Georgia State University researchers are manipulating individual atoms in DNA and forming unique molecules in hopes of understanding the mechanisms of DNA replication and transcription, and perhaps leading to new treatments for diseases.

Chemistry and chemical biology Professor Zhen Huang and his lab were able, for the first time, to manipulate groups of molecules called methyl and phosphate groups in DNA that have been altered to contain selenium in order to bring them close enough together to form hydrogen bonds.

It isn't often that the government gets it right and the energy/climate change policies being jammed through Congress while there is no way to block them could be with us for a long time.

Unless the writing is completely legible and usually modern, even advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems give rise to transcription problems and provide results with many errors that need to be edited afterwards, a time-consuming process.

The Computational Perception and Learning Research Group in the Computer Languages and Systems Department at the Universitat Jaume I, in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, have developed a new assisted system for the transcription of written text called 'State',  a transcription system that integrates a series of tools with which images can be processed in order to remove noise and clean up the original image.

A low-cost generator could be a boon for people in the world’s poorest countries.   The Score project, led by The University of Nottingham, is developing a biomass-burning cooking stove which also converts heat into acoustic energy and then into electricity, all in one unit.

The £2 million Score project (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) has brought  together experts from across the world to develop the biomass-powered generator.  An affordable, versatile domestic appliance like Score aims to address the energy needs of rural communities in Africa and Asia, where access to power is extremely limited.

In the 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species',  despite consistent patterns of biodiversity identified over space, time, organism type and geographical region, there still remain two views of the process of 'speciation', the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise.

The first requires a physical barrier;  a glacier, mountain or body of water that separates organisms,  enabling groups to diverge until they become separate species. In the second scenario, an environment favors specific characteristics within a species, which encourages divergence as members fill different roles in an ecosystem. 

A lunar geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis says that there are still many answers to be found in moon rocks brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts nearly 40 years ago.   And he's been studying them since then, so he should know.

Randy L. Korotev, Ph.D., a research professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts&Sciences, has studied lunar samples and their chemical compositions since he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and "was in the right place at the right time" in 1969 to be a part of a team to study some of the first lunar samples.