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Security forces worldwide rely on sophisticated equipment, trained personnel, and detection dogs to safeguard airports and other public areas against terrorist attacks. A revolutionary new electronic chip with nano-sized chemical sensors is about to make their job much easier.

WOODS HOLE, MA -- What do mollusks, starfish, and corals have in common? Aside from their shared marine habitat, they are all calcifiers—organisms that use calcium from their environment to create hard carbonate skeletons and shells for stability and protection.

The July issue of The Biological Bulletin, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory, addresses the challenges faced by these species as ocean composition changes worldwide.

This dipteran fly, therefore, serves as a potential vector of many diseases due to its close association with human dwellings. In general, C. megacephala is considered important in medical, veterinary and forensic sciences. Post mortem interval (PMI) determination is useful in cases of homicide, suicide and accidental or unattended death because of natural causes. An important aspect of calculating the PMI is the accurate and quick identification of the dipteran fly collected from a crime scene.

Radiotherapy for cancer involves exposing the patient or their tumor more directly to ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays or X-rays. The radiation damages the cancer cells irreparably. Unfortunately, such radiation is also harmful to healthy tissue, particularly the skin over the site of the tumor, which is then at risk of hair loss, dermatological problems and even skin cancer. As such finding ways to protect the overlying skin are keenly sought.

Most scientific literature devoted to the protein p53 refers to cancer biology, and the functions of this molecule as a tumour suppressor have been described in detail. Furthermore, also in cancer biology, it is known that p53 inhibits the metabolic pathways of tumour cells in order to block their metabolism and prevent their rapid growth and proliferation.

Parts of the primordial soup in which life arose have been maintained in our cells today according to scientists at the University of East Anglia.

Research published today in the Journal of Biological Chemistry reveals how cells in plants, yeast and very likely also in animals still perform ancient reactions thought to have been responsible for the origin of life – some four billion years ago.

An international team of researchers led by the University of York has carried out the first assessment of community-led marine conservation in the Western Indian Ocean.

The results, reported in the journal PLOS ONE, point to a revolution in the management of marine protected areas, with almost half of the sites – more than 11,000 km² – in the region now under local community stewardship.

Getting at this one-of-a-kind data, however, was a difficult task. Much of the data were locked up in handwritten notebooks or typed paper records. "The downside of the paper records is they're vulnerable, they're not digitized, and we only have a single copy -- so they're impossible to analyze," Zehr said.

The center migrated to electronic records in the 1990s, but that still left much of the data buried in odd computer files or hard-to-use databases.

Yushan Yan, Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Delaware, is known worldwide for using nanomaterials to solve problems in energy engineering, environmental sustainability and electronics.

The cellular process autophagy appears to not work properly, contributing to the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells

People with Type 2 diabetes have an excess of a protein called islet amyloid polypeptide, or IAPP, and the accumulation of this protein is linked to the loss of insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells.

Researchers have uncovered a way the malaria parasite becomes resistant to an investigational drug. The discovery, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, also is relevant for other infectious diseases including bacterial infections and tuberculosis.

The study appears July 24 in Nature Communications.

Traditional methods of characterising and detecting bacteria are often slow and time-consuming. Therefore, development of new methods of characterising and detecting illness-causing microorganisms is very important for improving food safety.

Trine Hansen, PhD student at the National Food Institute, has studied new methods of characterising Salmonella in pork meat processing and detecting unknown bacteria in water, feed and food samples.

It is seldom sufficient to read the declaration of contents if you need to know precisely what substances a product contains. In fact, to do this you need to be a highly skilled chemist or to have genuine X-ray vision so that you can look directly into the molecular structure of the various substances. Christian Grundahl Frankær, a Postdoc at DTU Chemical Engineering, is almost both, as he has developed a method that allows him to use X-rays to look deep into biological samples.

The 'Fingerprints' of a Substance

New research from the University of Sydney Voice Research Laboratory has discovered unique vocal cord vibration patterns might be the secret behind a good radio voice.

The world-first study filmed the vocal folds of 16 male radio performers, including announcers, broadcasters, newsreaders and voice-over artists and found their vocal folds move and close faster than non-broadcasters.

Philadelphia – Students graduating from U.S. medical schools in 2012 feel they've received a better education in health policy issues than graduates surveyed in 2008, according to a multi-center study led by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and published online this month in Academic Medicine. The study applied a new framework for teaching and evaluating perceptions of training in health policy, first proposed by the authors in a 2011 perspective published in the New England Journal of Medicine.