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A black Harvard premedical student quit school in what she called a "great act of resistance" spurred by her professors' refusal to discuss the Breonna Taylor case before an exam. Kyla Golding, who was a Harvard Crimson editorial editor, left the university due to the "silence and avoidance between myself and my educators when it comes to black women’s lives," she wrote in an opinion article Friday. "I took an inorganic chemistry exam the same day that a grand jury failed to charge two police officers with the murder of Breonna Taylor. That day, my body inhaled molecules of white...

For mouthless, lungless bacteria, breathing is a bit more complicated than it is for humans. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; Geobacter - a ubiquitous, groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria - swallow up organic waste and 'exhale' electrons, generating a tiny electric current in the process. Those waste electrons always need somewhere to go (usually into a plentiful underground mineral like iron oxide), and Geobacter have an unconventional tool to make sure they get there. "Geobacter breathe through what is essentially a giant snorkel, hundreds of times their size," Nikhil Malvankar, an assistant professor at Yale University's Microbial Science Institute...

What will 3D printers ultimately evolve into? No one has a functioning crystal ball in front of them I assume, but a good guess would be a machine which can practically build anything its user desire, all on the molecular, and eventually atomic levels. Sure we are likely multiple decades away from widespread molecular manufacturing, but a group of chemists led by medical doctor Martin D. Burke at the University of Illinois may have already taken a major step in that direction. Burke, who joined the Department of Chemistry at the university in 2005, heads up Burke Laboratories where he...

Need an obscure medicinal compound found only in a jungle plant? Just print it.Say you're a medical researcher interested in a rare chemical produced in the roots of a little-known Peruvian flower. It's called ratanhine, and it's valuable because it has some fascinating anti-fungal properties that might make for great medicines. Getting your hands on the rare plant is hard, and no chemical supplier is or has ever sold it. But maybe, thanks to the work of University of Illinois chemist Martin Burke, you could print it right in the lab. In a new study published in the journal Science...

Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter Photons with strong mutual attraction in a quantum nonlinear medium. Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it. Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25...

Study Finds Molecules Evolving in Wrong Direction by Brian Thomas, M.S. | Jan. 23, 2012 Which is more complex—a typical man walking across a street, or a blind man carrying a legless man across the street? The blind and legless partners are more complex simply because they have more interacting parts. But this increased complexity not only results in less functionality, it also doesn't provide any additional information about how sight and mobility could have originated. Evolution is supposed to explain how complicated biological machines, such as legs and eyes, developed without an intelligent person to design and build them....

The chemical fingerprints of potentially life-building molecules have been detected in the Orion nebula by Europe's Herschel Space Observatory. The Orion nebula is a nearby stellar nursery, brimming with gas, dust and infant stars. It is known to be one of the most prolific chemical factories in space, although the full extent of its chemistry and the pathways for molecule formation are not well understood. Researchers have used one of Herschel's instruments, which looks at the cosmos in the far infrared wavelengths of light, to provide more insight into how organic molecules form in space. By sifting through the pattern...

Why is it that the origins of many serious diseases remain a mystery? In considering that question, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has come up with a unified molecular view of the indivisible unit of life, the cell, which may provide an answer. Reviewing findings from multiple disciplines, Jamey Marth, Ph.D., UC San Diego Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, realized that only 68 molecular building blocks are used to construct these four fundamental components of cells: the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, glycans...

PARIS (AFP) - Genetic material from outer space found in a meteorite in Australia may well have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, according to a study to be published Sunday. European and US scientists have proved for the first time that two bits of genetic coding, called nucleobases, contained in the meteor fragment, are truly extraterrestrial. Previous studies had suggested that the space rocks, which hit Earth some 40 years ago, might have been contaminated upon impact. Both of the molecules identified, uracil and xanthine, "are present in our DNA and RNA," said lead...

NEW YORK: A newly designed porous membrane, so thin that it's invisible edge-on, might revolutionise the way doctors and scientists manipulate objects as small as molecules. The 50-atom thick filter can withstand surprisingly high pressures and may be a key to better separation of blood proteins for dialysis patients, speeding ion exchange in fuel cells and purifying air and water at the nanoscopic level. "It's amazing, we have a material as thin as some of the molecules it's sorting, and riddled with holes - but it can withstand enough pressure to make real-world nano-filtering a practical reality," said Christopher Striemer...

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real. Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”. His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been...

See for example this thread first. A new scientific breakthrough from IBM, and here's what they do: Using 'atomic force' to sort molecules (of course!) No electrophoresis, no "goo"!

Hunt for ancient human molecules By Richard Black BBC science correspondent in Seattle New technologies may soon allow scientists to identify some of the genes of humankind's oldest ancestors. This raises the possibility of plotting the evolutionary tree of humanity from five million years ago to the present. Professor Hendrik Poinar says DNA fragments should be recoverable from fossils that are a million years old, and proteins from even older times. His comments came at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Seattle. Professor Poinar, from McMaster University in Canada, said the key was to...

<p>A rare Martian meteorite seen through a microscope forms a collage of vivid colors and jagged shapes that is out of this world.</p> <p>But whatever you magnify -- beer, gems, even gunpowder -- most objects just end up looking like the psychedelic swirls in a funky tie-dyed T-shirt.</p>

The prospect of a new generation of devices that harness the spin of electrons has moved closer following a recent experiment in the US. Min Ouyang and David Awschalom of the University of California at Santa Barbara have transferred electron spins across molecular 'bridges' between quantum dots for the first time. Even better, the pair found that they could transfer the spins most effectively at room temperature (M Ouyang and D Awschalom 2003 Sciencexpress 1086963). Conventional electronic devices manipulate the flow of electronic charge, but spintronic devices would also exploit the intrinsic angular momentum or spin of electrons. Several proposals...