Termites know how to digest cellulose, but the human process of producing ethanol from cellulose is slow and expensive. The bottleneck is the rate at which the cellulose enzyme breaks down cellulose into sugars, which are then fermented into ethanol.

To help unlock the cellulose bottleneck, a team of scientists has conducted molecular simulations at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), based at UC San Diego. By using "virtual molecules," they have discovered key steps in the intricate dance in which the enzyme acts as a molecular machine -- attaching to bundles of cellulose, pulling up a single strand of sugar, and putting it onto a molecular conveyor belt where it is chopped into smaller sugar pieces.

For years contractors, real estate agents and event planners have said that whether building, buying or planning an event, a higher or vaulted ceiling is always better. Are they right? Until now there has been no real evidence that ceiling height has any influence or advantage with consumers. But recent research by Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, suggests that the way people think and act is affected by ceiling height.

The Spanish Aging Research Network (Red Nacional de Investigación del Envejecimiento), funded by Carlos III Health Institute and headed by professor Darío Acuña Castroviejo, from the University of Granada (Universidad de Granada [http://www.ugr.es]), is very near to achieving one of today's Science greatest goals: allowing humans to age in the best possible health conditions.

Europe is facing a “major health and social burden” as the obesity epidemic reaches crisis point, experts warned today.

Governments, whose health ministers have already signed the ‘European Charter’ pledging to halt the rise in obesity by 2015, must now back more intensive research programmes, and gear up to cope with the scale of the epidemic, which is damaging quality of life and reducing life expectancy.

Alcoholism is more common in people with alcoholic spouses than those without, a new study shows.

This makes some sense. If you met her while doing shots of Jäger off her drunken abdomen, she's going to be a little more tolerant of your excessive drinking, as long as you share. It's important to have things in common if you want your relationship to last.

The culture of a school can dampen – or exacerbate – the violent or disruptive tendencies of aggressive young teens, new research indicates. A large-scale study from the University of Illinois found that while personal traits and peer interactions have the most direct effect on the aggressive behavior of middle school students, the school environment also influences student aggression.

The study assessed individual, family and school predictors of aggression in 111,662 middle school students. The findings appear in the March 2007 issue of the journal, Youth & Society.

NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites have provided the first three-dimensional images of the sun. For the first time, scientists will be able to see structures in the sun's atmosphere in three dimensions. The new view will greatly aid scientists' ability to understand solar physics and there by improve space weather forecasting. This web page contains 3-D anaglyph video and images. This 3-D video can be seen with red and cyan + 3-D paper glasses.

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The April 23, 2007 Chemistry and Engineering News article on the Social Software in Education symposium at the American Chemical Society spring meeting in Chicago has come out. I gave a talk there on using blogs and wikis to teach organic chemistry. The article is a pretty comprehensive report on the session and does a good job of summarizing the key technologies currently being tried without much hype. Podcasting, vodcasting, tagging and wikis were discussed from teachers and librarians using them in different ways.

New research helps bridge an important gap in understanding schizophrenia, providing the best evidence to date that defects in the brain's white matter are a key contributor to the disease, which affects about 1 percent of people worldwide. The findings, to be published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of April 23, also demonstrate how two of the dozen or more genes previously linked with schizophrenia may contribute to the disease.

When NRG1-erbB signaling was blocked, oligodendrocytes from the brain's frontal cortex had a less complex structure than normal, forming fewer branches.

Just as an editorial note, we try to stay as politically agnostic as possible. No site can be objective but we at least try to be balanced - left, right, we don't much care. We just want it to be science.

This is a news release and it's from a group that, we are told, has a left wing agenda. News releases aren't endorsements of the content and we often change the titles to look less inflammatory, just as we did here. It's a science study so anyone who writes to write more on the GNEP program can contribute as well.