Chemical research has traditionally been organized in either experiment-centric or molecule-centric models. This makes sense from the chemist's standpoint. When we think about doing chemistry, we conceptualize experiments as the fundamental unit of progress. This is reflected in the laboratory notebook, where each page is an experiment, with an objective, a procedure, the results, their analysis and a final conclusion optimally directly answering the stated objective. When we think about searching for chemistry, we generally imagine molecules and transformations.

Is marketing a bad thing? How much money does Coca-Cola spend on Research & Development of its premier soft drink? Nothing. When something works, you go with it. New Coke taught them that. But they market it like crazy.

Yet whether pharmaceutical companies are primarily interested in research and development or marketing is central to the cultural debate about medicine.

Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin, writing in PLoS Medicine, state that information on promotional expenditures from IMS, the most widely quoted authority that surveys pharmaceutical firms, isn't reliable.

The extinction of dinosaurs has always fascinated historians and biologists. Theories abound regarding asteroid impacts or massive volcanic flows that might have occurred around the time dinosaurs became extinct but a new book argues that the mightiest creatures the world has ever known may have been brought down by a tiny, much less dramatic force – biting, disease-carrying insects.

An important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs, experts say, could have been the rise and evolution of insects, especially the slow-but-overwhelming threat posed by new disease carriers.

For centuries, human beings have been entranced by the captivating glimmer of the diamond. What accounts for the stunning beauty of this most precious gem?

As mathematician Toshikazu Sunada explains in an article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, some secrets of the diamond's beauty can be uncovered by a mathematical analysis of its microscopic crystal structure. It turns out that this structure has some very special, and especially symmetric, properties. In fact, as Sunada discovered, out of an infinite universe of mathematical crystals, only one other shares these properties with the diamond, a crystal that he calls the "K_4 crystal".

Researchers at the Biodesign Institute are using bacteria as a viable option to make electricity. The next step could be commercialization of a promising microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology.

"We can use any kind of waste, such as sewage or pig manure, and the microbial fuel cell will generate electrical energy," said Marcus, a Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate student and a member of the institute's Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Unlike conventional fuel cells that rely on hydrogen gas as a fuel source, the microbial fuel cell can handle a variety of water-based organic fuels.

"There is a lot of biomass out there that we look at simply as energy stored in the wrong place," said Bruce Rittmann, director of the center.

In the first study examining American physicians' use of placebos in clinical practice in the 21st Century, 45 percent of Chicago internists report they have used a placebo at some time during their clinical practice researchers report in the January issue of Journal of General Internal Medicine.

This study indicates a need for greater recognition of the use of placebos and unproven therapies and discussion about its implications," say the study authors, Rachel Sherman, a fourth year medical student at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine, and John Hickner, MD, MSc, professor of family medicine, at the University of Chicago and University of Chicago Medical Center.

The authors sent questionnaires inquiring about placebo use to 466 internists at the University of Ch

As structures made of metal get smaller — as their dimensions approach the micrometer scale (millionths of a meter) or less — they get stronger. Scientists discovered this phenomenon 50 years ago while measuring the strength of tin "whiskers" a few micrometers in diameter and a few millimeters in length.

The activation pattern evoked by a familiar object isn’t located in just one place in the brain, according to team of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists who combined methods of machine learning and brain imaging and found a way to identify where people’s thoughts and perceptions of familiar objects originate in the brain.

For instance, thinking about a hammer activated many locations. How you swing a hammer activated the motor area, while what a hammer is used for, and the shape of a hammer activated other areas.

This new method was developed over two years under the leadership of neuroscientist Professor Marcel Just and Computer Science Professor Tom M. Mitchell.

Index to ring finger length ratio (2D:4D) is a trait known for its sexual differences. Men typically have shorter second than fourth digits; in women, these fingers tend to be about equal in length.

Smaller 2D:4D ratios have intriguing hormonal connections, including higher prenatal testosterone levels, lower estrogen concentrations, and higher sperm counts. Reduction in this ratio has also been linked to athletic and sexual prowess. Whether this trait affects the risk of osteoarthritis (OA), a progressive joint disease associated with both physical activity and estrogen deficiency, has not been examined. Until recently.

The crystal structure of a molecule from a primitive fungus has served as a time machine to show researchers more about the evolution of life from the simple to the complex.

By studying the three-dimensional version of the fungus protein bound to an RNA molecule, scientists from Purdue University and the University of Texas at Austin have been able to visualize how life progressed from an early self-replicating molecule that also performed chemical reactions to one in which proteins assumed some of the work.

"Now we can see how RNA progressed to share functions with proteins," said Alan Lambowitz, director of the University of Texas Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology.