Latest Brookhaven National Laboratory Stories

Report on new materials calls for renewed efforts to regain US leadership in fieldAccording to a recent report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the United States, once the world leader in the discovery and growth of crystalline materials, is now falling behind other nations. Citing a decline in large U.S. industrial research laboratories and new investment by foreign governments as the cause behind this slippage, the report also singles out the U.S....

Tracing the history, genetic makeup of workhorse laboratory bacteriaAn international team of researchers from the United States, Korea, and France has sequenced and analyzed the genomes of two important laboratory strains of E. coli bacteria, one used to study evolution and the other to produce proteins for basic research or practical applications. The findings will help guide future research and will also open a window to a deeper understanding of classical research that is the foundation of...

Compounds that kill dormant pathogen while sparing human cells could lead to new drugsAttempts to eradicate tuberculosis (TB) are stymied by the fact that the disease-causing bacteria have a sophisticated mechanism for surviving dormant in infected cells. Now, a team of scientists including researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University (SBU), Weill Cornell Medical College, and The Rockefeller University has identified compounds...

Reveals shape-shifting atomic interactions; suggests mechanism and possible drug targetsHow much difference can a tenth of a nanometer make? When it comes to figuring out how proteins work, an improvement in resolution of that miniscule amount can mean the difference between seeing where atoms are and understanding how they interact.Case in point: New, improved-resolution views of a zinc transporter protein deciphered at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory provide...

An international team of scientists has discovered extensive similarities between a strain of bacteria commonly associated with plants and one increasingly linked to opportunistic infections in hospital patients. The findings suggest caution in the use of the plant-associated strain for a range of biotech applications. The genetic analysis was conducted in part at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, and will be published in the July 2009 issue of Nature...

In 1972, Apollo astronauts narrowly escaped a potential catastrophe. On August 2nd of that year, a large and angry sunspot appeared and began to erupt, over and over again for more than a week, producing a record-setting fusillade of solar proton radiation. Only pure luck saved the day. The eruptions took place during the gap between Apollo 16 and 17 missions, so astronauts missed the storm. Researchers still wonder, what would have happened if the timing had been just a little different,...

Duke and Brookhaven examine free-flowing 'exploding cigars'Several years after Duke University researchers announced spectacular behavior of a low density ultracold gas cloud, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have observed strikingly similar properties in a very hot and dense plasma "fluid" created to simulate conditions when the universe was about one millionths of a second old.The plasma was formed at a colossal 2 million degrees Kelvin temperatures within...

NIST, Brookhaven Researchers Use Tuberculosis Bacteria to End 25-Year QuestThe bacterium behind one of mankind's deadliest scourges, tuberculosis, is helping researchers at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) move closer to answering the decades-old question of what controls the switching on and off of genes that carry out all of life's functions.In a Journal of Biological Chemistry...

Findings have implications for increasing biomass for the production of biofuelsThrough work originally designed to remove contaminants from soil, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and their Belgium colleagues at Hasselt University have identified plant-associated microbes that can improve plant growth on marginal land. The findings, published in the February 1, 2009 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, may help scientists design...

A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Delaware and Yeshiva University, has developed a new catalyst that could make ethanol-powered fuel cells feasible. The highly efficient catalyst performs two crucial, and previously unreachable steps needed to oxidize ethanol and produce clean energy in fuel cell reactions. Their results are published online in the January 25, 2009 edition of...