A high-throughput assay developed by University of Illinois at Chicago chemists has led to discovery of a small organic compound that shows the unusual ability to inhibit cell migration. The new compound, identified as UIC-1005, may play a role in developing new kinds of cancer drugs.

The findings are published in the November issue of the journal ChemBioChem.

“We’ve been looking for chemical compounds that slow the process of cell migration,” said Gabriel Fenteany, assistant

UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute researchers have localized a region on chromosome 16 that is likely to contain a risk gene for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the most prevalent childhood-onset psychiatric disorder.

Their research, published in the October edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that the suspected risk gene may contribute as much as 30 percent of the underlying genetic cause of ADHD and may also be involved in a separate childhood onset disorder

Nicotine isn’t all bad, despite its addictive qualities and its presence in tobacco products, increasingly taboo in these health-conscious times. As a chemical compound, nicotine even has beneficial properties. It’s used around the world as a relatively cheap, environmentally friendly insecticide, repelling bugs that attack tobacco and other plants, and – contrary to popular misconceptions – it is not a carcinogen.

Take a nicotine molecule and snip off a methyl group, though, and y

Findings with lab mice may lead to novel cholesterol-lowering drugs against heart disease

Two people eat the same egg, cheese and ham muffin for breakfast, yet one absorbs significantly more cholesterol into his or her blood than the other. Why?
The answer, and all of its implications for combating heart disease, remains stubbornly hidden within our DNA. In recent genetic studies with lab mice, however, researchers at The Rockefeller University have begun to close in on the culpr

Study of planetary disks around T Tauri stars

If David Weintraub and Jeff Bary are right, there may be a lot more planets circling stars like the Sun than current models of star and planet formation predict.
The associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt and his graduate student are taking a critical look at T Tauri stars. These are stellar adolescents, less than 10 million years old, which are destined to become stars similar to the Sun as they age.

Classical T Taur

Somewhere in the distant, old Universe, a population of stars hide undetected. They were the first to form after the birth of the Universe and are supposed to be far bigger in mass than any star visible today.

Astronomers know they must have been out there: only in this way could they solve the riddle of the origin and composition of stars in today’s Universe. A couple of ESA missions will help astronomers search for this elusive population.

When the Universe formed, there was

Scientists work toward unraveling gene expression in the brain

Using Web-based tools they developed to sift through reams of data, scientists from the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins hope to unravel the genetics of neurological problems associated with Down syndrome, autism and lead poisoning.

Their search starts with microarrays, or so-called “gene chips,” which measure the activity of tens of thousands of genes all at once. By analyzing the pattern of gene acti

Drivers talking on cell phones are nearly twice as likely as other drivers involved in crashes to have rear-end collisions, according to a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study. Crashes involving cell phone use, however, are less likely to result in fatalities or serious injuries than crashes not involving the devices.

Almost 60 percent of licensed N.C. drivers have used a cell phone while behind the wheel, investigators from the UNC Highway Safety Research Center (HSRC) fo

A team of Carnegie Mellon University and NASA scientists will travel to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile in April to conduct research that will help them develop and deploy a robot and instruments that may someday enable other robots to find life on Mars. The researchers will be using the Atacama, described as the most arid region on Earth, as a Martian analog.

The group is funded with a $3 million, three-year grant from NASA to the university’s Robotics Institute. They are collabo

Until the last few years, Mars has been regarded as a cold, arid world that lost most of its water long ago. However, recent observations by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey spacecraft have provided tantalising evidence that huge amounts of water may be hidden just below the surface.

Now, a powerful new instrument is poised to probe the Martian soil, using an advanced radar system to penetrate the rust-red desert. On Friday 11 April, Professor Iwan Williams (Queen Mary) will expl

In photographs, it looks like a big red spaceship cruising the ocean depths. But it’s actually a new species of jelly that was discovered and described by scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. MBARI scientists published their research on this unusual animal in a recent online version of the journal Marine Biology.

With a bell diameter of up to a meter wide, the new jelly, named Tiburonia granrojo or “big red,” would seem tough to miss, except that it lives deep below t

Almost every week we hear of a new genome sequence being completed, yet turning sequence information into knowledge about what individual genes do is very difficult. An article published in Journal of Biology this week will simplify this task, as it describes a new online tool that dramatically improves predictions of how individual genes are regulated. Dr. Wyeth Wasserman and his team have created this powerful new two-step method for identifying which regulators of gene expression, called

NASA-funded project to search for underground water on Mars

University of Iowa professor and space physicist Don Gurnett is hoping to receive an uplifting word from western Asia on Monday.

That’s because Gurnett heads a $7 million, NASA-funded project to search for underground water on Mars, a project whose radar instrument is aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft using a Soyuz rocket and scheduled for launch at 12:45 p.m. CDT Monday, June

Researchers at the University of Southern California have created a new tool for organizing and visualizing collections of electronic mail. It is designed to help legal researchers, historians, archivists, and others faced with challenges in dealing with large email archives.

For examples, consider the following cases:

* A large corporation has just received a subpoena for all email messages on a specific question. Traditional keyword searches return an enormous volume of ma

Using XMM-Newton, astronomers have obtained the world’s deepest ‘wide screen’ X-ray image of the cosmos to date. Their observations show newly discovered clusters of galaxies and provide insights into the structure of the distant Universe…

Unlike grains of sand on a beach, matter is not uniformly spread throughout the Universe. Instead, it is concentrated into galaxies like our own which themselves congregate into clusters. These clusters are ‘strung’ throughout the Universe in a web-like st

The search for life on other planets could soon extend to solar systems that are very different from our own, according to a new study by an Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues.

In fact, finding a terrestrial planet in such a solar system would offer unique scientific opportunities to test evolution, said Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy here. In a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, he and his coauthors calculated that NASA’s upcoming Space Interferome

Using a new approach for dissecting the complicated interactions among many genes, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered how a common cancer gene works in tandem with another gene to spur the unchecked growth of cells. The researchers say the technique was so useful in solving a longstanding puzzle that it may expedite the discovery of other such gene interactions that lead to cancer, and could accelerate the development of new cancer drugs.

The report in the Aug

More than 220 ideas for making European scientific endeavours and policies better known, understood and more attractive to the young and to the public at large are published today on the Web by the European Commission’s research and innovation information service CORDIS (www.cordis.lu/eoi/science-society/).

These ideas, initiated by citizens, public and private bodies, research and civil society organisations, as well as by the media, in 29 countries, represent the impressive results from a

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or “planetesimals,” from the sola

Philosophical transactions a November issue

Organised and edited by Carlos Frenk, George Kalmus, Nigel Smith and Simon White

What is the universe made of? How is it expanding? What is the origin of galaxies and other cosmic large-scale structures? These questions and some tentative answers were the focus of the discussion meeting on The search for dark matter and dark energy in the Universe, held at The Royal Society on 22-23 January 2003.

Astronomers have known fo