waste co
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are using a very small and light ion, the electron, to study the structure and dynamics of ionic liquids and how those properties influence chemical reactivity.
Ionic liquids are made of positive and negative ions that pack so poorly together that they are liquids near room temperature. They offer extremely low volatility, non-flammability, new reactivity patterns, and the formation of separate phases that all
Rice, UIUC researchers find way to separate metallic, non-metallic nanotubes
Researchers at Rice University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have discovered the first method to chemically select and separate carbon nanotubes based on their electronic structure. The new process, described in the Sept. 12 issue of Science magazine, represents a fundamental shift in the way scientists think about the chemistry of carbon nanotubes.
“Other than low-cost mass prod
One of the great frustrations of modern medicine is the creeping ability of pathogenic microbes to develop resistance to the antibiotics we throw at them.
More and more, microbes are able to eliminate, modify and sequester the toxic molecules that make up the arsenal of antibiotics that humans use to treat infection, making once-miraculous drugs increasingly impotent. Now, adding to the mix of devices dangerous microbes deploy to evade destruction by antibiotics, scientists have disc
Using phone numbers, remote controls and computer keyboards will likely seem quaint within a decade as new capability to turn human speech into accurate, efficient computer code radically changes the ways we live and work.
That’s the outlook of Lawrence R. Rabiner, associate director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in an overview of speech processing, “The Power of Speech,” in the journal Science, available Friday
MIT scientists have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded – only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. The work, to be reported in the Sept. 12 issue of Science, bests the previous record by a factor of six, and is the first time that a gas was cooled below 1 nanokelvin (one-billionth of a degree).
“To go below one nanokelvin is a little like running a mile under four minutes for the first time,” said Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, co-leader of the team.
In the Sept. 13 issue of The Lancet, Johns Hopkins and Ugandan researchers report final results of a study showing that a safe, simple and inexpensive treatment reduces transmission of HIV from mothers to babies during childbirth and the first few weeks of life, offering a good chance to curb the spread of HIV.
In their study of more than 600 women in Uganda, giving one dose of nevirapine, a common HIV-fighting drug, to HIV-positive mothers during labor, and one dose to their newborns, redu
The 35,000 or so genes within a human cell are something like players on a sports team: If their activity isn’t controlled and coordinated, the result can be disastrous.
So just as coaches tell individual players when to scramble onto the field and when to stay on the bench, molecules called transcription factors prompt particular genes to be active or stay quiet. Transcription factors occur naturally in cells, but researchers have been working to develop artificial transcriptio
Researchers envision mass-produced rolls of material that converts sunlight to electricity
Princeton electrical engineers have invented a technique for making solar cells that, when combined with other recent advances, could yield a highly economical source of energy.
The results, reported in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature, move scientists closer to making a new class of solar cells that are not as efficient as conventional ones, but could be vastly less expensive and more ver
New nerve cells put fall foraging on fast track
The “senior moments” that herald old age, and the ability to forget where we put something we held in our hands just moments ago, give us humans much cause to envy a species like the black-capped chickadee.
Especially when fall is right around the corner.
Every autumn, the chickadee roams a territory covering tens of square miles, gathering seeds and storing them in hundreds of hiding places in trees and on the ground. Ove
New approach may provide new way to diagnose, classify and treat diseases
UCLA researchers found a distinction in the gene expression of leprosy that accurately classified two different clinical forms of the disease. This is one of the first studies of its kind where genetic profiling distinguished between disease types, possibly leading to new ways to diagnose and treat all types of diseases.
The new UCLA study, published Sept. 12 in the journal Science, also identified gen
An astronomer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, have discovered that a neighboring galaxy — the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) — appears to have formed with an old stellar halo, similar to how our very own Milky Way formed.
The oldest and most metal-poor Milky Way stars form a spherical halo where they move about like atoms in a hot gas, which in turn prompts two major formation scenarios of our galaxy: extended hier
Within a tumor, chaos reigns: Nutrients are scarce, and healthy tissue is muscled out by cancerous tissue so aggressive that the tumor even sacrifices parts of itself to continue its relentless expansion.
It’s in this rough-and-tumble environment, controlled by a dizzying array of molecular signals, that researchers at the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center are grappling with a conundrum: Starve a tumor of oxygen, and the tumor should die – but without oxygen, pretty much all of today’
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