Feature Channels: Chemistry

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In a groundbreaking paper published today in the journal Cell, investigators at the Cancer Research Institute Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have found dozens of important new genes, both coding and non-coding that impact sensitivity to chemotherapy. In doing so, the scientists developed a novel technique that marries CRISPR technology with big data mining to identify and assign function to non-coding RNAs

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A new University of Kansas research effort featured in the current edition of Integrative Biology has resulted in a low-cost, reliable blood test that uses a small plastic chip about the size of a credit card that can deliver the same diagnostic information as a bone biopsy — but using a simple blood draw instead.

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Explosives have an inherent problem - they should be perfectly safe for handling and storage but detonate reliably on demand.

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Helen M. Berman, Board of Governors distinguished professor emerita of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berman is among 213 people elected to the academy this year, including author Ta-Nehisi Coates, actor Tom Hanks, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, gene editing developer Feng Zhang and pediatric neurologist Huda Zoghbi.

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Brian Popp, assistant professor of chemistry at West Virginia University, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER award.

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— Brian Popp, assistant professor of chemistry at West Virginia University, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER award. The award recognizes Popp’s development of new methods utilizing carbon dioxide reactions to prepare chemicals for manufacturing pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and other materials.

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American Thyroid Association calls for pre-distribution of potassium iodide (KI) to individual households residing within a minimum of the 10-mile emergency planning zone (EPZ). The ATA® also calls for maintenance of a stockpile of potassium iodine in a greater than 10 out to 50-mile ring out from nuclear power points.

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Machine learning algorithms excel at finding complex patterns within big data, so researchers often use them to make predictions. Researchers are pushing the technology beyond finding correlations to help uncover hidden cause-effect relationships and drive scientific discoveries. At the University of South Florida, researchers are integrating machine learning techniques into their work studying proteins. As they report in The Journal of Chemical Physics, one of their main challenges has been a lack of methods to identify cause-effect relationships in data obtained from molecular dynamics simulations.

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Accelerator scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are testing a new type of electron gun for a future generation of instruments that take snapshots of the atomic world in never-before-seen quality and detail, with applications in chemistry, biology, energy and materials science.

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Chemists at Indiana University have published research findings on their discovery of a new and relatively unknown flame retardant in the environment. Their study is the first to detect the potentially toxic chemical in North America.

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Click here to go to the Food Science News Source

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Scientists directly see how the atoms in a magnesium-based battery fit into the structure of electrodes.

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Scientists mimic a worm’s lethal jaw to design and form resilient materials.

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Researchers at the University of Washington have designed a convenient and natural product that uses proteins to rebuild tooth enamel and treat dental cavities.

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A biologically inspired membrane intended to cleanse carbon dioxide almost completely from the smoke of coal-fired power plants has been developed by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico.

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Similar to how microwave ovens heat soup but not the bowl, researchers at West Virginia University are exploring the possibility of heating one solution component selectively over others in chemical reactions.

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Researchers have developed and patented a novel approach to treat ischemic stroke combining three distinct classes of drugs to create a multi-drug combination therapy, and have joined forces with CHS Pharma, Inc.

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Lasting just a few hundred billionths of a billionth of a second, these bursts offer new tool to study chemistry and magnetism.

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Carolina Motter Catarino, a graduate student in chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been awarded £10,000 from the Lush Prize, which is a collaboration between cosmetics company Lush and research organization Ethical Consumer.

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Articles on personal care product chemicals; PBPK modeling; 2D vs 3D for drug-induced liver injury; zebrafish and drug discovery; glutathione restoration and acetaminophen; high-throughput screening for thyroid hormone T4; and genetically engineered food crops featured in new Toxicological Sciences.

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UPTON, NY—Scientists studying plant biochemistry at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered new details about biomolecules that put the brakes on oil production. The findings suggest that disabling these biomolecular brakes could push oil production into high gear—a possible pathway toward generating abundant biofuels and plant-derived bioproducts.

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The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is pleased to announce the winners of its annual awards, and the times and titles of their talks at ASBMB 2018 in San Diego in late April.

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During a recent weeklong coding marathon at Brookhaven Lab, scientists, code developers, and computing hardware experts achieved from 2x to 40x speedups for scientific application codes running on supercomputers powered by Intel processors for high-performance computing.

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Most of us don’t think about our teeth and bones until one aches or breaks. A team of engineers at Washington University in St. Louis looked deep within collagen fibers to see how the body forms new bone and teeth, seeking insights into faster bone healing and new biomaterials.

