The Heisenberg uncertainty principle places severe constraints on the subatomic world. To illustrate, for particles called bosons, the principle dictates that bosons either condense to form a superconductor or they must remain localized in an insulator. However, experiments conducted during the last 15 years on thin films have revealed a third possibility: Bosons can exist as a metal. Scientists have been struggling to interpret this surprising result.

“The conventional theory of metals is

Genes and behavior go together in honey bees so strongly that an individual bee’s occupation can be predicted by knowing a profile of its gene expression in the brain, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This strong relationship surfaced in a complex molecular study of 6,878 different genes replicated with 72 cDNA microarrays that captured the essence of brain gene activity within the natural world of the honey bee (Apis mellifera). Even though most of th

Professor Ana Wünsch Blanco has presented her PhD, at the Public University of Navarre, on the application of molecular technologies in the identification and enhancement of the cherry fruit tree.

The application of molecular technologies in the identification and enhancement of the cherry tree is not something new. In fact, the varietal identification of fruit species has been accompanied, in the past few years, by the appearance of DNA markers. This has enabled an investigation of the geno

Robots, machines that speak, answering machines that understand what we say … will be soon a regular part of our daily life. Concretely the University of the Basque Country (EHU/UPV), together with the universities of Zaragoza and Valencia, is developing a system capable of recognising speech. The aim of the project is to develop a machine which responds automatically to the user who asks for information about trains and timetables.

The machine will be able to recognise the voice of the p

A new, all-natural, pollutant-busting microbe has been discovered by scientists in Germany. Research published in the October 2003 issue of Microbiology, a Society for General Microbiology journal, describes a new strain of bacterium, which could be used in the near future to clean up polluted land.

Over the years, many harsh and highly toxic chemicals have built-up in the environment. Dr Rapp and his colleagues at the National Research Centre for Biotechnology in Braunschweig, Germany, have

Cyclacel Limited, the UK-based biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it had entered into an agreement with MRC geneservice for the distribution of its proprietary Drosophila RNA interference (RNAi) collection. This agreement will allow access for MRC geneservice’s academic and commercial clients to the Cyclacel collection, for gene identification and validation purposes.

The Cyclacel Drosophila RNAi set covers some 13,605 genes defined in the FlyBase Drosophila genome database. The