Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine are the first to observe and measure the internal motion inside proteins, or its “dark energy.” This research, appearing in the current issue of Nature has revealed how the internal motion of proteins affects their function and overturns the standard view of protein structure-function relationships, suggesting why rational drug design has been so difficult.

The situation is akin to the discussion in astrophysics in which theoreticians predict that there is dark matter, or energy, that no one has yet seen,” says senior author A. Joshua Wand, PhD, Benjamin Rush Professor of Biochemistry.

A typical human mouth teems with as many as 700 different species of microbes. A handful of these have been specifically implicated in promoting gum disease, dental cavities, and bad breath, but for the most part, the make-up of this complex ecosystem and its impact on human health remain largely unexplored.

A new device created by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers, however, may make some of the most reclusive members of this and other microscopic communities much more accessible for laboratory study.

Ice loss from glaciers and ice caps is expected to cause more global sea rise during this century than the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

The researchers concluded that glaciers and ice caps are currently contributing about 60 percent of the world’s ice to the oceans and the rate has been markedly accelerating in the past decade, said Emeritus Professor Mark Meier of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, lead study author. The contribution is presently about 100 cubic miles of ice annually -- a volume nearly equal to the water in Lake Erie -- and is rising by about three cubic miles per year.

The genetic makeup of any species is more like customized open source code than something that is fixed and can be easily documented. The parts of our 'code' that have withstood the test of time and the parts have undergone rapid evolutionary change has been difficult to assess.

Staying with the metapohor, an international team of researchers has developed a simple method to comb whole genomes for all the software fixes and security patches accumulated over time. In a first trial run, the scientists catalogued the genetic variations in 23 strains of the mustard weed Arabidopsis thaliana that were collected from the wild all over the world.

Game over. Computer scientists at the University of Alberta have solved checkers, the popular board game with a history that dates back to 3,000 B.C.

After 18-and-a-half years and sifting through 500 billion billion (a five followed by 20 zeroes) checkers positions, Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues have built a checkers-playing computer program that cannot be beaten. Completed in late April this year, the program, Chinook, may be played to a draw but will never be defeated.

"This is a tremendous achievement—a truly significant advance in artificial intelligence," said Dr.

Astronomers have found a debris disk around HD 15115. As seen from Earth, the edge-on disk resembles a needle sticking out from the star.

Astronomers think the disk's odd imbalanced look is caused by dust following a highly elliptical orbit about the star. The lopsided disk may have been caused by the gravity of planets sweeping up debris in the disk or by the gravity of a nearby star.

The observations were made by Paul Kalas, James Graham, and Michael P. Fitzgerald, all from the University of California at Berkeley.