Some people insist that Big Oil is in control of energy because so many products, from plastic to rubber, use it. It's just the opposite, people came up with so many uses because it was there. To claim otherwise is like blaming toasters for the invention of electricity.

Peak Oil is now 20 years behind schedule but eventually doomsday prophets will be right.  For that reason, researchers are investigating possibilities for using renewable raw materials to replace oil. One well-known example of this is biodiesel, which comes not from oil sources, but from fields of yellow-flowering rape. Isobutene, a basic chemical used in the chemical industry to produce fuels, solvents, elastomers or even anti-knock agents in fuel, could be produced from sugar.

Plasma medicine is a new and rapidly developing area of medical technology. Specifically, understanding the interaction of so-called atmospheric pressure plasma jets with biological tissues could help to use them in medical practice. Under the supervision of Sylwia Ptasinska from the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, USA, Xu Han and colleagues conducted a quantitative and qualitative study of the different types of DNA damage induced by atmospheric pressure plasma exposure, the paper is published in EPJ D as part of a special issue on nanoscale insights into Ion Beam Cancer Therapy.

Drug approval requires a deep understanding of the mechanism of action

The team of Julia Bandow, who heads the RUB's Junior Research Group Microbial Antibiotic Research, has been studying the MP196 peptide as a representative of a group of very small positively charged peptides that consist of some four to ten amino acids. Earlier studies had shown that MP196 is efficient against various bacteria, including particularly problematic multi-resistant pathogens that frequently cause sepsis. How MP196 kills bacteria remained unclear. However, in order for a new substance to be approved as a drug, its mechanism of action has to be fully understood.

Peptide disrupts cell wall biosynthesis and cell respiration

An international team of astronomers, led by Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatório Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), has used telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-meter Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, to make a surprise discovery in the outer Solar System.

A 60,000-year record of rainfall in central Indonesia used sediments from a remote lake reveals important new details about the climate history of a region that wields a substantial influence on the global climate as a whole.

The Indonesian archipelago sits in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, an expanse of ocean that supplies a sizable fraction of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere and plays a role in propagating El Niño cycles. Despite the region's importance in the global climate system, not much is known about its own climate history, says James Russell, associate professor of geological sciences at Brown.

A new paper has found that the chemical citrate – a by-product of natural cell metabolism – is mixed with water to create a viscous fluid that is trapped between the nano-scale crystals that form our bones. This fluid allows enough movement, or 'slip', between these crystals so that bones are flexible, and don't shatter under pressure. It is the inbuilt shock absorber in bone that, until now, was unknown.

If citrate leaks out, the crystals – made of calcium phosphate – fuse together into bigger and bigger clumps that become inflexible, increasingly brittle and more likely to shatter. This could be the root cause of osteoporosis.