Material in Biological News

Crustacean shell with polyester creates mixed-fiber material for nerve repair

In the clothing industry it's common to mix natural and synthetic fibers. Take cotton and add polyester to make clothing that's soft, breathable and wrinkle free. Now researchers at the University of Washington are using the same principle for biomedical applications. Mixing chitosan, found in ...

NIST issues first reference material for tissue engineering

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) last week issued its first reference materials to support the new and growing field of tissue engineering for medicine. The new NIST materials are samples of a typical tissue scaffold material that have been measured and documented by NIST ...

New reference material can improve testing of multivitamin tablets

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a new certified reference material that can be an important quality assurance tool for measuring the amounts of vitamins, carotenoids, and trace elements in dietary supplements. The new Standard Reference Material (SRM) 3280 f...

Ceramic material revs up microwaving

Quicker microwave meals that use less energy may soon be possible with new ceramic microwave dishes and, according to the material scientists responsible, this same material could help with organic waste remediation. "Currently, food heated in a microwave loses heat to the cold dish because t...

Turning waste material into ethanol

AMES, Iowa Say the word "biofuels" and most people think of grain ethanol and biodiesel. But there's another, older technology called gasification that's getting a new look from researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University. By combining gasification ...

ORNL researchers analyze material with 'colossal ionic conductivity'

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., July 31, 2008 A new material characterized at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory could open a pathway toward more efficient fuel cells. The material, a super-lattice developed by researchers in Spain, improves ionic conductivity near room temperature by ...

Scientists confirm that parts of earliest genetic material may have come from the stars

Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on 15 June 2008. The finding suggests that parts of the raw materials to make the first molecules of...

MIT creates new material for fuel cells

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--MIT engineers have improved the power output of one type of fuel cell by more than 50 percent through technology that could help these environmentally friendly energy storage devices find a much broader market, particularly in portable electronics. The new material key to the ...

Scientists find that squid beak is both hard and soft, a material that engineers want to copy

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) How did nature make the squids beak super hard and sharp allowing it, without harm to its soft body to capture its prey? The question has captivated those interested in creating new materials that mimic biological materials. The results are published in this weeks ...

Creation of a new material capable of eliminating pollutants by the hydrocarbon industry

This release is available in Spanish . A research team of the University of Granada has managed to produce the most useful material to date to eliminate pollutants such as benzene, toluene and xylene, organic solvents widely used in the hydrocarbon industry and generated by road traf...

Genetic material under a magnifying glass

This release is also available in German . The genetic alphabet contains four letters. Although our cells can readily decipher our genetic molecules, it isnt so easy for us to read a DNA sequence in the laboratory. Scientists require complex, highly sophisticated analytical techniques to cra...

Ecologists, material scientists pursue genetics of diatom's elegant, etched casing

Diatoms some of which are so tiny that 30 can fit across the width of a human hair are so numerous that they are among the key organisms taking the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the Earths atmosphere. The shells of diatoms are so heavy that when they die in the oceans they typically s...

New Delft material concept for aircraft wings could save billions

Building aircraft wings with a special aluminium fibre combination makes them nearly immune to metal fatigue. The application of this technology, partly developed at Delft University of Technology, will lead to substantial savings. The unusual qualities of this special material (called CentrAl, an...

Consortium develops new method to manipulate genetic material

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (July 24, 2008) A multi-institutional team of researchers, including scientists at the University of Minnesota Medical School, have developed a powerful tool for genomic research and medicine. The robust method will allow researchers to generate synthetic enzymes that can t...

MIT material stops bleeding in seconds

MIT and Hong Kong University researchers have shown that some simple biodegradable liquids can stop bleeding in wounded rodents within seconds, a development that could significantly impact medicine. When the liquid, composed of protein fragments called peptides, is applied to open wounds, the pe...

Corals switch skeleton material as seawater changes

Leopards may not be able to change their spots, but corals can change their skeletons, building them out of different minerals depending on the chemical composition of the seawater around them. That's the startling conclusion drawn by a Johns Hopkins University marine geologist, writing in the Ju...

Researchers Find New Technique To Identify Fetal Genetic Material From Amniotic Fluid

A preliminary report suggests that cell-free fetal messenger RNA (ribonucleic acid) can be extracted from amniotic fluid (fluid around the fetus), and then be analyzed to study gene expression changes that may reflect the well-being of the fetus, according to a paper in the February 16 issue of JAM...

Carbon nanoparticles toxic to adult fruit flies but benign to young

...olecular and Nanoscale Innovation and the other corresponding author, said the findings are important, because they show that permutations of the same material carbon can have different effects in the environment. "It's not the nanoparticle per se (that may be hazardous), but the form the nanoparticle is...

Wastewater produces electricity and desalinates water

...ld actually desalinate water and produce electricity while removing organic material from wastewater," said Bruce Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engine...ectrode. Naturally occurring bacteria in the wastewater consume the organic material and produce electricity. The researchers, who also included Xiaoxin Cao,...

Parasites ready to jump

...re mobile genetic elements found in the hereditary material of humans and other organisms. They can replicate ...ass of nucleic acid closely related to the genetic material DNA) play the central role. "Transposons are genom... transposons, since these cells pass their genetic material together with integrated mobile elements on to a...

Extraterrestrial platinum was 'stirred' into the Earth

... thin surface layer of meteorite debris rich in platinum." With time through large-scale convection processes, which now cause plate tectonics, this material was stirred down into the interior of the Earth. We are seeing the signal of that stirring, which took about 1.5 billion years to occur. This is ...

