Proteins, which form much of the molecular machinery required for life, are the targets of most drug molecules. One third of all proteins are membrane proteins – embedded within the cell’s fatty outer layer. While scientists can easily study the other two-thirds using such tools as antibodies, they have not had such methods to investigate the membrane-embedded portions of proteins.
Body
Chemists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Arizona State University have proposed an elegantly simple technique for cleaving proteins into convenient pieces for analysis.
Using a brace of the most modern tools of materials research, a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Northwestern University has shed new light on one of mankind’s older construction materials—cement.
The city of London, with funding from the European Space Agency, has launched AirTEXT, which delivers air pollution alerts and health advice via SMS text messages.
What would large women think if a dress sold for lower cost to women of smaller sizes?
Common sense says this would turn them off.
But swimmers react well to items claimed to improve speed if they know the product is given away free to Olympic swimmers.
If you perceive the person getting the good deal as being smarter than you, you are okay with it. You are even more likely to pay full price.
A new, complete 'tree of life' tracing the history of all 4,500 mammals on Earth shows that they did not diversify as a result of the death of the dinosaurs, says new research published in Nature today.
The study was undertaken in the UK by scientists at Imperial College London and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It contradicts the previously accepted theory that the Mass Extinction Event (MEE) that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago prompted the rapid rise of the mammals we see on the earth today.
It is a natural history tale that every third grader knows: The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, until an asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula and triggered a mass extinction that allowed the ancestors of today’s mammals to thrive.
The asteroid part of the story may still hold true, but a new study challenges the notion that a mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago played a major role in the dominance of today’s mammals.
A new report published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) shows that patients treated with bronchial thermoplasty, the first non-drug treatment for asthma, demonstrated an overall improvement in asthma control.
Genetics tests could help provide cystic fibrosis (CF) patients with targeted treatment in future, pilot study authors suggest. Results from a French clinical trial published today in BMC Medicine show how a small percentage of CF sufferers with a rare genetic stop mutation responded positively to gentamicin treatment.
Well, almost predictable. The changes are consistent and occur at a predictable rate but because they are random, no one can predict exactly which new fashions will replace the old ones.
Huh?
“It’s like American Idol,” said Dr Alex Bentley, a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Durham University. “We can predict the steady production of new winners from programme to programme, but the randomness means we can’t forecast the particular winners themselves.”
The impact of exercise on body fat differs for boys and girls, suggests research published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Recommendations on exercise to curb the rising tide of obesity in children have tended to take a unisex approach, say the authors.
The Virginia Tech chemistry research group that has been creating molecular complexes that use solar energy to produce hydrogen from water has added an additional capacity to their supramolecule.
The good news: improved health care is reducing occurrences of intestinal parasites worldwide. The bad news: at the same time, rates of asthma are increasing worldwide. The link between these trends? Evolution – human evolution. The human immune system has evolved in the constant presence of intestinal parasites. The immune system is designed to react to these parasites – in their absence, the immune system overreacts to simple allergens, resulting in asthma. Its evolved state is mismatched to modernity.
Researchers believe they have solved a mystery that has puzzled evolutionary scientists for years ... if 'good' genes spread through the population, why are individuals so different?
The so-called 'lek paradox', that sexually-selecting species like humans should have much less individuality than is the case, has been seized upon by creationists as an argument that Darwin's theories are fundamentally flawed.
A mother’s high beef consumption while pregnant was associated with lower sperm counts in her son, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Rochester.