Findings from a Research Letter in this week’s issue of THE LANCET provide support for the idea that children who grow up on farms have fewer allergies because they are exposed to more microbes than other children.

Farmers’ children are known to be less prone to allergies than children who do not grow up on farms, but the exact reason is not known. Previous work has shown a circumstantial link between exposure to bacteria and reduced allergy; Dr Roger Lauener and colleagues from Zurich Unive

DuPont scientist identifies key issues in future coatings technology

Dr. Robert R. Matheson, Jr., one of the world’s foremost scientists on coatings – one of the oldest technologies known to humans – will have his scientific paper “20th- to 21st-Century Technological Challenges in Soft Coatings” featured in the upcoming edition of SCIENCE magazine.

As part of the Aug. 9 edition of SCIENCE, Dr. Matheson, a DuPont senior scientist, details the future of technological adva

The emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria has become a serious public-health concern, and, accordingly, scientists are investigating new classes of antimicrobials for their efficacy against disease-causing bacteria. One developing area of study involves antimicrobial peptides derived from insects. Recent studies have identified the protein target in bacteria of these antimicrobial peptides and suggested that the peptides are not toxic to mammalian cells including those of humans, rai

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have located two genes that give hepatitis A virus (HAV) its virulent properties. The team, led by Suzanne Emerson, Ph.D., also has discovered that deliberately weakened HAV can quickly revert to its naturally occurring, infection-causing form. To be published in the September 1 issue of Journal of Virology, and appearing online this week, these findings indicate that making an improved vaccine for HAV will be a very dif

Since the early 1980s, ocean phytoplankton concentrations that drive the marine food chain have declined substantially in many areas of open water in Northern oceans, according to a comparison of two datasets taken from satellites. At the same time, phytoplankton levels in open water areas near the equator have increased significantly. Since phytoplankton are especially concentrated in the North, the study found an overall annual decrease in phytoplankton globally.

The authors of the study,

An enormous source of clean energy is available to us. We see it almost every day. It’s just a matter of harnessing it.

The problem with solar energy is that it has not been inexpensive enough in the past. David Kelley, professor of chemistry at Kansas State University, developed a new type of nanoparticle — a tiny chemical compound far too small to be seen with the naked eye — that may reap big dividends in solar power.

Kelley’s team is studying the properties and tech