Category Biology/Biotechnology

Computer design meets potions class: A little of vial 1 and a little of vial 2 yield six-bit computations encoded in DNA. Computer scientists at Caltech have designed DNA molecules that can carry out reprogrammable computations, for the first time creating so-called algorithmic self-assembly in which the same “hardware” can be configured to run different “software.”

In a paper published in Nature on Feb XX, a team headed by Caltech’s Erik Winfree (PhD ’98), professor of computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering, showed how the DNA computations could execute six-bit algorithms that perform simple tasks...

Study may open the door to developing drug therapies or even gene therapies for alcohol addiction. Scientists at Scripps Research have found that they can reverse the desire to drink in alcohol-dependent rats – with the flip of a switch...

“Frustration” plus a pulse of laser light resulted in a stable “supercrystal” created by a team of researchers led by Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory, together with University of California, Berkeley, and two other national laboratories.

This is one of the first examples of a new state of matter with long-term stability transfigured by the energy from a sub-pico-second laser pulse. The team’s goal, supported by the Department of Energy, is to discover interesting states of matter with unusual properties that do not exist in equilibrium in nature.

“We are looking for hidden states of matter by taking the matter out of its comfortable state, which w...

Potential risks and benefits. A unique Rutgers-led study found that overweight and obese older women who took more than 3x the recommended daily dose of vitamin D showed improvements in memory and learning – but also had slower reaction times. The researchers hypothesize that slower reaction times may increase the risk of falling among older people.

The researchers, whose work is in the Journals of Gerontology: Series A, used computers to assess the impact of vitamin D on cognitive function. The researchers evaluated three groups of women between 50 and 70 years old in a randomized controlled trial.

One group took the recommended daily dose of 600 international units (IU), equivalent to 15 micrograms, of vitamin D ...