University of Massachusetts Amherst

UMass Amherst team invents a way to create versatile, water-soluble nano-modules.

Challenging risk assessment methods used for decades by toxicologists, a new review of the literature led by environmental health scientist Laura Vandenberg at the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests that oral gavage, the most widely accepted method of dosing lab animals to test chemical toxicity, does not accurately mimic how humans are exposed to chemicals in everyday life.

Whether a man, a mouse or a microbe, stress is bad for you. Experiments in bacteria by molecular biologists in Peter Chien’s lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with others at MIT, have uncovered the mechanism that translates stress, such as exposure to extreme temperature, into blocked cell growth.

The National Academy of Sciences recently announced a three-year, $271,930 grant to chemist Vincent Rotello at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to develop, test and deploy new, sensitive, reliable and affordable inkjet-printed, nanoparticle-based test strips for detecting disease-causing bacteria in drinking water, with researchers at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan.

Chemical engineering researchers Wei Fan, Paul Dauenhauer and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst report this week that they’ve discovered a new chemical process to make p-xylene, an important ingredient of common plastics, at 90 percent yield from lignocellulosic biomass, the highest yield achieved to date.