Every morning millions of Americans reach for the world’s most popular drug to help them start their day.

“That drug is caffeine,” said Dr. James Bibb, assistant professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Bibb is one of the authors of a new report explaining how caffeine exerts its stimulatory effect by altering the biochemistry of the brain. The findings appear in an August issue of Nature.

“Caffeine is the most frequently self-administered dru

Medical researchers would like to use nano-scale tubes to push very tiny amounts of drugs dissolved in water to exactly where they are needed in the human body.

The roadblock to putting this theory into practical use has been the challenge of building pumps small enough to do the job. In addition to the engineering challenge of building a nano-scale pump, there is the added complication of clogging by any biological molecule that can occur in valves small enough to fit a channel the size of

A NASA researcher finds that the amount of sea ice that moves between Greenland and Spitsbergen, a group of islands north of Norway, is dependent upon a “wave” of atmospheric pressure at sea level. By being able to estimate how much sea ice is exported through this region, called Fram Strait, scientists may develop further insights into how the ice impacts global climate.

This export of sea ice helps control the thermohaline circulation, a deep water ocean conveyor belt that moves warm, sal

Atmospheric measurements made at Earth’s geographic poles provide a convenient way of validating and calibrating global circulation models. Such measurements also might provide some of the first conclusive evidence of global change in the middle and upper atmospheres. But new data shows that the current models are wrong: Temperatures over the South Pole are much colder in winter than scientists had anticipated.

As reported in the Aug. 28 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, scientist

Discovery reveals smallest size molecules form functional structures; nanotechnology, research implications may be significant

While it may not make much of an anniversary present, a gold chain built atom by atom by UC Irvine physicist Wilson Ho offers an answer to one of the basic questions of nanotechnology—how small can you go?

In the first study of its kind, Ho and his colleagues have discovered the molecular phase when a cluster of atoms develops into a solid structur

Answer revealed in glowing live cells

Using a new mouse model that literally glows with health- protecting molecules, researchers have rewritten part of the textbook tale about how the immune system knows when to fight germs.

Time-lapse video from a pair of Harvard Medical School labs shows how pieces of captured germs may work their way to the surface of live dendritic cells. Dendritic cells are immune cells that alert other immune cells about invading germs. Inside a dendri