An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with the Cassini mission.

This atmospheric feature was already imaged by NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

Yesterday, I gave my first talk at the March07 ACS meeting on Teaching Organic Chemistry with Blogs and Wikis. The screencast is now available.

It was part of a symposium on Using Social Networking Tools to Teach Chemistry organized by Harry Pence and Andrea Gay. Joanna Scott gave a most interesting talk about Nature's experimentation with Second Life and the great possibilities for communicating research work. Harry is also involved with Second Life.

Nanomechanical oscillators -- tiny strips of vibrating silicon only a few hundred atoms thick -- are the subject of extensive study by nanotechnology researchers. They could someday replace bulky quartz crystals in electronic circuits or be used to detect and identify bacteria and viruses.

The catch is that measuring their vibrations isn't easy. It is usually done by bouncing laser beams off them -- which won't work when the nanodevices become smaller than the wavelength of the light -- or with piezoelectric devices -- those bulky quartz crystals we're trying to get rid of.

A pioneering “biofuel cell” that produces electricity from ordinary air spiked with small amounts of hydrogen offers significant potential as an inexpensive and renewable alternative to the costly platinum-based fuel cells that have dominated discussion about the “hydrogen economy” of the future, British scientists reported here today.

The research was presented at the week-long 233rd national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

An international team of researchers has discovered that two types of plant proteins are at work in the transport of an important growth hormone, a finding that could have applications in creating plants with specific characteristics.

Previously thought to function independently, the two types of proteins were shown to comprise mechanisms that work both cooperatively and synergistically, depending upon their location in the plant. Together they control the movement of auxin, a hormone that, among other functions, regulates plant architecture, tissue development and flowering time.

Gene therapy - the idea of using genetic instructions rather than drugs to treat disease - has tickled scientists' imaginations for decades, but is not yet a viable therapeutic method. One sizeable hurdle is getting the right genes into the right place at the right time.

Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now developing a tool to tackle this problem.

David M. Lynn and his colleagues have created ultrathin, nanoscale films composed of DNA and water-soluble polymers that allow controlled release of DNA from surfaces. When used to coat implantable medical devices, the films offer a novel way to route useful genes to exactly where they could do the most good.

Researchers in Japan have developed a pair of molecular-scale scissors that open and close in response to light. The tiny scissors are the first example of a molecular machine capable of mechanically manipulating molecules by using light, the scientists say.

The scissors measure just three nanometers in length, small enough to deliver drugs into cells or manipulate genes and other biological molecules, says principal investigator Takuzo Aida, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and biotechnology at the University of Tokyo.

The medication tilarginine, a drug that was believed could be beneficial for patients who develop cardiogenic shock (low blood pressure due to impaired cardiac function) after a heart attack, did not reduce the risk of death up to six months after a heart attack, according to a JAMA study published online March 26. The study is being released early to coincide with its presentation at the American College of Cardiology's annual conference.

High concentrations of nitrogen dioxide gas — inhaled for even very brief periods following fires, explosions of military munitions or detonations of terrorist devices — could cause serious lung damage, scientists reported today at the 233rd national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Dr. Zengfa Gu, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, Md., reached that conclusion based on experiments with laboratory rats that were exposed to the toxic gas. Gu explained that previous research showed that chronic exposure to low and moderate levels of nitrogen dioxide could damage the lungs. However, there was no clear information on the health risks of brief, high-level exposures lasting only a few minutes.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory are employing some modern day alchemy in an effort to find a material with properties of rare and high-priced palladium. If they’re successful, it could remove a major roadblock from the path of hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicles.

Hydrogen fuel-cell technology sounds almost too good to be true. You combine cheap and plentiful hydrogen and oxygen gas, the fuel cell generates electricity and the by-product is simply water. But it’s a little more involved.