Latest National Academy of Sciences Stories
UI researchers develop technique to help pollution forecasters see past clouds Until now, scientists who study air pollution using satellite imagery have been limited by weather. Clouds, in particular, provide much less information than a sunny day. University of Iowa scientists have created a technique to help satellites "see" through the clouds and better estimate the concentration of pollutants, such as soot. The finding is important, because, like GPS systems, clouds block...
Diels and Alder won the Nobel; now UCLA's Kendall Houk makes the movie In 1928, chemists Otto Diels and Kurt Alder first documented diene synthesis, a chemical reaction important for synthesizing many polymers, alkaloids and steroids. Their work on this mechanism, which came to be known as the Diels–Alder reaction, won them the 1950 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Since then, the iconic reaction has become the most commonly used and studied mechanism in organic chemistry. But what happens...
Rice University study details exactly how nanotubes bend and break What’s 100 times stronger than steel, weighs one-sixth as much and can be snapped like a twig by a tiny air bubble? The answer is a carbon nanotube — and a new study by Rice University scientists details exactly how the much-studied nanomaterials snap when subjected to ultrasonic vibrations in a liquid. “We find that the old saying ‘I will break but not bend’ does not hold at the micro- and nanoscale,” said...
A team of scientists has created an "MRI" of the Sun's interior plasma motions, shedding light on how it transfers heat from its deep interior to its surface. The result, which appears in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, upends our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation. The work was conducted by researchers from NYU's Courant Institute of...
Drugs are first to topically deliver gene therapy via commercial moisturizers for skin disease treatment “Getting under your skin” takes on a brave new meaning thanks to Northwestern University research that could transform gene regulation. A team led by a physician-scientist and a chemist -- from the fields of dermatology and nanotechnology -- is the first to demonstrate the use of commercial moisturizers to deliver gene regulation technology that has great potential for...
Invasive species such as kudzu, privet and garlic mustard can devastate ecosystems, and, until now, scientists had little reason to believe that native plants could mount a successful defense. A new University of Georgia study shows that some native clearweed plants have evolved resistance to invasive garlic mustard plants—and that the invasive plants appear to be waging a counterattack. The study, published in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of...
Scientists have identified a new mechanism of bacterial pathogenesis. The results of the research project, partly funded by the Academy of Finland, have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Bacteria that cause chronic infections have an amazing but yet poorly known ability to subvert immune response, live and produce offspring, enter and wake up from a dormant phase to cause, in some instances, deadly...
A classic study from more than 60 years ago suggesting that males are more promiscuous and females more choosy in selecting mates may, in fact, be wrong, say life scientists who are the first to repeat the historic experiment using the same methods as the original. In 1948, English geneticist Angus John Bateman published a study showing that male fruit flies gain an evolutionary advantage from having multiple mates, while their female counterparts do not. Bateman's conclusions have...
Neurons come in an astounding assortment of shapes and sizes, forming a thick inter-connected jungle of cells. Now, UCL neuroscientists have found that there is a simple pattern that describes the tree-like shape of all neurons. Neurons look remarkably like trees, and connect to other cells with many branches that effectively act like wires in an electrical circuit, carrying impulses that represent sensation, emotion, thought and action. Over 100 years ago, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the...
Using data supplied by a mobile operator, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have shown that population movements after the 2010 Haiti earthquake followed regular patterns. This information can be used to predict beforehand the movements of people after a disaster, and thus improves chances for aid to be delivered to the right places at the right time. Every year, tens of millions of people are displaced by natural disasters, and to date knowledge of their movement patterns has been...
