Forget mousetraps -- today's scientists will get the cheese if they manage to build a better battery.

An international team led by Texas A&M University chemist Sarbajit Banerjee is one step closer, thanks to new research published today (June 28) in the journal Nature Communications that has the potential to create more efficient batteries by shedding light on the cause of one of their biggest problems -- a "traffic jam" of ions that slows down their charging and discharging process.

ITHACA, N.Y. - The enzyme sirtuin 6, or SIRT6, serves many key biological functions in regulating genome stability, DNA repair, metabolism and longevity, but how its multiple enzyme activities relate to its various functions is poorly understood.

A team of Cornell University researchers, led by Hening Lin, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, has devised a method for isolating one specific enzyme activity to determine its contribution and lead to better overall understanding of SIRT6.

Their work, "Identifying the functional contribution of the defatty-acylase activity of SIRT6," was published June 20 in Nature Chemical Biology. Xiaoyu Zhang, graduate student in chemistry and chemical biology and a member of the Lin Group, was lead author.

CHAPEL HILL - Across North Carolina, the risk of death from the most common form of acute leukemia in adults was significantly higher in three regions, researchers from the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center found.

In a retrospective study published in the journal Cancer, researchers report that adults treated with chemotherapy in the hospital for acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, between 2003 to 2009 had a statistically significant higher risk of death if they lived in northeastern North Carolina from Wilson to Roanoke Rapids, in a region around Greenville, and a region around Wake County, including Durham County. Those differences remained even after researchers controlled for other factors that might help drive the increases.

BOSTON (June 28, 2016)--Researchers at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts, led by Jonathan Garlick, have established for the first time that skin cells from diabetic foot ulcers can be reprogrammed to acquire properties of embryonic-like cells. These induced pluripotent stem cells might someday be used to treat chronic wounds. The study is published online in advance of print in Cellular Reprogramming.

A second study from the research team published in Wound Repair and Regeneration found that a protein called fibronectin is linked to a break-down in the wound-healing process in cells from diabetic foot ulcers.

This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a cosmic tadpole, with its bright head and elongated tail, wriggling through the inky black pool of space. Tadpole galaxies are rare and difficult to find in the local Universe. This striking example, named LEDA 36252, was explored as part of a Hubble study into their mysterious properties -- with interesting results.

This week is National Mosquito Control Awareness Week, and the Entomological Society of America is supporting the effort with a special collection of articles about the Asian tiger mosquito.