Duke University theoreticians said their predictions helped guide the efforts of experimenters using Brookhaven National Laboratorys Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) atom smasher to create an almost perfectly flowing fluid of hot, dense matter.
Duke physics professor Berndt Mueller and assistant physics professor Steffen A. Bass said that some of the experimental evidence would also support the idea that these collisions have recreated a state of matter — a quark-glu
The rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, is cultivated in many humid tropical countries for the latex it produces, from which is extracted natural rubber mainly used by the tyre industry. Asia alone provides almost 95 % of the world production, where the first producer is Thailand whose rubber industry earns a regular income for 10 % of the population. However, a disease is attacking rubber trees that causes irreversible drying-up of latex flow, and can affect up to 30% of trees in African, Asian
A primitive star with extremely low iron content has been discovered by an international research team from Sweden, Japan, Germany, USA, Australia and Great Britain. The results are published in Nature online this week.
In 2001, the giant star HE0107-5240 was discovered among a large number of stars examined as part of the Hamburg/ESO* survey. Detailed studies revealed that the star had by far the lowest iron content ever recorded – 200 000 times lower than the Sun. Previously,
We all know that a viral infection can be developed extremely quickly, but in fact its even more dramatic than that – the process is literally explosive.
The pressure inside a virus is 40 atmospheres, and it is just waiting for an opportunity to blow up. The virus is like a living DNA cannon. How this cannon functions has been mapped by Dr. Alex Evilevitch at the Department of Biochemistry at Lund University in Sweden. This is knowledge that will have applications in ge
Finding could lead to new therapeutic strategies
Scientists have discovered the mechanism that enables some CD4 T cells — the main target of HIV — to thwart the virus. The discovery, reported on April 13 in the online version of Nature, could open the door to an entirely new strategy for preventing the spread of HIV infection in the bodys cells, according to the senior author of the study, Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology Director Warner C. Greene, MD, PhD.
Gene hunters at Johns Hopkins have discovered a common genetic mutation that increases the risk of inheriting a particular birth defect not by the usual route of disrupting the gene’s protein-making instructions, but by altering a regulatory region of the gene. Although the condition, called Hirschsprung disease, is rare, its complex genetics mimics that of more common diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease.
“It’s a funny mutation in a funny place,” says study leader Aravinda