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Wobbly cantilevers 'feel' pathogens lock onto their targets. The new microcantilevers detect viruses binding to membrane proteins.Martin Hegner Viruses can now be detected directly in fluids, thanks to microscopic diving boards that vibrate when the pathogenic particles stick to cellular proteins. The findings could eventually lead to better blood tests and more sensitive ways of measuring whether new drugs are binding to their targets.Microcantilevers — which look like springboards but are only 0.5 millimetres long and just 1 micrometer thick — wobble and bend in response to different forces. By measuring changes in the frequencies at which these tiny planks...

How Joseph Priestley inspired early America. And why he's needed now more than ever The next time you take a deep breath, think for a moment of Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century British scientist widely credited with discovering oxygen.As Steven Johnson explains in his engaging study of Priestley, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America,  the circumstances surrounding Priestley's signature achievement are "far more vexed than the standard short-form biographies suggest." That's because "discovering 'oxygen' is not like 'discovering' the Dead Sea Scrolls....It is closer to, say, discovering America: the meaning of the phrase...

A group of researchers led by Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, have recently created nanoscale particles that can self-assemble into various optical devices. These include photonic crystals, metamaterials, color changing paints, components for optical computers and ultrasensitive chemical sensors, among many other potential applications. The new technology works by controlling how densely the tiny silver particles assemble themselves.   Professor Peidong Yang (Credit: University of California, Berkeley) The nanoparticles have been used to increase the sensitivity of arsenic detection by an order of magnitude. Researchers also made a very robust kind of photonic...

A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab - and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism. Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family's garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him. A few days...

2 Seeing Exoplanets SeeWeb links on exoplanets Seeing might be believing, but for scientists belief rarely depends on seeing. The right squiggles coming out of an instrument are usually enough to confirm that they have caught their quarry, however infinitesimal, insubstantial, or bizarre. Astronomers searching for planets circling other stars, however, may have been getting just a tad impatient with their progress toward their ultimate goal: recognizing a habitable, even an inhabited, planet beyond our own solar system. For that, they'll need to see their target. But all exoplanet detections had been of the squiggly variety. Now, astronomers have seen...

Enlarge ImageHumble beginnings. An experiment in the 1950s with primordial gases and sparks produced some of life's building blocks.Credit: Ned Shaw/Indiana University/Science A once-discarded idea about how life started on our planet has been given a new life of its own, thanks to a serendipitous find. The story traces back to the early 1950s, when chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago in Illinois tried to recreate the building blocks of life under conditions they thought resembled those on the young Earth. The duo filled a closed loop of glass chambers and tubes with water...

Geckos have long inspired scientists and super-hero fans alike with their ability to scamper up vertical walls and cling to ceilings with a single toe. In recent years, people have attempted to create materials that match those spectacular abilities, in the hope of creating new advanced adhesives, or even car braking systems.Now US chemists claim to have made one based on nanotubes that it is 10 times stickier than some gecko feet. Even more impressively, like a real gecko foot, it can also be easily unstuck with a tug in the right direction.Gecko's superhero toes are covered in microscopic hairs,...

Green fluorescent protein bags the biggest gong in science. Aequorea victoria, source of the green fluorescent protein.G. OCHOCKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The molecule responsible for a jellyfish's glow has won its discoverer and developers this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The green fluorescent protein (GFP) has revolutionized medical and biological science by providing a way to track the activity of individual proteins within a living cell, and thereby monitor how genes are expressed. The prize is shared equally between three scientists: Osamu Shimomura, now an emeritus professor at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University...

Stockholm, Sweden (AHN) - Another trio of scientists were recognized by the Nobel Foundation for their discovery of the mystery behind the green glow of jellyfish. The past two days saw trios also being awarded the Nobel laureates for Medicine and Physics. For this finding, Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California at San Diego will be awarded the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

Switchgrass could be an excellent source of biofuels - if only it were easier to break down its cellulose.US Govt A genuine revolution in biofuels is currently hindered by the difficulty of converting the most recalcitrant parts of plants, primarily the cellulose of their fibres, into useful fuel. Two chemists in California now claim that it might be remarkably easy to do just that with little more than a strong acid to break down the cellulose. Mark Mascal and Edward Nikitin of the University of California, Davis say their new process is the most efficient way yet described for...

