The enigmatic Möbius strip has long been an object of fascination, appearing in numerous works of art, most famously a woodcut by the Dutchman M.C. Escher, in which a tribe of ants traverses the form’s single, never-ending surface.
Scientist…
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital investigators have identified a novel structure in cells that serves as a control switch in the body’s system for eliminating damaged cells and also offers new therapeutic potential.
The findings provide fresh…
New Rochelle, NY, September 10, 2010 — The glycome, encompassing all of the complex sugars produced by an organism, is comprised of multiple families of molecules whose function in the human body is often determined by the structure, composition,…
PASADENA, Calif. — Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have devised a new technique — using a sheet of carbon just one atom thick — to visualize the structure of molecules. The technique, which was used to obtain the…
Gamblers who think they have a “hot hand,” only to end up walking away with a loss, may nonetheless be making “rational” decisions, according to new research from University of Minnesota psychologists. The study finds that because humans are making …
A better understanding of the ground beneath our feet will result from research by seismologists and Rapid — a group of computer scientists at the University of Edinburgh. The Earth’s structure controls how earthquakes travel and the damage they ca…
For their look into the nanoworld, the Jülich researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope. Its thin metal tip scans the specimen surface like the needle of a record player and registers the atomic irregularies and differences of approxim…
The best cancer drugs in the world are not much good if they cannot get to tumor cells. That problem has been challenging cancer physicians and researchers for years because the physical structure of many tumors can prevent anticancer agents from reaching their targets. In a study appearing in the June issue of Nature Medicine, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) describe a new technique for assessing the permeability of tumors and a promising new way of improving tumors’ accessibility to drugs.
A new study offers the first molecular explanation of how the body metabolizes and detoxifies cocaine and heroin. “We show for the first time how humans initiate the breakdown and clearance of these dangerous narcotics,” said one of the lead scientists. “This work also has two potential applications. First, our results can be used to generate an efficient treatment for cocaine overdose. Second, the same system we describe can be engineered to detoxify chemical weapons, including sarin, soman, tabun and VX gases.”
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have taken the first stab at a “periodic table” of the protein structures – an organized map of the building blocks used over and over again to construct the billions of complex proteins that make up life on Earth. The three-dimensional map depicts similarities and differences among the building blocks, letting scientists visualize the universe of possible protein structures – the many possible twists, turns and folds – and see evolutionary changes that may have occurred with time.
New molecular technologies are exposing unexpectedly high levels of DNA folding and complex protein-rich assemblages within the nucleus of cells that researchers say 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,” noted one expert at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.