Applied Sciences

Marinda Li Wu, Ph.D., president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, comments on today’s award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Martin Karplus, Ph.D., of the Université de Strasbourg and Harvard University; Michael Levitt, Ph.D., of Stanford University; and Arieh Warshel, Ph.D., of the University of Southern California.
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A safer and more efficient nuclear fuel is on the horizon. A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have reached a new milestone with tristructural-isotropic (TRISO) fuel, showing that this fourth-generation reactor fuel might be even more robust than previously thought.
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With estimates of losing 15 to 40 percent of the world’s species over the next four decades – due to climate change and habitat loss, researchers ponder in the Sept. 26 issue of Nature whether science should employ genetic engineering to the rescue.
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Highlighting an important but unexplored area of evolution, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found evidence that, over hundreds of millions of years, an essential protein has evolved chiefly by changing how it moves, rather than by changing its basic molecular structure.
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The first scoop of soil analyzed by the analytical suite in the belly of NASA’s Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the surface of the planet contain several percent water by weight. The results were published today in Science as one article in a five-paper special section on the Curiosity mission. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Dean of Science Laurie Leshin is the study’s lead author.
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