The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) opened a public comment period Wednesday for the recommended names of elements 115, 117 and 118.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia (JINR) were credited late last year for discovering elements 115 and 118. LLNL, JINR, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Vanderbilt University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas were credited with the discovery of element 117.

Moscovium (Mc) is provisionally recommended for element 115 in recognition of the Moscow region and honoring the ancient Russian land that is home to JINR. Moscow is the capital of the region.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Researchers at the University of Michigan have identified a promising new compound for targeting one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer.

The compound, currently called UM-164, goes after a kinase known to play a role in the growth and spread of triple-negative breast cancer. UM-164 blocks the kinase c-Src and inhibits another pathway, p38, involved in this subtype. The researchers also found that the compound had very few side effects in mice.

In treating diseases with drugs, dosing is critical; too little is ineffective, while too much can be lethal. Colorado State University's Brad Reisfeld takes a mathematical approach to achieving optimal dosing for various drugs.

Publishing earlier this week in the American Society for Microbiology's Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Reisfeld, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and a faculty member in the School of Biomedical Engineering, has described a new computational model for optimizing dosing for the drug Rifapentine.

Installing a microgrid, such as a cooperative of power generators and power consumers operating in a coordinated system, within a regulated electricity market, will not work any better than the type of regulated de-regulation that led to California having utility rates 50 percent higher than other states.

It can work, it just depends on how heavily things are regulated. Microgrids are touted as hybrid alternatives to smooth out kinks in existing electricity networks. Wealthy elites with electric cars, for example, believe they are using no fossil fuels, without factoring in that each charger is equivalent in load to a whole new house on the grid, with power draws from nuclear or coal or natural gas just the same.

A few years ago, there were concerns about Dengue in Florida. This plight on humanity is carried by a small number of mosquitoes that have no ecological value of any kind, they are just disease carriers that have somehow survived evolution. 

Pesticides obviously work, DDT has been killing the bugs that carry malaria for 70 years, but a more targeted approach is making sure they can't viably reproduce - a genetically modified mosquito does that quite well, but an activist mom, funded by environmentalists, whipped the public into frenzy. Science rationally showed that the arguments were hype, not science. 

Griffith University researchers have found evidence that demonstrates Aboriginal people were the first to inhabit Australia, as reported in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal this week.

The work refutes an earlier landmark study that claimed to recover DNA sequences from the oldest known Australian, Mungo Man.