Converting one third of chemical scrubbers worldwide could save up to two billion dollars each year

Scientists at UC Riverside have pushed the current limit of a technique for biologically removing hydrogen sulfide from sewage emissions a step further. Marc Deshusses, associate professor in the department of chemical and environmental engineering, and his postdoctoral researcher, David Gabriel, report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that they have modifi

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists from diverse disciplines have responded to the April 27 spill of nearly 15,000 gallons of No. 6 fuel oil into Buzzards Bay, drawing on decades of experience studying the effects of oil spills on the marine and coastal environment.

Marine chemists have collected dozens of oil samples spilled into Buzzards Bay by the barge Bouchard 120 to determine the chemical composition of the petroleum spilled and its potential toxicity. Biologists

If the evolution of complex organisms were a road trip, then the simple country drives are what get you there. And sometimes even potholes along the way are important.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Michigan State University and the California Institute of Technology, with the help of powerful computers, has used a kind of artificial life, or ALife, to create a road map detailing the evolution of complex organisms, an old problem in biology.

In an article in the May 8 is

Dartmouth researchers have found evidence of two circadian clocks working within the same tissue of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering plant often used in genetic studies. Their results suggest that plants can integrate information from at least two environmental signals, light and temperature, which is important in order to respond to seasonal changes.

The study, published this week, appears in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“H

There’s a small problem with Earth’s magnetic field: It should not have existed, as Earth’s rock record indicates it has, for the past 3.5 billion years. Motions in the Earth’s molten iron core generate convection currents–similar to boiling water–which produce the field. Many sources of heat drive these currents, but the known sources seem inadequate to maintain the field this long. In 1971 University of Minnesota geology and geophysics professor Rama Murthy theorized that radi

To carry out their functions, proteins must first fold into particular structures. How rapidly this process can occur has been both a source of debate and a roadblock to comparing protein folding theory and experiment.

Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have observed a protein that hit a speed limit when folding into its native state.

“Some of our proteins were folding as fast as they possibly could — in only one or two microseconds,” said Martin G