Chemists copy bacterial tricks for making clean fuel.
Bacteria are teaching chemists their tips for creating lean, green fuel. US researchers have developed a catalyst based on a bacterial enzyme that converts cheap acids to hydrogen, the ultimate clean power source.
Unlike other fuels, hydrogen is non-polluting: its combustion makes only water, instead of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide or the poison carbon monoxide. Thomas Rauchfuss and colleagues at the University of Illino
Mouse studies emphasize children’s cancer risk from sunburn.
Serious sunburn in childhood may raise the risk of developing the deadliest form of skin cancer as an adult, research in mice suggests 1 . The experiments could lead to a better understanding of malignant melanoma and of how and when to protect ourselves from the sun.
“I have my kids wear hats and put sunscreen on like crazy now,” says the study’s leader Glenn Merlino, of the National Cancer Institu
Museum exhibits’ genes record British forestry policies
Commercial forest planting in the north of England drew red squirrels westwards in the 1980s say UK researchers. This migration led to big changes in squirrel numbers and genetics.
The finding has implications for the protection of the endangered red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris). Many conservationists advocate leaving ’wildlife corridors’ for animals to travel between patches of fragmenting habitat. This is the first evi
Spells and incantations step aside: scientists have found a genetic elixir of love. It makes males more faithful to females and more friendly to fellow males. It could also shed light on bonding disorders such as autism.
Larry Young of Emory University in Georgia and colleagues used a virus to deliver a gene straight to the part of voles’ brains responsible for rewards and addiction, the ventral pallidum. The gene made the animals’ brains more receptive to the hormone vasopressin 1
Fossils bridge gap between land mammals and whales.
Fifty million years ago, two mammals roamed the desert landscapes of what is now Pakistan. They looked a bit like dogs. They were, in fact, land-living, four-legged whales.
Their new-found fossils join other famous missing links, such as the primitive bird Archaeopteryx , that show how one group of animals evolved into another. And they undermine the two prevailing theories about which land mammals are most closely re
New-found jawbone hints at 200 thousand years of care in the community.
Care for the elderly and disabled may have been around a lot longer than we thought. The discovery of a jawbone scarred by severe gum disease hints that a toothless early human got by with a little help from his friends.
Minus teeth, unable to chew his or her food, the owner of the deformed jawbone nonetheless survived “for at least several months,” estimates anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington U
A virus that exploits a gene defect common to cancer cells and selectively kills them may offer a new avenue for therapy, suggest researchers in Nature.
The gene p53 is mutated in about half of all human cancers (an event directly implicated in tumour progression) so a way of killing such cells offers the attractive possibility of treating multiple cancer types with one drug. The human adeno-associated virus (AAV) selectively induces cell death in p53-defective cells, Peter Beard and his co
New Analysis of Computer Worm Indicates Additional Destructive Payload Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC), a world leader in Internet security, today announced that new analysis of W32.Nimda.A@mm reveals that the worm contains an additional destructive payload that will not only require detection, but removal. The new analysis indicates that the worm is a file infector, overwriting .exe files. W32.Nimda.A@mm is a mass-mailing worm that utilizes multiple methods to spread itself. The worm
Centipede genealogy has scientists and supercomputers foxed
Four-fifths of all known creatures are arthropods. So immense is this family that no one knows who is related to whom. To resolve the relationships between the family members, the insects, spiders, crustaceans and centipedes, two research groups have performed state-of-the-art analyses – and come up with two different answers.
The main problem is the centipedes and millipedes, collectively called the myriapods. One
Silicon still has a lot to offer the microelectronics industry
The end is not nigh for silicon chips. They have “enormous remaining potential”, predicts a new analysis of the limits of integrated circuit technology 1 .
By around 2011, chips could be holding thousands of times more transistors than the billions they house today, calculate James Meindl and colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Trillion-transistor chips are known as ’terascal
Two new techniques will assist the rapid cataloguing of proteins’ roles in the cell.
Decoding the human genome sequence was merely a preliminary step towards understanding how living cells work. Two new techniques should assist the next step: working out the functions of all the proteins that the genes encode 1,2 .
Selectively sticking to small molecules is central to most proteins’ function. Proteins generally have delicately sculpted binding sites, clefts i
Embargo until September, 6 2001
E-BioSci is a new, next generation scientific information service initiated by EMBO to meet the future needs of researchers in the life sciences and funded by the European Commission with 2,4 million Euro over three years. The service – aimed at establishing Europe’s leadership in one of the most important and fast moving scientific fields of our day – will offer scientists and other researchers new forms of navigation through the dramatically increasing floo
Delta Debugging automates the scientific method of debugging. The basic idea of the scientific method is to establish a hypothesis on why something does not work. You test this hypothesis, and you refine or reject it depending on the test outcome. When debugging, people are doing this all the time. Manually. Delta Debugging automates this process. Read more…
The Problem Considerable progress has been made in basic research and software development for modeling traffic flow. However, user-friendly and affordable services which could prevent a car driver from getting stuck in a traffic jam are not yet as effective as they could be.
Dynamic guidance covering the major highways has already been implemented in many European countries. On secondary roads, and especially across major
Ever find using a product incredibly difficult and frustrating? Lack of product interface design-some have called it the “science of simplicity”–is usually the reason why companies that neglect this may find the consumer marketplace less than receptive-and customers less than satisfied. With this in mind, Siemens has inaugurated its third worldwide User Interface Design Lab. Located at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) in Princeton, NJ, the lab has responsibility in the U.S. for evaluating user inte
Future generations of electric trains may use considerably less power than they do today thanks to the development of the first high temperature superconducting (HTS) cable. To produce the cable, Scientists at Siemens Corporate Technology in Erlangen, Germany started out with micron-sized particles of a brittle ceramic material. The particles were then embedded in a silver alloy. Through repeated rolling stages and annealing, the material was turned into ribbon-shaped wires. To make a cable from suc
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