RedXDefense of Rockville, Maryland has recently developed a portable kit that could provide a quick and simple visual diagnostic for detecting plastic explosives favored by terrorists. The device, which was designed to be used by in security checkpoints and under harsh conditions, is currently undergoing field tests in Iraq. While most explosives-detection methods look for vapors coming from the explosive metrical, the plastic explosives often used by terrorists such as like Richard Reid (the notorious “shoe bomber”) are not very volatile, and technologies for their detection usually require dislodging the explosive before running a chemical analysis. Unfortunately, these systems are...

Home Science Under Attack In Massachusetts An anonymous reader tips a guest posting up on the MAKE Magazine blog by the author of the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. It seems that authorities in Massachusetts have raided a home chemistry lab, apparently without a warrant, and made off with all of its contents. Here's the local article from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. "Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its...

No extreme hazards found in basement workshop that alarmed authorities MARLBORO— Victor Deeb, the retired chemist who stored hundreds of chemicals in his house, was allowed to return home yesterday after authorities spent three days dismantling his basement laboratory. None of the materials found at 81 Fremont St. posed a radiological or biological risk, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. No mercury or poison was found. Some of the compounds are potentially explosive, but no more dangerous than typical household cleaning products.

New studies with different fuel cell catalysts show promising results As the automotive industry is betting that hydrogen can become the fuel of the future, technology is taking steps to bring that hope closer to reality. Three papers being published by the journal Science promise to fill some of the most significant gaps in what could someday be an environmentally friendly cycle of hydrogen production and consumption. --snip-- Platinum is also commonly used on the consumption side, in the fuel cells that turn hydrogen back into water and produce electric currents. In Science‘s August 1 issue, researchers at Monash University...

It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries. Well known, but wrong. Medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new. The tale contains a grain of truth about glass resembling a liquid, however. The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass? “They’re the thickest and gooiest of...

Electron microscope spots hydrogen atoms resting on invisible carbon sheet. The smallest of atoms can now be seen sitting in splendid isolation with a standard transmission electron microscope, thanks to the most fashionable form of carbon, graphene. The technique, developed by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, could help to produce images of individual molecules in atomic detail using relatively conventional laboratory kit. The research is reported in this week's Nature1. A transmission electron microscope (TEM) works by firing a beam of electrons through a very thin sample supported by a scaffold....

Hebrew Univ. to Readmit Convicted Terrorist to Chemistry Lab by Gil Ronen 14 July 2007 www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/126827 [For Channel 2 TV report: www.keshet-tv.com/VideoPage.aspx?MediaID=40798&CatID=330&CurrentCatID=330 ] (IsraelNN.com) A professor at Hebrew University wants to allow a convicted Arab terrorist who stole bomb-making materials from his chemistry lab to be allowed back to the lab, Channel 2 TV reported Sunday. Six years ago, 160 liters of acetone - a chemical which is used for making the common explosive acetone peroxide - disappeared from the Laboratory for Medicinal Chemistry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The theft led to an investigation by the Israel Security Agency...

A chemist running a computer server from his home is quietly solving one of his colleagues' biggest frustrations by providing the community with an open-access source of chemical information. Although biologists have enormous public databases of genes and proteins, chemists usually have to pay for access to data on molecules. Chemist Antony Williams is hoping to change this in a move likely to ruffle the feathers of the American Chemical Society. Williams, a private consultant based in Wake Forest, North Carolina, has started a website called ChemSpider that has compiled data on nearly 20 million molecules in a year. The...

Enlarge ImageOut of the frying pan.Studies show that pumping sulfur into the atmosphere could seriously damage the ozone layer.Credit: Ross J. Salawitch [via Science] The ozone layer protects all life on Earth, but it's frustrating scientists' attempts to curb global warming. Take geoengineering: Researchers have proposed that injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere might counter the effects of greenhouse gas buildup, but a new study suggests that the approach could thin the planet's already fragile ozone layer. Leaving the ozone layer alone comes with its own risks, however. A second study warns that the gradual recovery of the Antarctic...

Enlarge ImageSweet shot. Different colors reveal sugar groups produced at different times during the development of a zebrafish embryo.Credit: Image courtesy of Carolyn R. Bertozzi Biologists have long sought chemical reactions that can home in on and alter particular molecules while leaving everything around them untouched. Their desire may soon be fulfilled. A team of chemists has developed a reaction that targets specific sugars that decorate proteins and other molecules. So far, the researchers have used the technique to study the embryonic development of zebrafish. But it could one day offer doctors better ways to deliver radioactive imaging agents...