News Articles

Before we can begin to implement sustainable, carbon-neutral gasoline - "grassoline" - from inedible plant material like fast-growing weeds and agricultural waste, some technology hurdles have to be overcome.  Namely, finding better ways to break lignocellulosic biomass down into fermentable sugars.

Over 60 percent of the nearly 5,000 genome projects reported in the Genomes OnLine Database involve microbes.   It's no surprise.   Microbes are important in everything from bioenergy to agriculture and medicine and are involved in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles.A lot could be done with microbial genomics, says DOE JGI Genome Biology head Nikos Kyrpides writing in Nature Biotechnology, if researchers go beyond the present anthropocentric focus and institute shared standards for genomic data collection and analysis.

University of Haifa-Oranim researchers have managed to make out the “self-irrigating” mechanism of Rumex hymenosepalus, the desert rhubarb, which enables it to harvest 16 times the amount of water than otherwise expected for a plant in this region based on the quantities of rain in the desert - the first example of a self-irrigating plant worldwide.The desert rhubarb grows in the mountains of Israel’s Negev desert, where average precipitation is particularly low (75 mm per year). Unlike most of the other desert plant species, which have small leaves so as to minimize moisture loss, this plant is unique in that its leaves are particularly large; each plant’s rosette of one to four leaves reaches a total diameter of up to one meter.

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), expected to power Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the future because they are an optimum energy harvesting source that may lead to longer flight times without refueling, have gotten a boost  by using a flexible film and a thin glass coating with transparent conductive electrodes. The University of Washington's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project team, with lead researcher Dr. Minoru Taya is working on the airborne solar cells and found that DSSCs made from organic materials, which use (dyes) and moth-eye film, are able to catch photons and convert them into synthesized electrons that can harvest high photon energy. 

Georgia State University researchers are manipulating individual atoms in DNA and forming unique molecules in hopes of understanding the mechanisms of DNA replication and transcription, and perhaps leading to new treatments for diseases.Chemistry and chemical biology Professor Zhen Huang and his lab were able, for the first time, to manipulate groups of molecules called methyl and phosphate groups in DNA that have been altered to contain selenium in order to bring them close enough together to form hydrogen bonds.

It isn't often that the government gets it right and the energy/climate change policies being jammed through Congress while there is no way to block them could be with us for a long time.

Unless the writing is completely legible and usually modern, even advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems give rise to transcription problems and provide results with many errors that need to be edited afterwards, a time-consuming process.The Computational Perception and Learning Research Group in the Computer Languages and Systems Department at the Universitat Jaume I, in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, have developed a new assisted system for the transcription of written text called 'State',  a transcription system that integrates a series of tools with which images can be processed in order to remove noise and clean up the original image.

A low-cost generator could be a boon for people in the world’s poorest countries.   The Score project, led by The University of Nottingham, is developing a biomass-burning cooking stove which also converts heat into acoustic energy and then into electricity, all in one unit.The £2 million Score project (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) has brought  together experts from across the world to develop the biomass-powered generator.  An affordable, versatile domestic appliance like Score aims to address the energy needs of rural communities in Africa and Asia, where access to power is extremely limited.

In the 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species',  despite consistent patterns of biodiversity identified over space, time, organism type and geographical region, there still remain two views of the process of 'speciation', the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise.The first requires a physical barrier;  a glacier, mountain or body of water that separates organisms,  enabling groups to diverge until they become separate species. In the second scenario, an environment favors specific characteristics within a species, which encourages divergence as members fill different roles in an ecosystem. 

A lunar geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis says that there are still many answers to be found in moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts nearly 40 years ago.   And he's been studying them since then, so he should know.Randy L. Korotev, Ph.D., a research professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts&Sciences, has studied lunar samples and their chemical compositions since he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and "was in the right place at the right time" in 1969 to be a part of a team to study some of the first lunar samples.

Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI), a privately held company co-founded by Craig Ventner in the business of applying genomic-driven commercial solutions to challenges like energy and the environment, announced a multi-year research and development agreement with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (EMRE) to develop next generation biofuels using photosynthetic algae. 
SGI will receive milestone payments for achievements in developing biofuel products. Total funding for SGI in research and development activities and milestone payments could amount to more than US$300 million with the potential for additional income from licensing to third parties. 

Scientists in Atlantic Canada say they have found a gene that may play a role in skin aging. Researchers were investigating the genetic cause of a rare disorder known as cutis laxa type 2 (CL2), which causes skin on the hands, feet and face to be loose and older looking, as well as growth and developmental delays including effects on the brain. In the process, researchers found some interesting correlations with the synthesis of proline, a chemical associated with skin and joint health. Several maritime Canadian families with CL2 were identified by clinicians at the IWK Health Centre’s Maritime Medical Genetics service.