News Articles

Think you can't live without caffeine?  Some bacteria can live on caffeine.  Previous studies discovered caffeine-degrading bacteria, but new research one goes a step further and identifies four bacteria that can live on the compound.    One of them, known as Pseudomonas putida CBB5, was found in a flowerbed outside a University of Iowa research laboratory.   Now they have identified the gene sequence that enables the bacterium to break down the caffeine compound in nature.

The expansion of the universe should slow as time marches on, some even conjectured it would slow and then collapse again - that's what all that mass and its gravity in the universe should do.But Hubble showed us distant supernovae in the 1990s and researchers realized the universe had actually been expanding slower in the past, not faster - and that was a pickle for current theory.   So researchers hypothesized Einstein's theory of gravity and a cosmological constant might account for it,  or some strange kind of energy-fluid filled space or Einstein's theory of gravity was wrong and a new one including some kind of field creates cosmic acceleration.    No one knew what it was, but they called this mystery Dark Energy.

Protein folding is where the coiled strings of amino acids that make up proteins in all living things fold into more complex three-dimensional structures. Incorrectly folded proteins in humans result in such diseases as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, emphysema and cystic fibrosis, so developing better modeling techniques for protein folding is a good strategy to assist in creating more effective pharmaceutical treatments for such diseases.  By understanding how proteins fold, and what structures they are likely to assume in final form, researchers are then able to move closer to predicting their function. 

It is generally accepted that pathological violence is a combination of factors, both biological and psychological, but brain studies of violent criminals haven't revealed much.However, a new brain imaging study suggests that men with a history of violent behavior may have greater gray matter volume in certain brain areas, whereas men with a history of substance use disorders may have reduced gray matter volume in other brain areas.

What do Ivan Pavlov, Guglielmo Marconi and Thomas Edison all have in common?  Not much, you might think - but after the creation of General Electric’s first Global Research Laboratory in the barn behind Chief Engineer Charles Steinmetz’s house in Schenectady, NY, numerous top scientists began to visit to see what GE was working on next.MIT Chemistry professor Wilis Whitney was hired as the Global Research Laboratory's first director and each famous mind that visited would stop to sign the VIP guest book, which he kept at that desk from 1914 to 1935.  The signatures are a veritable Who’s Who of inventors, physicists, chemists, physiologists, and businessmen of the period.

The creation, trapping and storage of antihydrogen atoms for up to 1,000 seconds not only represents the longest time period so far that antihydrogen has been captured, but it also brings us closer to answering the question, do matter and antimatter obey the same laws of physics?Antimatter particles are routinely produced in particle accelerators as well as in space, but holding onto them, particularly the neutral ones, is difficult because antimatter and matter will annihilate on contact and conventional containers are made of matter.

Preliminary data from DNA sequencing performed in cooperation with the University Hospital Muenster, Germany, on the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) strongly suggests that the bacterium at the root of the deadly outbreak in Germany is a new hybrid type of pathogenic E. coli strains. 

The MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope has captured an image of NGC 6744, a spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). And in the image, NGC 6744 looks a lot like our Milky Way.We see NGC 6744 almost face on, meaning we get a bird’s eye view of the galaxy’s structure. If we had the technology to escape the Milky Way and could look down on it from intergalactic space, this view is close to the one we would see, striking spiral arms wrapping around a dense, elongated nucleus and a dusty disc. There is even a distorted companion galaxy — NGC 6744A, seen here as a smudge to the lower right of NGC 6744, which is reminiscent of one of the Milky Way’s neighboring Magellanic Clouds.

Bigpoint Inc. today released a teaser trailer and game site for its upcoming action-adventure title, The Mummy Online.  Developed in collaboration with Universal Partnerships&Licensing, The Mummy Online brings the blockbuster film franchise to the free-to-play MMOG space. 
The 3D action-adventure game will include original storylines, battles and opportunities to explore mysterious and exotic locales.  The game will be free-to-play directly via your web browser.
Game Setting - Amarna

Well-known jeweler Tiffany&Co. has introduced a new website and iPhone(R) App for people who fall in love and simply must see other stories about people in love.    How well known is Tiffany's?    There's the rather famous "Breakfast at Tiffany's",  from a novella by Truman Capote that was made into a Blake Edwards film starring Audrey Hepburn, but they likely aren't showing it in the store today because Mickey Rooney's buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi comes across as racist to a modern crowd.

A new study finds that stress does not appear to increase a person's risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS). 

Researchers studied two groups of women nurses from the Nurses' Health Study. The first group of 121,700 nurses between the ages of 30 and 55 were followed starting in 1976. The second group of 116,671 nurses between the ages of 25 and 42 were followed from 1989. Participants were asked to report general stress at home and at work, including physical and sexual abuse in childhood and as teenagers. Of the first group, 77 people developed MS by 2005.

There is water inside the moon.  A lot,
it turns out, according to the first measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions, which show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as the Earth’s upper mantle.Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globules of molten rock trapped within crystals that are found in volcanic glass deposits formed during explosive eruptions. The new findings show lunar magma water contents are 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested.