Although cases of adult-onset diabetes have skyrocketed in the United States, researchers still don’t know much about the biological processes that predispose so many people to the disease. But in research that will be published in the Oct. 16 issue of the journal Nature, scientists say they’ve found a protein that plays an essential role in regulating a cell’s ability to absorb glucose, an important step toward gaining a better understanding of the underlying causes of diabetes.

An asteroid that has eluded astronomers for decades turns out to be an unusual pair of objects traveling together in space, a UCLA planetary scientist and colleagues report.

The asteroid Hermes was rediscovered last week after being lost for 66 years. Now Jean-Luc Margot, a researcher in UCLA’s department of Earth and space sciences, has determined that the asteroid is, in fact, two objects orbiting each other. The two objects together would cover an area approximately the size

How can you be sure your on-line transactions are secure, and find out if anybody has been siphoning off money from your credit card? The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed a way of handling electronic information to protect the rights of cyberspace users and guard against fraud when buying on the Internet.

The EU Cyber Tools On-Line Search for Evidence (CTOSE) project helps identify, secure, integrate and present electronic evidence on on-line criminal offence

Scanning all of Shakespeare in 1/60th of a second

A computer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis has developed technology to stop malicious software – malware – such as viruses and worms long before it even has a chance to reach computers in the home and office.

John Lockwood, Ph.D., an assistant professor of computer science at Washington University, and the graduate students that work in his research laboratory have developed a hardware platform called the Fiel

Europe’s mission to the Red Planet, Mars Express, is on schedule to arrive at the planet on Christmas Day, 2003.

The lander, Beagle 2, is due to descend through the Martian atmosphere and touch down also on 25 December.
Mars Express is now within 20 million kilometres of the Red Planet and the next mission milestone comes on 19 December, when Mars Express will release Beagle 2. The orbiter spacecraft will send Beagle 2 spinning towards the planet on a precise trajectory.

Age at Onset and Inflammatory Cells Define Patient Subsets, Guide Treatment

People who develop asthma as children may have a different disease than those who develop it as an adult. A study in the January issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology adds to the growing body of evidence that asthma is not a single disease, but a group of syndromes with different origins and biological characteristics. The research team, led by Sally Wenzel, M.D., a pulmonologist at National

Scientists are finding a computer program called Elves to be a nearly magical solution to the tedious and time-consuming task of determining the 3-D shape of proteins – a major focus of cutting-edge proteomics today – from X-ray diffraction data.

According to Elves developer James Holton, who recently received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, researchers can unleash Elves on a set of X-ray diffraction data and go on to other things – or take a nap – while the computer

After years of searching for a rare African primate, anthropologist Scott McGraw and his colleagues believed that the Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey, Procolobus badius waldroni, was probably extinct. They had written a paper in 2000 saying so.

But recent hard evidence of the Miss Waldron’s red colobus’ existence has rekindled McGraw’s hopes of finding the primate, reportedly last seen in 1978. McGraw, an associate professor of anthropology at Ohio State University, det

Already renowned as a leading centre for plant science research, the University of Reading’s Herbarium is now a world resource for botanists after the launch of a new internet website featuring an ever-expanding database of specimens.

The Herbarium, which was founded in 1900, contains 264,500 plant specimens from around the world, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom and Mediterranean countries such as Spain and Morocco.

There are extensive collections of phanerogams, pter

Before humans can leave their boot prints on the dusty surface of Mars, many questions have to be answered and many problems solved. One of the most fundamental questions – one that has intrigued humankind for centuries – is whether life has ever existed on Mars, the most Earthlike of all the planets.

Through its long-term Aurora Programme of solar system exploration, ESA is already preparing a series of robotic missions that will reveal the Red Planet’s secrets and pave the way for a human

Researchers in North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today’s high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.

The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined

Peeking at a Puzzling Supernova with Spectropolarimetry

By measuring polarized light from an unusual exploding star, an international team of astrophysicists and astronomers has worked out the first detailed picture of a Type Ia supernova and the distinctive star system in which it exploded.

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the researchers determined that supernova 2002ic exploded inside a flat, dense, clumpy disk of dust and gas

During World War II, soldiers from the Fifth U.S. Army set up camp at an exclusive hunting estate in Italy, regrouping between military drives north against German troops and fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Sixty years later, forest pathologists are pointing to huge gaps of dead trees in the estate as the visible reminders of that brief stay.

In a new study published in the April issue of Mycological Research, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and in Italy, have unlock

Program speeds drug discovery

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute today announced the release of a software program capable of quickly identifying molecules that show promise for future medicines. The software program enables drug makers to comb through enormous databases of potential molecules and identify the ones that have sound medicinal properties.

Rensselaer researchers with skills in computer science, chemistry, and math allied to create the software pro

Close look at structure of transport proteins could aid search Red-blooded genealogists take note: The discovery in microbes of two oxygen-packing proteins, the earliest known ancestors to hemoglobin, brings scientists closer to identifying the earliest life forms to use oxygen. According to the project’s lead investigator, University of Hawaii microbiologist Maqsudul Alam, the research may also aid in the search for blood substitutes as new

Process shows how mounds of data can be effectively managed

Johns Hopkins scientists have successfully used new techniques to search the yeast genome for genes that help keep copied chromosomes together, protecting the integrity of the organism’s genetic material during cell division.

By combining two genome-wide screens, the researchers were able to narrow down the dozens of genes identified by the first screen to just 17 that made both cut-offs — a number small enough

CDMS II presents new results on Weakly Interacting Massive Particles that could make up most of the matter of our universe

With the first data from their underground observatory in Northern Minnesota, scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search have peered with greater sensitivity than ever before into the suspected realm of the WIMPS. The sighting of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles could solve the double mystery of dark matter on the cosmic scale and of supersymmetry on the

Such research could offer important evolutionary insights into the nature of intelligence in primates

Until now, primatologists believed lemurs to be primitive, ancient offshoots of the primate family tree, with far less intelligence than their more sophisticated cousins, monkeys, apes and humans. But at the Duke University Primate Center, with the gentle touch of his nose to a computer screen, the ringtail lemur called Aristides is teaching psychologist Elizabeth Brannon a startling

A natural mutation of a gene that helps regulate the reactivity of the immune system is a major contributor to type 1 diabetes, Medical College of Georgia researchers have found.

The newly discovered gene, SUMO-4, controls the activity of NFêB, a molecule that in turn controls the activity of cytokines, proteins that regulate the intensity and duration of the immune response, according to research that will be published in the August print issue of Nature Genetics and online July 11.

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have developed the first international server that allows the user to analyze genetic diversity on a large scale. The web service, published in the special edition of Nucleic Acids Research on bioinformatics, will facilitate research about the genetic basis of hereditary diseases. The server is called PDA (Pipeline Diversity Analysis) and for the first time biologists around the world can search for small variations in the genomes of different