An international team of scientists, using the world's most powerful X-ray laser, has revealed the three dimensional structure of a key enzyme that enables the single-celled parasite that causes African trypanosomiasis (or sleeping sickness) in humans.
With the elucidation of the 3D structure of the cathepsin B enzyme, it will be possible to design new drugs to inhibit the parasite (Trypanosoma brucei) that causes sleeping sickness, leaving the infected human unharmed.
AMHERST, Mass. – New research that relied in part on satellite images suggests that cheatgrass, an invasive species brought west by settlers in the 1800s, is one cause for the larger, hotter and more frequent range fires experienced recently in the Great Basin of the American West. The arid region covers about 230,000 square miles (600,000 km) over much of Nevada and parts of Utah, Colorado, Idaho, California and Oregon.
A new web-based resource on climate science, designed to help scientists and others understand this key topic, is the focus of a Comment article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the American Chemical Society's weekly newsmagazine. ACS, the world's largest scientific society, launched the resource this week.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new study co-authored by a University of Florida researcher provides the first direct chronological test of sequence stratigraphy, a powerful tool for exploring Earth's natural resources.
"We find that 87% of the 15 largest (8.6 magnitude or higher) and half of the 50 largest (8.4 magnitude or higher) earthquakes of the past century are associated with intersection regions between oceanic fracture zones and subduction zones," says Dietmar Müller, researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia and lead author of the Solid Earth paper. The connection is less striking for smaller earthquakes.
Powerful earthquakes related to these intersection regions include the destructive 2011 Tohoku-Oki and 2004 Sumatra events.
A combined team of scientists from Europe and South Africa (Luísa G.
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – December 5, 2012 – Scientists have long used the speed of seismic waves traveling through the Earth as a means of learning about the geologic structure beneath the Earth's surface, but the seismic waves they use have typically been generated by earthquakes or man-made explosions. A University of Rhode Island graduate student is using the tiny seismic waves created by ocean waves crashing on shorelines around the world to learn how an underwater plateau was formed 122 million years ago.
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – December 5, 2012 – Oceanographers at the University of Rhode Island have analyzed long-term data from several anemometers in southern New England and found that average wind speeds have declined by about 15 percent at inland sites while speeds have remained steady at an offshore site.
Kelly Knorr, a graduate student at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, and Professor John Merrill reported the results of their research today at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
The researchers found that if a Eurasian jay is caching and hears but does not see another bird nearby it will hide its cache in the less noisy substrate (for this study, sand rather than gravel). This is presumably done to avoid drawing unwanted attention from potential thieves that might then try to view the location of the cache.
Buildings and statues constructed of limestone can be protected from pollution by applying a thin, single layer of a water-resistant coating.
That's the word from a University of Iowa researcher and her colleagues from Cardiff University in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, from the publishers of Nature. In the study, the researchers report a new way to minimize chemical reactions that cause buildings to deteriorate, according to Vicki Grassian, F. Wendell Miller professor in the UI departments of chemistry and chemical and biochemical engineering.
No man is an island, entire of itself, said poet John Donne. And no atom neither. Even in the middle of intergalactic space, atoms feel the electromagnetic field---also known as the cosmic microwave background---left over by the Big Bang. The cosmos is filled with interactions that remind atoms they are not alone. Stray electric fields, say from a nearby electronic device, will also slightly adjust the internal energy levels of atoms, a process called the Stark effect.
UC Davis chemists have been using a Japanese synchrotron to get a detailed look at enzymes that could help power the green economy. The work was published online Nov. 8 by the journal Angewandte Chemie and is featured on the cover of the Nov. 26 issue.
One option for powering clean, environment friendly vehicles is to run them on hydrogen fuel rather than carbon-based fuels. Cheap catalysts to prepare hydrogen gas (H2) are key to this future "hydrogen economy."
ST. PAUL, Minn., December 4, 2012 – Trees, water and lawn clearly matter to urban dwellers. For city planners balancing green space with other demands, the question has been just how much green space matters to residents.
San Francisco, CA —Researchers from the Carnegie Institution are rolling out results from the new Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System, or AToMS, for the first time at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meetings in San Francisco. The groundbreaking technology and its scientific observations are uncovering a previously invisible ecological world. To watch a video about how AToMS is helping researchers look at the world in a whole new way, click here.
"There is a critical need for scientists to address basic questions that have hindered the development of emerging energy resources, including geothermal, wind, solar and natural gas, from underground shale formations," said Mark Zoback, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University. "In this talk we present, from a university perspective, a few examples of fundamental research needs related to improved energy and resource recovery."