Tiny organisms living in the oceans could be playing a significant role in human health, an audience at this year’s BA Festival of Science will hear today (8 September).

Professor Peter Liss of the University of East Anglia (UEA) School of Environmental Sciences will talk about how microscopic marine organisms called plankton produces gases that can travel in the atmosphere until they ultimately get deposited on land. Here they can become important in supplying micronutrients to human diets,

A new software tool promises to aid scientists whose research has forced them to lead double lives – as computer programmers.

The tool, called the Tensor Contraction Engine (TCE), automatically generates the computer code that chemists, physicists, and materials scientists need to model the structure and interaction of complex molecules, saving them weeks or even months of work.

By making the computer code more efficient, the TCE could even reduce the amount of time required

By taking advantage of techniques developed in the search for Alzheimer’s treatments, a team of researchers has discovered that a molecule called Notch is essential for the development of critical kidney cells. The study, published online and in the Oct. 15 issue of the journal Development, provides key information about kidney development that could have implications for tissue regeneration.

“Tissue transplantation is fantastic but it would be so much better if we could instead raise o

A Duke University research collaboration has identified a likely route for “leakage” of therapeutic gene-bearing viruses out of tumors in experimental anti-cancer gene therapy experiments in laboratory animals. The group also found this toxic leakage can be avoided by using a chemical extracted from common brown algae.

Their work was described in a 9:30 a.m. Sept. 8 presentation at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in New York, as well as in a research paper accepted for

When a plane arrives late to an airport, it affects more than just the frustrated passengers on the tardy plane – the ripple effects could throw the entire day’s timetable off schedule.

Similarly, in a new study, North Carolina State University geneticists have found that changes to genes regulating olfactory behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a popular insect model for genetics, have far greater implications than previously appreciated.

The study is presented in a p

Two short protein segments, called peptides, have been identified by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, for their ability to recognize and bind to beta-amyloid-containing plaques that accumulate abnormally in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients, providing a possible “Trojan horse” mechanism to diagnose and treat the disorder.

“These peptide sequences are potential new tools for the delivery of medication to the amyloid plaques that are fo