Life Sciences and Chemistry

Researchers at the University of Toronto and Mount Sinai Hospital have identified a protein that plays a critical role in the regulation of “natural killers cells” in the immune system’s battle against foreign and diseased cells.

“Our research is a small part of the larger problem of how viruses and diseased cells ravage the body and circumvent our immune system,” says Kathleen Binns, a U of T doctoral student in medical genetics and microbiology and an author on a paper in the June 20

A newly established national biomedical center at Cornell University is reporting its first major advance: a new way of measuring, or “visualizing,” proteins. The new technique will hasten the transformation of the human genome project’s blueprints of life into a comprehensive view of the biochemical and physiological circuitry that interconnect to form entire organisms.

The technique, which determines the structure of a protein by measuring the distances between atoms in the molecule at g

The emergence of mutant frogs with extra arms and legs may smack of a low-budget sci-fi script. But it is a reality, and a new study provides more evidence that ultraviolet radiation could be responsible. The findings are reported in three consecutive papers in the July 1 print issue of Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

Concern has been mounting for years over the depletion of the ozone

’Little shavers’ could prove key in nanoelectronics

They’re cute little shavers, and they could play a key role in the “small” revolution about us.

They’re boron nanowhiskers, the world’s first such crystalline nanowires, made by chemists at Washington University in St. Louis.

Reporting in the May 1 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), graduate student Carolyn Jones Otten, her advisor William. E. Buhro, Ph.D., Washin

Our pedigree has been revised. Our closest relatives–gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, gibbon apes, and baboons–have been joined by an animal whose appearance hardly resembles that of humans: the Dermoptera or the flying lemur.

Flying lemurs live in Southeast Asia. The largest species can be 75 cm tall. This animal can glide between trees thanks to skin stretched between the front and back legs.

This discovery was made by a research team headed by Professor Ulfur Arnason at Lund

Were the first macromolecules created on a primitive beach?

In order for life to emerge both peptides and nucleic acids must have appeared under “prebiotic” conditions. Despite numerous efforts, the formation of these macromolecules without the help of modern synthetic reagents has not been achieved in a laboratory. Now for the first time researchers have proposed a mechanism by which the formation of peptides could have occurred under prebiotic conditions. Reporting their findings in