New thermometer reveals wet conditions on earliest Earth
... the measurement of the titanium content of zircon crystals to determine their crystallization temperature. Zircons are tiny crystals embedded in rock that are the oldest known materials on Earth. Zircons pre-date by 400 million years......play during cancer therapy. The scientists soaked crystals of AChE with a solution of CPT-11, obtaining crystals of the complex of the two. Bouncing powerful X-rays off the protein crystals yielded a three-dimensi...Gold nanoparticles may simplify cancer detection
...ial atoms known as Quantum Dots uses semiconductor crystals to mark cancer cells, but the semiconductor material is potentially toxic to the cells and humans. "This technique is very simple and inexpensive to use," said El-Sayed. "We think it holds great promise in making cancer detection easier, faster and l...Technique may allow cancer patients to freeze eggs, preserving fertility before starting treatment
...e the cells are large. When the egg is thawed, ice crystals cause damage that prevents the egg from being fert...tion from liquid to solid is instantaneous. No ice crystals form and the consistency resembles a viscous glassy state. Research so far has used mouse oocytes bu...Gram-negative bacteria shoot their way into cells
...fied repeated attempts to grow it into the orderly crystals needed for detailed structural studies. One of the problems was that the ring's surface is glazed with positively charged atoms that push clones of themselves away like magnets repelling each other. The breakthrough in the lab came when Yip made a m...From sound analysis to nicotine addiction
...e Priority Programme "Structures and properties of crystals under extremes of pressure and temperature" will concentrate on the properties and synthesis of substances that are formed in the earth's crust under conditions of very high pressure and temperature. Mineralogists and material scientists are joining ...'Molecular zipper' may hold important clues to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and mad cow disease
...molecular biologists had difficulty analyzing tiny crystals from the small peptide using standards methods of ... analyze very small crystals. "We sent some of our crystals to Christian Riekel and his student, Anders Madsen, and we worked closely with them," said Michael S...Researchers get first peek at amyloid's spine
...ed and dropped to the bottom of the test tube. The crystals were about 50,000 times smaller than those normall...picked up the project four years ago. "Because the crystals were so small, we ended up trying lots of techniques," she said. "We formed collaborations with peop...Programming organic transistors with light; the unusual origin of peacock brown; rotating nanowires
... of light of different colors. Generally, photonic crystals in animal coloring produce pure colors, such as bl... natural photonic crystals. Mimicking the photonic crystals in peacock tail feathers could lead to new ways to manipulate light in cutting edge optical instrume...Nanotubes inspire new technique for healing broken bones
...not sufficient, since the growth of hydroxyapatite crystals relies on the ability of the scaffold to attract calcium ions and initiate the crystallization process. So the researchers carefully designed nanotubes with several chemical groups attached. Some of these groups assist the growth and orientation of h...Virginia Tech, Nanjing Institute researchers discover half-billion year-old fossils
... and his colleagues carefully examined the calcite crystals that replicate the tubes. They believe that the crystals were emplaced shortly after the death, burial, and decay of the Ediacara organisms, thus replicating...Biologists see combined structure of cold virus and receptor molecule
...al atoms. Using this technique, researchers create crystals of a substance, in this case the virus. Then, X-rays are passed through the crystals, creating a "diffraction pattern" that can be interpreted with various computational procedures to produce an image. The other method, a powerful imaging tool called...Identifying the 'signatures' of protons in water
...how this all comes together as we continue to grow crystals toward bulk water (ice)."...Fundamental discovery -- bone fracture
...of these collagen fibrils coated with tiny mineral crystals only a few atoms thick. What we found is that there is a glue in bone that holds these mineralized collagen fibrils together, and this glue works along the same principles that our interdisciplinary research group found in abalone shells. This glue i......from a xenon flashlamp through a series of calcite crystals to illuminate each corn, sugar beet, cotton or other broad-leaf crop with a tiny, transient spot of polarized light. Moving from leaf to leaf, that system can measure nitrogen levels in 60 plants per minute. Instead of a broad-spectrum lamp as its so...Breakthrough: Structure of membrane protein described by Hebrew University, German researchers
...n's structure was done utilizing three-dimensional crystals of the protein which diffract x-rays. The work of analyzing the diffraction was done using the powerful electron accelerators in Grenoble, France, and Zurich, Switzerland. "In this way we were able to reveal the wonderful architecture of the membran...Gold bowties may shed light on molecules and other nano-sized objects
...ic locations. "It's difficult to put molecules and crystals exactly where you want them when you're working at a nano-scale," Schuck explains. Bowties also may have applications in Raman spectroscopy, a technique that allows scientists to identify individual molecules by measuring the vibrational energy the m...Method slashes quantum dot costs by 80 percent
...um dots by about 80 percent. Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconducting materials - cadmium selenide or ...rom the red to the blue end of the spectrum as the crystals get smaller. The reproducible synthesis of high-quality quantum dots became a reality in the early ...Israeli scientists successfully transplant frozen-thawed ovaries in sheep
...allows precise control over the propagation of ice crystals during the freezing process, thus reducing the damage caused to cells by conventional methods[4]. Sheep were chosen because their ovaries are similar to those of humans. The technique worked the frozen-thawed ovaries produced comparable numbers of f......tories could concentrate their efforts on creating crystals of the relevant fragments of the spike protein in ...ter they had crystallized the protein complex, the crystals were then subjected to structural analysis using x-ray crystallography. In this widely used techniqu...