news 2011

Scientists from Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Granada have for the first time reconstructed active enzymes from four-billion-year-old extinct organisms. By measuring the properties of these enzymes, they can examine the conditions in which the extinct organisms lived.

Solar cells made from organic materials are inexpensive, lightweight and flexible, but their performance lags behind cells that contain silicon or other inorganic materials. Cornell chemist William Dichtel and colleagues have found a way to synthesize ordered organic films that could be a major step toward solving this problem.

Scientists from the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol have discovered how marine bacteria join together two antibiotics they make independently to produce a potent chemical that can kill drug-resistant strains of the MRSA superbug. Working with Japanese pharmaceutical company Daiichi-Sankyo, and funded by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the researchers' work paves the way for the creation of new hybrid antibiotics that may help to solve the growing problem of bacterial infections that are resistant to essentially all antibiotics.

A Stanford research team uses glowing nanopillars to give biologists, neurologists and other researchers a deeper, more precise look into living cells. BY ANDREW MYERS As words go, evanescent doesn't see enough use. It is an artful term whose beauty belies its true meaning: fleeting or dying out quickly.

Biologists at UC San Diego have identified the molecular mechanisms triggered by starvation in fruit flies that enhance the nervous system's response to smell, allowing these insects and presumably vertebrates'including humans?to become more efficient and voracious foragers when hungry. Their discovery of the neural changes that control odor-driven food searches in flies, which they detail in a paper in the April 1 issue of the journal Cell, could provide a new way to potentially regulate human appetite.

An extremely rare copy of the very first book written by Humphry Davy, one of the world's greatest scientists, at just 19 years of age, has been discovered in UCL's library collections. Essays on heat, light and the combinations of light was published in 1799, a youthful work that Davy was later in life embarrassed about having written.

An extremely rare copy of the very first book written by Humphry Davy, one of the world's greatest scientists, at just 19 years of age, has been discovered in UCL's library collections. Essays on heat, light and the combinations of light was published in 1799, a youthful work that Davy was later in life embarrassed about having written.

Science Cath Harris | 01 Apr 11 An Oxford University scientist has taken our understanding of the origin of life a step further. Professor Don Fraser from the Department of Earth Sciences has carried out neutron scattering experiments to try to find out more about the role of geochemistry in determining the origin of our amino acids - key building blocks of life on Earth - and specifically why the DNA-coded amino acids that make up our proteins are all left-handed.

Science Cath Harris | 01 Apr 11 An Oxford University scientist has taken our understanding of the origin of life a step further. Professor Don Fraser from the Department of Earth Sciences has carried out neutron scattering experiments to try to find out more about the role of geochemistry in determining the origin of our amino acids - key building blocks of life on Earth - and specifically why the DNA-coded amino acids that make up our proteins are all left-handed.

Scientists from Oxford University have mapped a state of matter called 'quantum spin liquid', whose existence was proposed in the 1970s but which has only been observed recently. Until now there has been very limited information describing the physical characteristics of a quantum spin liquid state, but researchers from Oxford University's Department of Physics working with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have demonstrated the effect of temperature and magnetic field on this state of matter.

University of Birmingham asteroseimologists are part of a team of scientists who have studied approximately 600 red giant stars and have been able to distinguish between those that burn hydrogen and those that are burning helium in their cores, according to research published today (30 March 11). Red giants are stars that are nearing the end of their life.

Experts at the University have discovered how plants know when to make their own sunscreen to protect themselves from the harmful rays of the sun. Scientists have speculated for decades that plants must have a 'photoreceptor' for UV-B wavelengths in sunlight, similar to those they use to detect other wavelengths which control other processes, such as triggering when they flower.

News Release Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Scripps Homepage ScrippsNews Home "Lost" samples from famous origin of life researcher could send the search for Earth's first life in a new direction March 22, 2011 By Robert Monroe Scripps Institution of Oceanography/University of California, San Diego Stanley Miller gained fame with his 1953 experiment showing the synthesis of organic compounds thought to be important in setting the origin of life in motion.

A new discovery about how molecules are broken down by the body, which will help pharmaceutical chemists design better drugs, has been made by researchers at the University of Bristol. Working with Professor Jeremy Harvey and Professor Adrian Mulholland of Bristol's School of Chemistry , Dr Julianna Olah, an EU Marie Curie Fellow in Bristol at the time, studied a class of enzymes ' cytochromes P450 - which play an important role in removing drug molecules from the body.

Princeton researchers have invented an extremely sensitive sensor that opens up new ways to detect a wide range of substances, from biological markers of cancer to hidden explosives. The sensor, which is the most sensitive of its kind to date and easy to produce, relies on a completely new architecture and fabrication technique developed by the Princeton researchers.

A new NASA-funded study demonstrates how a chemical that smells like rotten eggs - hydrogen sulfide - may have played a role in the formation of life on Earth. The study authors, including Andrew Aubrey of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, re-examined old test tubes from classic experiments performed in the 1950s by Stanley Miller, who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

The organic compounds surviving in fifty million year old fossilized reptile skin can be seen for the first time today, thanks to a stunning infra-red image produced by University of Manchester palaeontologists and geochemists. Published in the journal Royal Society Proceedings B , the brightly-coloured image shows the presence of amides – the organic compounds, or building blocks of life – in the ancient skin of a reptile, found in the 50 million year-old rocks of the Green River Formation in Utah, USA.

Researchers have revealed a new single-stage method for recharging the hydrogen storage compound ammonia borane. LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, March 21, 2011—Researchers have revealed a new single-stage method for recharging the hydrogen storage compound ammonia borane. The breakthrough makes hydrogen a more attractive fuel for vehicles and other transportation modes.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham have developed a molecular test that has tracked the global spread of a carrier of antibiotic resistance, according to a paper published online today by a leading medical journal. Researchers led by Professor Laura Piddock in the School of Immunity and Infection devised a specific test that can identify the carrier, known as a plasmid, and track its progress around the world in both humans and animals in various strains of E. coli.

New method for self-assembling molecules Researchers at the University of Sheffield have discovered a new way of making small molecules self-assemble into complex nanopatterns, which will push the limits of what is possible in `bottom-up´ methods of nanopatterning for advanced functional materials through molecular self-assembly.