How do you capture a cellular process that transpires in the blink of an eye? Biochemists at MIT have devised a way to trap and visualize a vital enzyme at the moment it becomes active—informing drug development and revealing...
Hypersaline brines—water that contains high concentrations of dissolved salts and whose saline levels are higher than ocean water—are a growing environmental concern around the world. Very challenging and costly to treat, they result from water produced during oil and...
Engineers at MIT and Imperial College London have developed a new way to generate tough, functional materials using a mixture of bacteria and yeast similar to the "kombucha mother" used to ferment tea.
Using this mixture, also called a SCOBY...
Know that sickening feeling when you exit the grocery store and find your car has been banged up by a runaway shopping cart? It may one day be just a bad memory if auto body manufacturers make use of...
Open and closed forms of channel proteins, which function by changing their shape. Credit: University of Arkansas
A University of Arkansas chemist and his collaborator at North Carolina State University have developed a new theory for explaining how proteins and...
Biomedical engineers from Duke University and Washington University in St. Louis have demonstrated that, by injecting an artificial protein made from a solution of ordered and disordered segments, a solid scaffold forms in response to body heat, and in...
Life on Earth arose about 4 billion years ago when the first cells formed within a primordial soup of complex, carbon-rich chemical compounds.
These cells faced a chemical conundrum. They needed particular ions from the soup in order to perform...
Tires gripping the road. Nonslip shoes preventing falls. A hand picking up a pen. A gecko climbing a wall.
All these things depend on a soft surface adhering to and releasing from a hard surface, a common yet incompletely understood...
Lithium ions migrate through the electrolyte (yellow) into the layer of crystalline silicon (c-Si). During the charging cycle, a 20-nm layer (red) develops on the silicon electrode adsorbing extreme quantities of lithium atoms.
Credit: HZB
The team was able to show...
Recent Furman University graduate Trent Stubbs is the author of a new study in Nature Chemistry that may fundamentally alter humanity's understanding of the origin of life. The research was published today.
The study describes how organic chemical reactions could have started...
A touch of gold—or another noble metal—can change the structure of a crystal and its intrinsic properties, physicists at the University of Warwick have demonstrated in a display of modern-day alchemy.
Scientists at the University of Warwick have found a...
