When 22-year-old Charles Darwin stepped aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831, he took with him little more than a magnifying glass, a stack of notebooks, and an open mind.

A team of researchers led by University of Virginia Health System geneticists has uncovered a major secret in the mystery of how the DNA helix replicates itself time after time. It turns out that it is not just the sequence of the bases (building blocks) in the DNA, but also how loosely or tightly the chromatin (the material that makes up chromosomes) is packed at different points of the chromosome that is critical.

The growth of most plants depends on the presence of sufficient amounts of nitrogen contained in the soil. However, a family of plants, the legumes, is partially free of this constraint thanks to its ability to live in association with soil bacteria of the Rhizobium, genus, capable of fixing nitrogen from the air.

Researchers at Northwestern University have made significant strides in the development of quantum dot infrared photodetectors - technology that may provide new imaging techniques with applications in medical and biological imaging, environmental and chemical monitoring, night vision and infrared imaging from space.

Detecting the molecular structure of a tiny protein using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) currently requires two things: a million-dollar machine the size of a massive SUV, and a large sample of the protein under study.

Imagine being able to rapidly identify tiny biological molecules such as DNA and toxins using a system that can fit on a microchip or in a drop of salt water. It's closer than you might think, say a team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Brazil's Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, and Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

The machine under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) can detect explosive, chemical and biological agents all at the same time.

We have to climb a mountain in order to conquer it. In quantum physics there is a different way: objects can reach the opposite side of a hill simply by tunnelling through it, instead of laboriously climbing over it. An international team of researchers working with Prof. Ferenc Krausz from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics has now observed electrons in this tunnelling process.

Flexible electronic structures with the potential to bend, expand and manipulate electronic devices are being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Flexible electronic structures with the potential to bend, expand and manipulate electronic devices are being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Chemists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Arizona State University have proposed an elegantly simple technique for cleaving proteins into convenient pieces for analysis. The prototype sample preparation method, detailed recently in Analytical Chemistry,* uses ultraviolet light and titanium dioxide and could be ideal for new microfluidic "lab-on-a-chip" devices designed to rapidly analyze minute amount of biological samples.

Dr. Thea Tlsty, an expert on cancer at the University of California at San Francisco, will present some of her latest research on the origin and development of cancerous cells in the body.