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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 17:44 |
 One of the biggest questions facing scientists today is how life began. How did non-living molecules come together in that primordial ooze to form the polymers of life? Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that small molecules could have acted as "molecular midwives" in helping the building blocks of life's genetic material form long chains and may have assisted in selecting the base pairs of the DNA double helix. |
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 14:34 |
 MIT chemical engineers have built a sensor array that, for the first time, can detect single molecules of hydrogen peroxide emanating from a single living cell.Hydrogen peroxide has long been known to damage cells and their DNA, but scientists have recently uncovered evidence that points to a more beneficial role: |
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Monday, 08 March 2010 17:57 |
 Recent research findings indicate a possible connection between virus infections, the immune system and the onset of gluten intolerance, also known as celiac disease. |
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Friday, 05 March 2010 18:55 |
 Fictional candy maker Willy Wonka called his whimsical device to sort good chocolate eggs from bad, an eggucator. Likewise, by determining what enzymes and compounds to keep and which to discard, scientists are aiming to find their own golden eggs: more potent drugs and cleaner sources of energy. |
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Friday, 05 March 2010 12:57 |
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In newborn mice, at least, mother's milk appears to have some rather immediate and potentially far-reaching metabolic consequences. The milk intake kick-starts the liver to produce a molecule that then turns on heat-generating brown fat. |
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Wednesday, 03 March 2010 17:07 |
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The same antifreeze proteins that keep organisms from freezing in cold environments also can prevent ice from melting at warmer temperatures, according to a new Ohio University and Queen's University study published today in the Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |
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Monday, 01 March 2010 18:47 |
 Call them oil droplets with a brain or even "chemo-rats." Scientists in Illinois have developed a way to make simple oil droplets "smart" enough to navigate through a complex maze almost like a trained lab rat. The finding could have a wide range of practical implications, including helping cancer drugs to reach their target and controlling the movement of futuristic nano-machines, the scientists say. |
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Monday, 01 March 2010 15:55 |
 Scientists at the University of Essex have a greater understanding of how our genes are controlled following a major research project.The findings of the study, which looked at how proteins work as teams to control genes in the cells, could also help to unravel the mechanisms of disease such as cancer. |
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Friday, 26 February 2010 15:20 |
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A new University of Colorado at Boulder study shows mice infected with the bacteria salmonella develop clinical signs consistent with a deadly and poorly understood human inflammatory disease, a finding that may lead to new therapies. |
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Wednesday, 24 February 2010 19:31 |
 Malaria remains one of the most deadly infectious diseases. Yet, how Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, regulates its infectious cycle has remained an enigma despite decades of rigorous research. |
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 16:41 |
 A new method of growing arteries could lead to a "biological bypass" -- or a non-invasive way to treat coronary artery disease, Yale School of Medicine researchers report with their colleagues in the April issue of Journal of Clinical Investigation. |
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Monday, 08 March 2010 18:41 |
 A new technique to study protein dynamics in living cells has been created by a team of University of Illinois scientists, and evidence yielded from the new method indicates that an in vivo environment strongly modulates a protein's stability and folding rate, according to research accepted for publication in the journal Nature Methods and posted on the journal's Web site Feb. 28. |
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Monday, 08 March 2010 17:39 |
 A ground-breaking study published in the March 2010 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found an astonishing 59 per cent of study subjects had too little Vitamin D in their blood. Nearly a quarter of the group had serious deficiencies (less than 20 ng/ml) of this important vitamin. |
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Friday, 05 March 2010 17:52 |
 Every day, about 10 billion cells in a human body commit suicide. Cells infected by virus, that are transformed or otherwise dysfunctional altruistically sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Now, new imaging experiments have revealed a previously unseen order to this process, showing closely related cells dying in synchrony as a wave of destruction sweeps across their mitochondria, snuffing out the main source of energy that keeps cells alive. |
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Wednesday, 03 March 2010 18:03 |
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A patient with a breast lump that has no features suggesting cancer should still be immediately evaluated, according to a primer for physicians in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). This article provides an "in office" approach for immediate evaluation of women who present to their family physician with a breast lump. |
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Wednesday, 03 March 2010 16:08 |
 A team of researchers led by Peter Calvert (SUNY Upstate Medical University) has, for the first time, measured the diffusion coefficient of a protein in a primary cilium and in other major compartments of a highly polarized cell. The study appears in the March issue of the Journal of General Physiology. |
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Monday, 01 March 2010 17:13 |
 With their best chemical antibiotics slowly failing, scientists are increasingly looking to nature for a way to control deadly staph bacteria -- the culprit behind most hospital infections. Naturally toxic for bacteria, enzymes called lysins have the promising ability to obliterate staph, but the problem is producing large enough quantities of them to study how they work. |
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Friday, 26 February 2010 15:55 |
 In ongoing work to identify how genes interact with social environments to impact human health, UCLA researchers have discovered what they describe as a biochemical link between misery and death. In addition, they found a specific genetic variation in some individuals that seems to disconnect that link, rendering them more biologically resilient in the face of adversity. |
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Friday, 26 February 2010 13:09 |
 Huixin He, associate professor of nanoscale chemistry at Rutgers University, Newark, and Tamara Minko, professor at the Rutgers Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, have developed a nanotechnology approach that potentially could eliminate the problems of side effects and drug resistance in the treatment of cancer. |
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Wednesday, 24 February 2010 18:06 |
 Math-based computer models are a powerful tool for discovering the details of complex living systems. John Tyson, professor of biology at Virginia Tech, is creating such models to discover how cells process information and make decisions. |
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