Fruit rinds provide new clues about crop domestication

Distinctly sculptured opaline phytoliths in soil and plant remains tell archaeologists which plants were present thousands of years ago. However, the production and purpose of these tiny glassy structures common in plant tissues is poorly understood. Dolores Piperno at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama and colleagues predict that a single genetic locus controls both lignin and phytolith production in sq

By the time you`ve had your new computer for six months, much faster processors will already be on the market. But there is a limit to how fast conventional computers can become. This is because computers process information in a step-by-step fashion, carrying out each part of the process in turn. To make things work really fast, we need to build `quantum computers` instead. Computers today handle information in binary form, representing everything as zeros or ones. In order to process that

Parchment points to authenticity of Vinland Map

For the first time, scientists have ascribed a date – 1434 A.D., plus or minus 11 years – to the parchment of the controversial Vinland Map, possibly the first map of the North American continent. Collaborators from the Smithsonian Center for Materials Research and Education (SCMRE), Suitland, Md., the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y., used carbon-dating techn

Why would an uneven coating of gold on a silica surface excite any interest, much less earn cover-story honors in a respected scientific journal?

This uneven coating – nanoparticles of gold in a layer that changes from very dense to very sparse across a surface of selected molecules – will allow improvements in a wide range of processes and devices. And it’s the decreasing concentration of the coating and overlaying particles, the designed-in gradient, that has chemical engineers and ph

Burning eyes, burning lungs, skin rashes and other symptoms of illness have been found in a study of residents living near land fertilized with Class B biosolids, a byproduct of the human waste treatment process.

This study is the first linking adverse health effects in humans to the land application of Class B biosolids to be published in a medical journal. It was co-authored by David Lewis, a UGA research microbiologist also affiliated with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)&#

A team of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has discovered a way to use adult bone marrow stem cells to form new blood vessels in the eye or to deliver chemicals that will prevent the abnormal formation of new vessels.

This technique, which involves injecting the stem cells into the eye, could potentially be used to stimulate vessel growth and address inherited degenerations of the retina in the first instance, and in the second, to treat ocular diseases resulting from