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

A novel method of analysis has been developed that could change the way complicated documents are assessed for bias, accuracy and consistency.

The technique could be used to simplify all sorts of records. For instance long legal documents that use complex and obscure reasoning could be stripped down to their essential arguments.

It could also be used to identify inconsistencies, spotting whether arguments have been changed or contradicted or if evidence has been hidden. The m

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

A team from Imperial College London based at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, Hammersmith and the Royal Brompton Hospitals has worked with equipment developed by scientists at QinetiQ, Europe’s largest science and technology organisation, to study the heart rate of unborn babies in minute detail.

The technique, reported in this months British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, will allow doctors to monitor the health of babies’ hearts and obtain the full fetal ECG (fECG), particularl