Life Sciences and Chemistry

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated that a chemical that permits plants to detoxify heavy metals can be transported from the roots to stems and leaves, a finding that brings the possibility of using plants to clean up soil contaminated with toxic metals such as lead, arsenic and cadmium one step closer to reality.

A paper detailing the discovery appears this week in an advance online publication of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Stanford University Medical Center researchers have developed a way to tailor therapies to combat the specific inappropriate responses of autoimmune diseases in mice. The researchers also have shown that their technique can provide information needed to predict a disease’s progression. Eventually, their work may provide a way to reverse the course of such autoimmune diseases in humans as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and type-1 diabetes by first identifying the immune system culpri

Moscow researchers have made the supercritical carbon dioxide work. Saturated with special reagents, carbon dioxide first extracts uranium from the spent nuclear fuel waste, then extracts plutonium and then flies away into the atmosphere.

As a matter of fact, the spent nuclear fuel consists of multiple elements. First of all, this is uranium that did not burn out and plutonium obtained as a result of nuclear reaction and numerous fission fragments, both radio-active and non-radio-acti

University of Connecticut Health Center geneticists have made a two-fold discovery in gene recoding that will significantly increase understanding of the information in genome sequences and could prove to be a knowledge expressway scientists need for unraveling nervous system disorders such as Parkinson Disease and epilepsy. The research, published in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal Science, was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that sup

Researchers sifting through the indispensable machinery that senses and fixes broken DNA have discovered a new culprit that can induce instability in the genome and thereby set the stage for cancer to develop.

Studies in mice have shown that loss of H2AX, a gene that produces a protein called a histone that is part of the chromosomal structure, can tip the delicate balance of proteins that are curators of the human genome. When H2AX ceases to function properly, lymphomas and solid tu

Like the snap of a clothespin, the sudden mixing of closely related species may occasionally provide the energy to impel rapid evolutionary change, according to a new report by researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions. Their paper was made available online by Science magazine´s “Science Express” service.

A study of sunflower species that began 15 years ago shows that the sudden mixing and matching of different species´ genes can create genetic super