The man who farms the sea

Credits
A few miles inland from the Sea of Cortez, cracked earth contrasts with the clear, cloudless sky to create a beautiful yet cruel and unforgiving landscape. Here, resources are scarce and people are even fewer. Still, one man fights agains all these adversities; amid mosquitos, cactus, and an almost unbearable heat Carl Hodges manages to […]

Menstrual blood a good source of stem cells?

Researchers are always seeking more and more ways that are viable and safe for gathering stem cells. Now it seems they’ve finally identified a potentially unlimited, noncontroversial, easily collectable, and inexpensive source – menstrual blood.
Stromal stem cells - cells that are present in connective tissues - have recently been identified in endometrial tissues of the […]

Bloodless Worm Sheds Light on Human Blood

University of Maryland researchers have managed to shed some light in an important matter which puzzled medical scientists and not only for ages: how iron carried in human blood is absorbed and transported into the body. Among the benefits of this discovery I’ll just name a better understanding of iron deficiency, the world’s number one […]

Sugar-powered Cars run on Hydrogen

Greenest fuels are a really hot topic, with every single day bringing a new (claimed) discovery, breakthrough, but many of them are just minor improvements. Still, every once in a while you hear about something that sounds really promising (like green gasoline). Now it seems that chemists are describing development of a “revolutionary” process for […]

Breakthrough in biofuel production process - green gasoline is not that far away

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have made a significant breakthrough in the development of biofuels (”green gasoline”), a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources, such as poplar trees and switch grass. Poplar plants have been in the scientific spotlight before, as they are considered to disarm toxic pollutants 100 […]

Evolution - 2 billion years late ?!

Recently, the University of California, Riverside provided some materials that shocked me, to say the least. According to that research, scientists from all around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. What they found was that the lack of […]

Major advance in computational chemistry: Designer Enzymes

In what is a great leap for science, scientists from UCLA and the University of Washington have succeeded in creating “designer enzymes,” a major milestone in computational chemistry and protein engineering. The two groups were led by UCLA’s chemistry professor Kendall Houk and Washington’s biochemist David Baker.
Designer enzymes will have applications for defense against biological […]

Mysterious compound could in fact be the key to ocean life

To understand this, you need just a very basic knowledge of chemistry, nothing fancy. When small parts of organic matter break down, they could go into rivers or ponds where they could cause a buildup of yellow-brown organic matter that amasses as the tiny plants die. Of course, this matter decomposes into something which is […]

Life’s Ingredients Detected In Far Off Galaxy

Life as we know has certain ingredients which are necessary for life to evolve and even exist. Such ingredients are the molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide — two ingredients that build life-forming amino acids.
Researchers found these molecules in a galaxy somewhere 250 million light years away; it’s not as a few more light years is […]

Crystal That Nature May Have Missed

For a lot of time man kind or at least a big part of it has been absolutely fascinated with the diamond and its fantastic glimmer. The reasons which account for its stunning beauty could be uncovered by a mathematical analysis of its microscopic crystal structure. It turns out that this structure has some very […]

« Previous Entries / Home