PASADENA, Calif.—Chemists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory believe they can now explain one of the remaining mysteries of photosynthesis, the chemical process by which plants convert sunlight into usable energy and generate the oxygen that we breathe. The finding suggests a new way of approaching the design of catalysts that drive the water-splitting reactions of artificial photosynthesis. "If we want to make systems that can do artificial photosynthesis, it's important that we understand how the system ...

Bacteria appear to speed up their evolution by positioning specific genes along the route of expected traffic jams in DNA encoding. Certain genes are in prime collision paths for the moving molecular machineries that read the DNA code, as University of Washington scientists explain in this week's edition of Nature. The spatial-organization tactics their model organism, Bacillus subtilis, takes to evolve and adapt might be imitated in other related Gram-positive bacteria, including harmful, ever-changing germs like staph, strep, and listeria, to strengthen their virulence ...

A team of researchers, led by a University of California, Davis, plant scientist, has identified a lettuce gene and related enzyme that put the brakes on germination during hot weather — a discovery that could lead to lettuces that can sprout year-round, even at high temperatures. The study also included researchers from Arcadia Biosciences and Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University, India. The finding is particularly important to the nearly $2 billion lettuce industries of California and Arizona, which together produce more than 90 percent of the nation's lettuce. ...

A new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) has pieced together the last 150 years of history for one of the state's most interesting denizens: the black bear. The study, which looked at everything from historic newspaper articles to more recent scientific studies, indicates that black bears in Nevada were once distributed throughout the state but subsequently vanished in the early 1900s. Today, the bear population is increasing and rapidly reoccupying its former range due in part to the conservation and management ...

It looks like 2013 will be a thrilling season for baseball fans as four of the six divisions can be expected to deliver tight races, says baseball guru NJIT Associate Professor and Associate Dean Bruce Bukiet. Over the years, Bukiet has applied mathematical analysis to compute the number of regular season games each Major League Baseball team should win. Though his expertise is in mathematical modeling, his projections have compared well with those of so-called experts. The numbers indicate that only one game might separate the first and second place teams in both ...

PHILADELPHIA — A new diagnostic test that uses a scientific technique known as metabolomic analysis may be a safe and easy screening method that could improve the prognosis of patients with pancreatic cancer through earlier detection. Researchers examined the utility of metabolomic analysis as a diagnostic method for pancreatic cancer and then validated the new approach, according to study results published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Although surgical resection can be a curative treatment ...

Los Angeles, CA (March 28, 2013) While compared to men, women continue to be underrepresented in math and science courses and careers, is this disparity a true reflection of male and female student ability? According to a study to be released tomorrow in Psychology of Women Quarterly, a SAGE journal, male and female students earn similar grades in math and science while Asian American students of both genders outperform all other races. Researchers Nicole Else-Quest, Concetta Mineo and Ashley Higgins studied 367 White, African American, Latino/Latina, and Asian American ...

The Gastropoda, more commonly known as snails and slugs, are a large group of animals within the phylum Mollusca. Gastropоds species are extremely diverse in forms and sizes, ranging from microscopic to large. About 50 species of snails are currently considered to inhabit Skadar Lake, the largest on the Balkan Peninsula. The Bojana River connects the lake with the Adriatic Sea, and the Drin River provides a link with the Ohrid Lake. Scientists Vladimir Pešić from the University of Montenegro and Peter Glöer from the Biodiversity Research Laboratory have ...

A specially-adapted 'tactile helmet', developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield, could provide fire-fighters operating in challenging conditions with vital clues about their surroundings. The helmet is fitted with a number of ultrasound sensors that are used to detect the distances between the helmet and nearby walls or other obstacles. These signals are transmitted to vibration pads that are attached to the inside of the helmet, touching the wearer's forehead. Rescue workers, such as fire-fighters, who might be working in dark conditions or in buildings ...

A research coordinated by the scientists at SISSA of Trieste has now developed and studied a numeric model of the chromosome that supports the experimental data and provides a hypothesis on the bundle's function. A chromosome spends most of its life "diluted" in the nuclear cytoplasm. To the untrained eye it may look like a randomly entangled thread, yet biologists claim the opposite: although a chaotic component does exist in the bundle, experimental measurements have identified regions that tend to contain specific genes. Thanks to such measurements, researchers have ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Students perform better when their instructors use hand gestures – a simple teaching tool that could yield benefits in higher-level math such as algebra. A study published in Child Development, the top-ranked educational psychology journal, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that gesturing may have a unique effect on learning. Teachers in the United States tend to use gestures less than teachers in other countries. "Gesturing can be a very beneficial tool that is completely free and easily employed in classrooms," said Kimberly Fenn, study ...

The sooner a person smokes a cigarette upon waking in the morning, the more likely he or she is to acquire lung or oral cancer, according to Penn State researchers. "We found that smokers who consume cigarettes immediately after waking have higher levels of NNAL -- a metabolite of the tobacco-specific carcinogen NNK -- in their blood than smokers who refrain from smoking a half hour or more after waking, regardless of how many cigarettes they smoke per day," said Steven Branstetter, assistant professor of biobehavioral health. According to Branstetter, other research ...

