Preliminary results from DNA tests carried out on a mummy believed to be Queen Hatshepsut is expected to support the claim by Egyptian authorities that the remains are indeed those of Egypt’s most powerful female ruler.

Egyptologists in Cairo announced last month that a tooth found in a wooden box associated with Hatshepsut exactly fitted the jaw socket and broken root of the unidentified mummy.

Now, Dr Angelique Corthals, a biomedical Egyptologist at The University of Manchester, says that DNA tests she helped carry out with colleagues at the National Research Centre in Cairo have promising preliminary results suggesting the identity of the queen.

It may seem odd to think about using metallic structures for transmitting light because light quickly attenuates on passing through a metal, but light waves travelling only a few centimeters don't lose their energy and that discover could change the face of nanotechnology.

The discovery, known as acoustic plasmon, are surface plasmons formed by the group excitation of electrons but it is produced by the interaction between light and metal surfaces.

The advantage of acoustic plasmons over the long-known surface plasmons is that they are created with a different amount of energy.

There are hundreds of thousands of proteins for which amino acid sequence data are available, but whose structure and function remain unknown.

Now a research team, led by University of Illinois biochemistry professor John A. Gerlt, has devised a method to use a computational approach to accurately predict a protein’s function from its amino acid sequence. Their “in silico” (computer-aided) predictions were validated in the laboratory by means of enzyme assays and X-ray crystallography.

The new approach involved searching databases of known proteins for those with amino acid sequences that had the greatest homology to the unknown proteins.

When a cell is seriously stressed, say by a heart attack, stroke or cancer, a protein called Bak just may set it up for suicide, researchers have found.

In a deadly double whammy, Bak helps chop the finger-like filament shape of the cell’s powerhouse, or mitochondrion, into vulnerable little spheres. Another protein Bax then pokes countless holes in those spheres, spilling their pro-death contents into the cell.

“We found out Bak has a distinct function in regulation of the mitochondrial morphology,” says Dr. Zheng Dong, cell biologist at the Medical College of Georgia and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Augusta .

By bypassing a well-known gene implicated in almost one-third of all cancers and instead focusing on the protein activated by the gene, Dr. Christopher Counter and colleagues at the Duke University Medical Center have identified IL6 as a new target in the battle against Ras-induced cancers.

The ras gene, known as an oncogene when it is in this mutated state, has been implicated in several different cancers, including those of the pancreas and lungs. To date, efforts at blocking or turning off ras have proven ineffective.

To protect us from disease our immune system employs macrophages, cells that roam our body in search of disease-causing bacteria. With the help of long tentacle-like protrusions, macrophages can catch suspicious particles, pull them towards their cell bodies, internalise and destroy them.

Using a special microscopy technique, researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) now for the first time tracked the dynamic behaviour of these tentacles in three dimensions. In the current online issue of PNAS they describe a molecular mechanism that likely underlies the tentacle movement and that could influence the design of new nanotechnologies.