Using a brace of the most modern tools of materials research, a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Northwestern University has shed new light on one of mankind’s older construction materials—cement. Their refinements to our understanding of how cement and concrete actually work, reported this week in Nature Materials,* ultimately may make possible improvements in the formulation and use of cement that could save hundreds of millions of dollars in annual maintenance and repair costs for concrete structures and the country’s infrastructure.

It’s the seventh game of the World Series — bottom of the ninth inning, your team is down 4-3 with runners on second and third — and you’re on deck. You watch as your teammate gets the second out. That means you’re up with a chance to win a championship for your team...or lose it.

You’re known as a clutch hitter, and you’ve hit safely in 22 straight games — an impressive streak to be sure. But as you step into the batter’s box, your hands are sweating and your mind is racing. You think about the last time you faced this pitcher and the curveball he threw to strike you out. You look at him standing on the mound and he looks tired. You try to pick up clues from his body language. How fast is his fastball today? Will he tempt you with that curveball again?

Chemists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Arizona State University have proposed an elegantly simple technique for cleaving proteins into convenient pieces for analysis.

The New York Mets should expect to win about 90 games in 2007 and the Yankees a whopping 110 games to lead their divisions, said Bruce Bukiet, PhD, an associate professor of mathematical sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Bukiet, who is also an associate dean of NJIT’s College of Science and Liberal Arts offers the expectations for the number of games each major league baseball team should win based on his mathematical model, developed in 2000.

Sandia National Laboratories researchers Mark Ivey and Bernie Zak are members of a research team from around the world whose work on the cold tundra in northern Alaska is helping to transform scientists' understanding of what the future may hold for Earth's climate.

The team conducts research at the North Slope of Alaska east of Barrow along the coast of the Chukchi Sea.

Proteins, which form much of the molecular machinery required for life, are the targets of most drug molecules. One third of all proteins are membrane proteins – embedded within the cell’s fatty outer layer. While scientists can easily study the other two-thirds using such tools as antibodies, they have not had such methods to investigate the membrane-embedded portions of proteins.

To probe the secrets of these seemingly inaccessible proteins, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have designed peptides that are able to bind to specific regions of transmembrane proteins, using computer algorithms, and information from existing protein sequence and structure databases.