Researchers  have developed an inexpensive way to grade the ethanol potential of perennial grasses at the biorefinery's loading dock - the first use of near-infrared sensing (NIRS) to measure 20 components in switchgrass biomass that determine its potential value to biorefiners. These components include cell wall sugars, soluble sugars and lignin. With this information, 13 traits can be determined, including the efficiency of the conversion from sugars to ethanol.

This is the first use of NIRS to predict maximum and actual ethanol yields of grasses from a basic conversion process. This capability already exists for corn grain using NIRS.

On one of my recent safari’s through the internet jungle, I came across a remarkable little creature. It’s a small (maximum diameter about 4.5 millimeters) bell-shaped jellyfish, with a number of tentacles ranging from 8 in young specimens to 90 in adult ones.

It’s name is Turritopsis nutricula (see figure 1), and it can actually age backwards. A cnidarian Benjamin Button, as it were.

    

Figure 1: The immortal jellyfish, T. nutricula.

(Source: zmescience)

   

Look, we all know smoking is bad for you by now.  We don't need to spend billions of dollars telling people that but an entire industry has been built around getting people to stop, and it is primarily funded by penalties on tobacco companies and taxes.   It's a truly parasitic relationship but it isn't going anywhere and anti-smoking groups need smokers to stay in business.  Apparently so do some researchers.

For this instance of my "Guess the plot" series I wish to go back to the basics. So I picked a graph which allows me to illustrate a general concept, something about particle physics (but we could say physics in general, and actually extending to other exact sciences) which is a source of endless awe for me: the fact that some functions exist, in the infinite-dimensional space of all real functions of a real variable, which describe some specific feature of our world.

As health care costs continue to rise and more people want more services for less money, it will be important that doctors engage in evidence-based medicine. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have determined that the majority of primary care providers continue to recommend annual cervical cancer screening, though cervical cancer screening guidelines recommend a combination of a Papanicolaou test and an HPV test, known as an HPV co-test, for women 30 years of age and older. 

Five years into the Science 2.0 experiment I can tell you down to the eyeball how many people are involved in the communication pillar of it - but in the collaboration realm, it's not so easy.

Science 2.0 fave Heather A. Piwowar from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt recently gave it a shot, and the answer was...it's unknown.

Cancer, diabetes, stroke and transplant patients can all get benefit from one common thing; frog skin.

An international research project is collecting proteins from our amphibian friends (no frogs were harmed in the writing of this article or in the research) and adding to a growing bank of biological data needed to build up our understanding of the naturally occurring medicines in frogs.

They have already found that the peptides (mini-proteins) collected from the Waxy Monkey Frog and the Giant Firebellied Toad can be used in a controlled and targeted way to regulate 'angiogenesis', the process by which blood vessels grow in the body.  

University of Alberta researcher David Bressler has an idea for the future of recycling.

Using throwaway parts of beef carcasses that were sidelined from the value-added production process after Mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) damaged the Canadian beef industry in 2003, Bressler has collaborated with industry, government and other researchers to forge cattle proteins into heavy-duty plastics that could soon be used in everything from car parts to CD cases.

Police blotters can make fun reading, especially when they show up in your news alert for "squid," and especially when they use the word "caper":

The caper began when someone used blue spray paint to draw a large squid or octopus on the northwest side of the Warner Park Community Recreation Center, 1425 Troy Drive.

Squid or octopus? Why didn't they call a marine biologist to identify it? Anyway, a few days later the police were investigating the suspect of a hit-and-run crash in his house:

Analysis of a piece of lunar rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972 has shown that we may have been wrong about the age of the Moon.

It is commonly accepted that the Moon was created by the impact of a large planet-like object and our proto-Earth very early in the evolution of our solar system. The energy of this impact was sufficiently high that the Moon formed from melted material that began with a deep liquid magma ocean.  As the Moon cooled, this magma ocean solidified into different mineral components, the lightest of which floated upwards to form the oldest crust. Analysis of a lunar rock sample of this presumed ancient crust has given scientists new insights into the formation of the Moon.