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    Researchers Decode Molecule that Gives Living Tissues their Flexibility

    June 28, 2018, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    This diagram depicts the configuration of the complex tropoelastin molecule, which forms the basis for the elastin that gives tissues like skin and blood vessels their elasticity. The molecule’s atom-by-atom structure was decoded by a team of researchers from MIT, Australia and the UK. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

    Study reveals atomic structure of tropoelastin, showing what goes wrong in some diseases. The stretchiness that allows living tissues to expand, contract, stretch, and bend throughout a lifetime is the result of a protein molecule called tropoelastin. Remarkably, this molecule can be stretched to 8X its length and always returns back to its original size.

    Now, for the first time, researchers have decoded the molecular structure of this complex molecule, as well as the details of what can go wrong with its structure in various genetically driven diseases. Tropoelastin is the precursor molecule of elastin, which along with structures called microfibrils is the key to flexibility of tissues including skin, lungs, and blood vessels...

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    Faster, more precise Lab-on-a-Chip holds promise of Early Cancer Diagnosis

    June 28, 2018, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Squeezing light into nano-size volumes is enabled by surface plasmon resonance, a phenomenon that causes molecules to be trapped near the film, making them available for study under powerful microscopes. Credit: Justus Ndukaife/Vanderbilt University

    An award-winning Vanderbilt University researcher used plasmonics to develop a new kind of nanotweezers that can rapidly trap and detect molecules, viruses and DNA – a device transformative for medicine that also has color printing applications. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Justus Ndukaife and his Purdue University collaborators poked holes in gold film smaller than the wavelength of light...

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    Mars’ Surface Hardened Quickly, Boosting Odds of Life: Study

    June 27, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This image montage taken by NASA's Curiosity rover shows the surface of planet Mars, which researchers believe hardened only 20 million years after the birth of the Sun, much earlier than first thought

    This image montage taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover shows the surface of planet Mars, which researchers believe hardened only 20 million years after the birth of the Sun, much earlier than first thought

    The crust that encases rocky planets and makes possible the emergence of life took shape on Mars earlier than thought and at least 100 million years sooner than on Earth, researchers said Wednesday. Analysing grains of the mineral zircon extracted from a Martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, they determined that the Red Planet’s outer layer hardened 4.547 billion years ago, only 20 million years after the birth of the Sun.

    “Mars’s primary crust formation—which is the end product of planet formation—happened much faster than previously thought,” said Martin Bizzarro, a scientist at Denmark...

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    Planet Formation Starts Before Star Reaches Maturity

    June 27, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    MC1A is a still developing star in the constellation Taurus. Red are areas with many dust particles. Green and blue are two types of carbon monoxide. The absence of green / blue carbon monoxide in the inner part indicates that dust particles in the young protoplanetary disk have grown from less than a thousandth of a millimeter to a millimeter. Credit: Jørgensen/Harsono/ESASky/ESAC [CC-BY-SA 3.0]

    MC1A is a still developing star in the constellation Taurus. Red are areas with many dust particles. Green and blue are two types of carbon monoxide. The absence of green / blue carbon monoxide in the inner part indicates that dust particles in the young protoplanetary disk have grown from less than a thousandth of a millimeter to a millimeter. Credit: Jørgensen/Harsono/ESASky/ESAC [CC-BY-SA 3.0]

    A European team of astronomers has discovered that dust particles around a star already coagulate before the star is fully grown. Dust particle growth is the first step in the formation of planets. The researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark publish their findings in Nature Astronomy.

    In recent years, astronomers have discovered numerous planetary systems around other stars...

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