The Liverpool Telescope, the world’s largest fully robotic telescope, has snapped its first images of the heavens this week. This 2 meter optical telescope is owned by the Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) of Liverpool John Moores University (JMU), but observes autonomously from its site on La Palma in the Canary Islands. The telescope was designed, constructed and commissioned by Telescope Technologies Ltd., a subsidiary company of JMU.

The Liverpool Telescope’s unique capabilities of

Global Cancer Alliance calls on Cancer Control community to put words into action and save millions of lives

The Alliance for Global Cancer Control issued its first public statement today, calling for the rapid implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The Alliance, the first worldwide coalition addressing global cancer control, emphasised that eliminating tobacco use could prevent an estimated 30% of all cancer cases and 90% of all lung cancer cases.

A bold paper which has highly impressed some of the world´s top physicists and been published in the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters, seems set to change the way we think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics. Much to the science world´s astonishment, the work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno of Elea´s famous motion paradoxes, almost 2500 years after they were originally conceived by the ancient Greek philosopher. In doi

Since the time when humans first learned to record their thoughts in written form, codes have kept sensitive information from prying eyes. But conveying information through a code requires someone who can read it as well as write it. The same is true for one of nature´s methods for transmitting information that activates or silences a gene: the “histone code.”

First formally proposed in 2000 by C. David Allis, Ph.D., and his postdoctoral fellow Brian Strahl, Ph.D., the histone code is

Scientists have inactivated almost three-quarters of all genes in the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, a species widely used in plant research. The feat, which results in the largest so-called “knockout” gene collection of a complex multi-cellular organism, now allows researchers to study the function of each of those genes individually or together.

The findings, published in the August 1 issue of the journal Science, mark an important milestone in the field of plant genomics. Follow

Finding will aid drug design to combat depression, stroke and diabetes. Scientists are a step closer to understanding how essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals are ferried into cells.

For the first time, a member of the Major Facilitator Superfamily (MFS) of transport proteins, found in almost every form of life, has been visualised by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reporting in Science today, the researchers reve