Life Sciences and Chemistry

New research at North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine indicates that cloned pigs can have the same degree of variability in physical appearance and behavior as normally bred animals. Two separate studies show that while clones are genetically identical to the original animal, the similarities end there.

This dispels the commonly held notion that cloned animals retain the physical and behavioral attributes of the animal from which they were cloned. The research was

Dr. Wesley Sundquist, professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah, will present at the Experimental Biology 2003 meeting in San Diego on his work in elucidating how HIV is manufactured and assembled in the cell.

The raison d’être of a virus such as HIV, if a non-living thing can be said to have one, is to turn a host cell into a factory that churns out virus copies and releases them to infect other cells. Dr. Sundquist’s research has focused on discovering the mechanisms u

Clemson researcher part of discovery team

Science, a leading international research journal, reports today that a team of scientists, including Clemson University plant biochemist Brandon Moore, has found sugars not only serve as fuel for plants but also as signal compounds to genes critical to cell development and plant growth.

The research is considered to be groundbreaking, providing insights into the fundamental importance sugars play in both plants and animals. Scientis

Mineral salts are essential for living organisms. To be precise, it is from these, living cells get their basic components, the ions. Common salt, for example, contains chloride and sodium ions which the cell uses to establish and maintain electrochemical balance with the environment.

In order to achieve sodium equilibrium in animal cells, for example, the external sodium concentration has to be ten times greater than the internal one. It is precisely due to this difference in concentration

The major features of evolution are pre-determined and not only the result of random or accidental processes, two leading European scientists propose in a paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology .

Professor Robert Williams of the University of Oxford and Professor Fraústo da Silva of the Instituto Superior Tecnico of Lisbon, challenge the Darwinist idea that the overall course of evolution random and purposeless, and that the appearance of organisms with increasing complexity

Nanowires and carbon nanotubes, each with their pluses and minuses, are advertised as the next-generation building blocks for electronic circuits a thousand times smaller than today’s semiconductor circuits.

Peidong Yang, a University of California, Berkeley, chemist, has now fabricated a new type of nanotube, made of gallium nitride, that, he says, “captures some of the great properties from nanowires and carbon nanotubes, and eliminates the not-so-good characteristics of both.

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