Canola oil and high-oleic canola oils can lower abdominal fat when used in place of other selected oil blends, according to a team of American and Canadian researchers. The researchers also found that consuming certain vegetable oils may be a simple way of reducing the risk of metabolic syndrome, which affects about one in three U.S. adults and one in five Canadian adults. "The monounsaturated fats in these vegetable oils appear to reduce abdominal fat, which in turn may decrease metabolic syndrome risk factors," said Penny Kris-Etherton, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition, ...

VIDEO: Comet ISON is now approaching the inner solar system. Discovered last year, the comet remains unusually active for its distance from the sun. If current trends continue, ISON could rank... Click here for more information. Astronomers from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Lowell Observatory have used NASA's Swift satellite to check out comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), which may become one of the most dazzling in decades when it rounds the sun later this ...

Performing surgery on a pregnant patient is a delicate matter. Risks to both mother and baby must be carefully weighed in every decision a surgeon makes. Recently, at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, a surgeon performed a groundbreaking robotic laparoscopic procedure on a 35-year-old pregnant patient whose cervix was too short to sustain a pregnancy. VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtvVARBoxFw. PATIENT FEATURE STORY: http://www.utmb.edu/newsroom/article8400.aspx. Dr. Sami Kilic, chief of minimally invasive gynecology and research at UTMB, ...

Boulder, Colo., USA - The April 2013 issue of Lithosphere is now available. Four classic research papers cover the Saint Elias Mountains of Yukon and British Columbia, Canada; the Nacimiento fault near San Simeon, California, USA; the western Alps; and the Caledonides in Scandinavia. An invited review relays the significance of dynamic topography to long-term sea level change. This month's research focus article, which is open access online, discusses the revolution in remote sensing-LiDAR-laser altimetry swath mapping. Abstracts are online at http://lithosphere.gsapubs.org/content/current. ...

When blessed with a resource in overwhelming abundance it's generally a good idea to make valuable use of that resource. Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant organic material on Earth. For thousands of years it has been used as animal feed, and for the past two centuries has been a staple of the paper industry. This abundant resource, however, could also supply the sugars needed to produce advanced biofuels that can supplement or replace fossil fuels, providing several key technical challenges are met. One of these challenges is finding ways to more cost-effectively ...

Athens, Ga. – While pearl millet is a major food staple in some of the fastest growing regions on Earth, relatively little is known about the drought-hardy grain. Recently, plant geneticists at the University of Georgia successfully isolated the gene that creates dwarfed varieties of pearl millet. It is the first time a gene controlling an important agronomic trait has been isolated in the pearl millet genome. Their work appeared in the March edition of the journal G3: Genes, Genomics, Genetics. The dwarf varieties are economically important in the U.S., India and ...

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, March 29, 2013 -- As the capacity of handheld devices increases to accommodate a greater number of functions, these devices have more memory, larger display screens, and the ability to play higher definition video files. If the users of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablet PCs, and notebooks, want to share or transfer data on one device with that of another device, a great deal of time and effort are needed. As a possible method for the speedy transmission of large data, researchers are studying the adoption of gigabits per second ...

Scientists have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources. The study focused mainly on how Argentine ants behave and coordinate themselves in ...

Highlights Among dialysis patients, Hispanics tend to live the longer than Blacks, who in turn live longer than whites. Determining the reasons for these racial and ethnic disparities may be important for improving care. As of 2010, there were approximately 410,000 dialysis patients in the United States. Washington, DC (March 28, 2013) — Among kidney failure patients on dialysis, Hispanics tend to live the longest and Whites the shortest, with Blacks' survival time in between these two, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal ...

Highlights Low vitamin D levels measured at three months after kidney transplantation were linked with lower kidney function and increased kidney scarring at 12 months post-transplant. Other hormones involved with mineral metabolism were not predictors of kidney function or scarring after one year. Vitamin D deficiency is prevalent in patients with kidney failure. Washington, DC (March 28, 2013) — Vitamin D deficiency may decrease kidney function in transplant recipients, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society ...

Two University of Calgary researchers have developed a ground-breaking way to make new affordable and efficient catalysts for converting electricity into chemical energy. Their technology opens the door to homeowners and energy companies being able to easily store and reuse solar and wind power. Such energy is clean and renewable, but it's available only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The research by Curtis Berlinguette and Simon Trudel, both in the chemistry department in the Faculty of Science, has just been published in Science – one of the world's ...

ANN ARBOR—Wouldn't it be convenient if you could reverse the rusting of your car by shining a bright light on it? It turns out that this concept works for undoing oxidation on copper nanoparticles, and it could lead to an environmentally friendly production process for an important industrial chemical, University of Michigan engineers have discovered. "We report a new physical phenomenon that has potentially significant practical implications," said Suljo Linic, an associate professor of chemical engineering, who led the study, which is published in the March 29 issue ...

STANFORD, Calif. — When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the first modern computer developed in the 1940s, used vacuum tubes and electricity. Today, computers use transistors made from highly engineered semiconducting materials to carry out their logical operations. And now a team of Stanford University bioengineers has taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology. In a paper to be published March 28 in Science, ...