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Scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) collaboration, including an astronomer at Penn State, have created the largest-ever three-dimensional map of the distant universe by using the light of the brightest objects in the cosmos to illuminate ghostly clouds of intergalactic hydrogen. The map provides an unprecedented view of how the universe looked 10 billion years ago.

Salvatore Torquato , a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials at Princeton University, in collaboration with a team of researchers has uncovered universal features in the structures of jammed materials, suggesting a unified method to analyze disparate systems.

Simply put, people develop diabetes because they don't have enough pancreatic beta cells to produce the insulin necessary to regulate their blood sugar levels. But what if other cells in the body could be coaxed into becoming pancreatic beta cells? Could we potentially cure diabetes? Researchers from UCLA's Larry L. Hillblom Islet Research Center have taken an important step in that direction.

Laboratory scientists have developed a way to avoid the use of expensive platinum in hydrogen fuel cells. Los Alamos scientists document utility of non-precious-metal catalysts LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, April 22, 2011—Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have developed a way to avoid the use of expensive platinum in hydrogen fuel cells, the environmentally friendly devices that might replace current power sources in everything from personal data devices to automobiles.

Imagine: Your 6-year-old found a nail in the garage and drew pictures across the side of your new car.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. A new study in fruit flies offers a broad view of the potent and sometimes devastating molecular events that occur throughout the body as a result of methamphetamine exposure. The study, described in the journal PLoS ONE, tracks changes in the expression of genes and proteins in fruit flies ( Drosophila melanogaster ) exposed to meth.

An international group of scientists has used a powerful new X-ray technique to observe for the first time at the molecular scale how muscle proteins change form and structure inside a contracting muscle cell. The study, led by scientists from King's College London, Università di Firenze (Italy), and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble (France), is published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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.