Physics gets strange when matter gets small. Take electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom, for example. If they did so with the same dynamics by which planets orbit the sun, classical physics predicts the electrons would spiral toward the nucleus and crash into it in a fraction of a second. But that doesn’t happen.

At very low temperatures, classical physics fails to explain phenomena at tiny scales. This is when quantum mechanics kicks in. Scientists are now chilling materials to ne

The fact that infections among adults can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes is now well established by several hundred scientific studies. Both heart attacks and strokes are expressions of arteriosclerosis (thickening of the arteries, previously termed hardening of the arteries). New research from the Section for Pediatric Cardiology in Lund indicates that infections can also contribute to the early development of arteriosclerosis even in childhood.

Doctor Petru Liuba shows in a

Austrian physicists report unusual light-metal interaction

A team under Professor Franz Aussenegg at the University of Graz in Austria is looking into unusual interactions between light and submicroscopic metal particles. The physicists’ findings represent a major advance towards the development of improved data storage media and optical sensors. They also confirmed theoretical predictions and merited publication in 13 international scientific journals. These are the impressive result

NIAB has patent protection pending for a number of schemes for encoding non-genetic information into DNA. The patent describes four methods by which DNA can be made to hold information in a binary or other number base format as a DNA ’barcode’.
Jonathan White, Head of NIAB’s Molecular and Genotyping Group said, “The encoding of non-genetic information has the overall major benefit of providing a means of ready identification and authentication of goods and organisms and is particul

Educators and scientists should discard the idea that a cell’s nucleus is just a bag of chromosomes, according to Johns Hopkins’ cell biologist Kathy Wilson, Ph.D. In a Feb. 17 session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Denver, Wilson and five others will introduce visual evidence of the nucleus’s newly recognized importance.

“The old view is that the nucleus is simply a warehouse for chromosomes,” says Wilson, associate

New molecular technologies, some driven by the work of a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are exposing unexpectedly high levels of DNA folding and complex protein-rich assemblages within the nucleus of cells that he says “seriously challenge the textbook models.”

“What we are seeing suggests that there may be machinery, not yet identified, that controls the folding and the movements of enzymes that turn genes on and off,” said Andrew Belmont, a professor of cell