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Mar 18 | News
The detection of tissue-damaging pungent chemicals like those found in wasabi, tear gas and cigarette smoke is called chemical nociception. It’s different than either taste or smell, and according to recent phylogenetics research, this defensive sensor has been conserved across 500 million years of evolution.
Mar 18 | News
A team of McGill Chemistry Department researchers led by Dr. Hanadi Sleiman has achieved a breakthrough in the development of nanotubes—tiny "magic bullets" that could one day deliver drugs to specific diseased cells.
Mar 18 | News
Duke Univ. researchers have devised a method to dry and preserve proteins in a glassified form that seems to retain the molecules' properties as workhorses of biology.
Mar 17 | News
With inspiration from a semi-tropical frog that makes its own long-lived foam, engineers from the University of Cincinnati have blended plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes to create foam that captures energy, converts to sugar, and removes excess carbon dioxide from the air.
Mar 16 | News
Forensic scientists may soon have a valuable new item in their toolkits—a way to identify individuals using unique, telltale types of hand bacteria left behind on objects like keyboards and computer mice, says a new Univ. of Colorado at Boulder study.
Mar 16 | News
Magic bullets, also called silver bullets, because of the folkloric belief that only silver bullets can kill supernatural creatures, remain the goal of drug development efforts today. A team of scientists at Washington Univ. in St. Louis is currently working on a magic bullet for cancer. But their bullets are gold rather than silver.
Mar 16 | News
The film "Avatar" isn't the only 3-D blockbuster making a splash this winter. A team of scientists from Houston's Texas Medical Center this week unveiled a new technique for growing 3-D cell cultures, a technological leap from the flat petri dish that could save millions of dollars in drug-testing costs.
Mar 12 | News
Conventional biological wisdom holds that living cells interact with their environment through an elaborate network of chemical signals, which is most therapies rely on drugs that block chemical signals. Scientists can now show, however, for the first time, that direct physical force can also change the way cellular proteins conduct chemical activity.
Mar 10 | News
For decades, the traditional practice in animal testing has been standardization, but a study involving Purdue Univ. has shown that adding as few as two controlled environmental variables to preclinical mice tests can greatly reduce costly false positives, the number of animals needed for testing and the cost of pharmaceutical trials.
Mar 10 | News
A recent discovery in understanding how to chemically break down the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a useful form opens the doors for scientists to wonder what organism is out there—or could be created—to accomplish the task.