Jet-propelled imaging for an ultrafast light source

...ource before. ASU postdoc Dan DePonte did most of the hard work and refinement needed to realize the design. It wasn't easy. Nozzles made of solid material like glass invariably clog up, limiting droplets to at best 20 micrometers across. What Spence and his colleagues wanted was a jet of particles less t...

Scientists discover Amazon river is 11 million years old

...ty of Liverpool researchers, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, analysed sedimentary material taken from two boreholes near the mouth of the river to calculate the age of the Amazon river and the Amazon deep sea fan. Prior to this study the ...

University of Toronto helps to 'barcode' the world's plants

...efforts. Other applications include identifying illegal trade in endangered species, identifying invasive organisms, poisonous species and fragmentary material in forensic investigations. The technique will work on minute amounts of tissue and can be used on fragments of plant material, small seedlings, and i...

All-in-1 nanoparticle: A Swiss Army knife for nanomedicine

... multifunctional nanoparticles could also be used in energy research, for example in solar cells. Quantum dots are fluorescent balls of semiconductor material just a few nanometers across, a small fraction of the wavelength of visible light (a nanometer is 1-millionth of a centimeter). At this tiny scale, qu...

University has grand designs to build a house of straw

... is the ultimate environmentally-friendly building material since it is renewable and is a by-product of farmi...s have not really been seen as a credible building material by much of the industry, even though straw has alw...Straw bales are an agricultural by-product and the material can be re-grown so is totally sustainable and rene...

New supercomputer to reel in answers to some of Earth's problems

...nto plastics and generate only water as a byproduct with the help of compounds called catalysts. Chinook is helping scientists develop a new catalytic material based on small clusters of platinum atoms that does this at least 40 times more efficiently than older materials. Unlike a consumer buying a PC, EM...

Scientists closer to making implantable bone material, thanks to new research

...w small 'nodules' of what appeared to be bone-like material in the laboratory from different types of bone cel...erial College London have compared the 'bone-like' material grown from three different commonly used clinicall...icant differences between the quality of bone-like material that these can form. For example, the research...

DOE-funded research projects win 46 R&D 100 Awards for 2009

...un damage in just a few weeks. (Jointly with Atlas material Testing Technology and the Institute of Laser Opti...rmore National Lab Fire-resistive phase change material - the first-ever organic fire-resistive material when incorporated into conventional insulation can...

Parasitic worms make sex worthwhile

... two lakes are on opposite sides of the Southern Alps mountain range, so the researchers assume that neither the worms nor the snails exchange genetic material between the lakes. The snail's parasite, a genus of trematode worms called Microphallus , can be found in both Alexandrina and Kaniere lakes, as w...

New windows opened on cell-to-cell interactions

...teins is crucial, said Raghuveer Parthasarathy, who is a member of the UO's material Science Institute, the Institute of Molecular Biology and the Oregon Nanosc...istry, UO doctoral student Yupeng Kong and Parthasarathy applied biological material -- a thin layer of membrane lipids -- onto to tiny glass spheres about one-...

'Invisibility cloak' could protect against earthquakes

...y of the rings, waves travelling through the 'cloak' pass smoothly into the material and are compressed into small fluctuations in pressure and density. The pat... these particularseismic waves and the team is currently seeking a suitable material to accommodate the elastic parameters of the cloak. ...

Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology increases impact, international reach

...es through sharing of standards, strategy, research and experience," said Stainken. JVIR's impact factor is a direct measure of the number of times material in a particular journal is cited in relation to the total number of manuscripts a journal publishes. It is a way to estimate the frequency with which ...

K-State plant pathologists develop online teaching modules used globally

...an Andres in La Paz, Bolivia. Through the workshop, the researchers further developed online teaching modules for students in Bolivia by adding new material and translating materials into Spanish. The workshop is part of a larger joint project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development's Su...

Medical use for waste television screens

... Waste material from discarded televisions could be recycled and used in medicine, accordin...urning them." The researchers have developed a technique where recovered material is heated in water in a microwave and washed in ethanol to produced "expand...

New advance in revolutionary 'bullet fingerprinting' technique

...even if it only leads to small increase in success rate, then that would be significant. "Previous recovery methods include applying powder to the material which can actually damage the evidence. This new technique promotes a naturally occurring process which does not involve adding anything to, or damagi...

New Report Just Published: World Solid-State, Fiber, Gas and Dye Lasers Market Report

...lyzed by the following end-use markets: Industrial material Processing, Medical, Instrumentation, Research and... Dye Lasers I-4 End-Use I-4 Industrial material Processing I-4 Medical Applications I-4 In...eakdown of Value Sales by End-use - Industrial material Processing, Medical Applications, Instrumentat...

Supply-Chain Council Announces New Board of Directors and Officers

...alenfant, Vice President, Global Supply Chain, Alcon Labs, is now Chair of the Board and Nancy Craft, Manager, Volvo, is Secretary. Dennis Zagrodnik, material & Order Flow Manager, DaimlerChrysler, continuers as Treasurer, and Gary Kilponen, Energy and Manufacturing Industries Leader, Sunergos, is Vice T...

Landmark project to map genomics of complex ant systems

...istant professor of biology and lead investigator of the project. "If we can understand how these ants have evolved to process huge amounts of organic material over 50 million years, we might discover more efficient ways to process our own waste materials, produce bio-fuels, or improve our agricultural method...

UH team analyzes Hurricane Ike's effects on waterways, fish contamination

... if there are some new sources of PCBs. Since the 1990s, we've had so much growth and industrial activity kicking back up that there might be some new material coming in." What those new sources are remains unclear, Rifai said, and materials that were manufactured with PCBs before the ban may still be in u...