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A research team led by Associate Professor He Jianzhong from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at NUS Faculty of Engineering has found that a natural bacterium isolated from mushroom crop residue can directly convert cellulose to biobutanol, a biofuel.

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The 2018 ASBMB Annual Meeting in San Diego will feature talks by winners of the Journal of Biological Chemistry/Herbert Tabor Young Investigator Awards, on April 22.

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Researchers have learned to combine up to eight different metals in a single tiny, uniformly mixed nanoparticle.

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A research team led by the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed an economical and industrially viable strategy to produce graphene.

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A simple activity will demonstrate how chemistry is essential for creating consumer products – specifically liquid hand soaps – at the American Cleaning Institute’s (ACI) booth during the USA Science & Engineering Festival April 7-8 in Washington, D.C. At the ACI booth (#6436), students will visit a series of stations to learn about the function of several ingredients found in a liquid hand soap.

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It's called a nanoflower, but if you could brush your cheek against its microscopic petals, you would find them cool, hard, and...rusty. Common rust forms the inner skeleton of these lovely and intricate nanostructures, while their outer layer is a kind of plastic. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a straightforward way to make this type of conducting polymer with high surface area that is likely to be useful for energy transfer and storage applications.

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Bioethanol is a $1 trillion industry, but advances could make production more efficient and less reliant on food stocks such as corn.

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Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast who invented a liquid that can dissolve remarkably large amounts of gas, have launched a new spin out company Porous Liquid Technologies Ltd.

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A team at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has designed and synthesized a selective molecular trap that can separate the minor actinide element americium from a mixture of americium and the lanthanide elements.

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• Scientists untangle the structure of a recently discovered bacterial wall-building protein, found in nearly all bacteria • The discovery unveils potential weak spots in the protein’s molecular make-up • Findings can pave the way to next-generation broad-spectrum drugs that disrupt the protein’s function and disarm harmful bacteria

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Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to print 3-D structures composed entirely of liquids. Using a modified 3-D printer, they injected threads of water into silicone oil — sculpting tubes made of one liquid within another liquid.

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have published a new study that identifies the process by which holes get trapped in nanoparticles made of zinc oxide, a material of potential interest for solar applications because it absorbs ultraviolet light.

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Cells can avoid “data breaches” when letting signaling proteins into their nuclei thanks to a quirky biophysical mechanism involving a blur of spaghetti-like proteins, researchers from the Rockefeller University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have shown. Their study appears in the March 23 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

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When it comes to the special sauce of batteries, researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered it's all about the salt concentration.

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There’s a class of materials responsible for the chemistry we rely on to make fertilizer for crops, create prescription drugs and refine oil into gasoline. They’re called catalysts, and they speed up chemical reactions and steer the direction of the changes that happen during the transformation from one chemical compound to another. Despite the fact that many catalysts are commonly found in biology (these catalysts are called enzymes), the chemistries of most catalysts are still not fully understood because of their complexity.

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Argonne scientists and collaborators have identified another elemental actor in catalytic reactions that helps activate palladium while reducing the amount of the precious metal needed for those reactions to occur.

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Michigan State University scientists are testing a promising drug that may stop a gene associated with obesity from triggering breast and lung cancer, as well as prevent these cancers from growing.

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An organic chemical compound shows effective antiviral activity against Ebola virus and several other viruses, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a new enzyme that will enable microbial production of a renewable alternative to petroleum-based toluene, a widely used octane booster in gasoline that has a global market of 29 million tons per year.

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In a news story for the Inside Science News Service this week, staff journalist and editor Jason Socrates Bardi describes a project by California scientists who genetically engineered yeast with basil and mint genes to give beer a hoppy flavor without the need to add the actual flowers. Read the story for free today.

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Click here to go directly to Newswise's Obesity News Source

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Scientists have used the Hubble Space Telescope to chemically analyze the gas in the Leading Arm (the arching collection of gas that connects the Magellanic Clouds to the Milky Way) and determine its origin.

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A team of biologists has deciphered how neurons used in the perception of motion form in the brain of a fly —a finding that illustrates how complex neuronal circuits are constructed from simple developmental rules.

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A new, growing group of scientists at the University of Iowa is researching how to address the storage and potential reuse of nuclear waste. Armed with grants from various federal agencies, UI faculty also are educating undergraduate and graduate students in radiochemistry.

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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have discovered that as plants develop they craft their root microbiome, favoring microbes that consume very specific metabolites. Their study could help scientists identify ways to enhance the soil microbiome for improved carbon storage and plant productivity.