Lignocellulosic waste such as sawdust or straw can be used to produce biofuel – but only if the long cellulose and xylan chains can be successfully broken down into smaller sugar molecules. To do this, fungi are used which, by means of a specific chemical signal, can be made to produce the necessary enzymes.

It's an expensive process so the Vienna University of Technology has been investigating the molecular switch that regulates enzyme production in the fungus and found it is possible to manufacture genetically modified fungi that produce the necessary enzymes fully independently, thus making biofuel production significantly cheaper.

Replacing A Traditional Biofuel Inductor Over 60 Times More Expensive than Gold

A team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope has imaged a faint object moving near a bright star. With an estimated mass of four to five times that of Jupiter, this exoplanet, named HD 95086 b, would be the lightest planet to be directly observed outside the Solar System.

Although nearly a thousand exoplanets have been detected indirectly — most using the radial velocity or transit methods — and many more candidates await confirmation, only a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged. Nine years after ESO's Very Large Telescope captured the first image of an exoplanet, the planetary companion to the brown dwarf 2M1207, the same team has caught on camera what is probably the lightest of these objects so far."

How do you allocate lifesaving drugs when there aren't enough to go around? 

83 percent of cancer doctors surveyed say that they've faced oncology drug shortages, and of those, nearly all say that their patients' treatment has been impacted, according to results presented today at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (Abstract #CRA6510).

The shortages are most profound among drugs to treat pediatric, gastrointestinal and blood cancers and have left physicians surveyed unable to prescribe standard chemotherapies for a range of cancers.

Some readers may well feel themselves in the dark when it comes to the usage of the interjection ‘oh’ in English and its translation in Catalan. Thus they could find a 2007 article published in the Catalan Journal of Linguistics, (Vol. 6, pp 117-136) of help.

‘The translation of oh in a corpus of dubbed sitcoms‘ is authored by  Dr. Anna Matamala, who is a Professora titular d’universitat, at the Departament de Traducció i d’Interpretació of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

The Mousetrap Myth

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.  The metaphor of a better mousetrap suggests that any really useful invention will be eagerly adopted. In this series of articles I trace a history of invention and discovery which shows that resistance is more likely than acceptance, even for proven life-saving inventions and facilities.



A better mousetrap ?

The Danish composer Per Nørgård uses an endless self similar (fractal like) strict sloth canon structure in some of his compositions such as his Symphony number 2. He first discovered his sequence in 1959.

Researchers behind a new paper say women's brains appear to be hard-wired to respond to the cries of a hungry infant.

They asked men and women to let their minds wander, then played a recording of white noise interspersed with the sounds of an infant crying. Brain scans showed that, in the women, patterns of brain activity abruptly switched to an attentive mode when they heard the infant cries, whereas the men's brains remained in the resting state.

Mouse studies have determined that a small molecule called natriuretic polypeptide b (Nppb) released in the spinal cord triggers a process that is later experienced in the brain as the sensation of itch. 

Nppb streams ahead and selectively plugs into a specific nerve cell in the spinal cord, which sends the signal onward through the central nervous system. When Nppb or its nerve cell was removed, mice stopped scratching at a broad array of itch-inducing substances. The signal wasn’t going through.

Young entrepreneurs tackling hard problems and billion dollar markets took top prizes at the First Look West (FLoW) regional finals competition with technologies that recover waste energy from energy servers powered by fuel cells, mobile phone apps for tracking home energy use and devices for improving solar panel efficiencies.  At an awards celebration held at the University of Southern California on May 7, Pyro-E, Chai Energy and Dragonfly shared $160,000 in prize money and start-up packages that include face time with top investors and legal support.

Increasingly one can't help but notice the tone of many of today's hot button science topics have decidedly left the realm of science and become firmly entrenched in advocacy.  My choice of discussion is Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) foods.

While I don't intent to pick on Steve Savage, since he is clearly a very knowledgeable individual, I couldn't help but be struck by his recent article which seemed to cross far over the line into advocacy.  Moreover, I certainly don't intend to impugn anything about Steve as anything other than that we have a disagreement on this topic.