The decade-long research that chemistry professor Thomas Bell has invested in received an important boost recently when one of Bell's articles made the list of the 100 most influential publications in the HIV/AIDS research field for 2006. The research looks into the development of an extremely effective HIV/AIDS-fighting compound

Chemical research is thriving in Israel - a tiny country far away from major scientific centers and surrounded by hostile neighbors. The country ranks third in the world in research papers published per million population. That's just one characteristic detailed in the profile of science in the Holy Land based on visits to 30 research groups by Chemical & Engineering News, ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

The largest market basket survey of the arsenic content of rice grown in the United States has found elevated levels of arsenic in rice produced in the South Central part of the country, scientists report in an article scheduled for the April 1 issue of ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

Academics have found, for the first time, smells from healthy faeces and people with infectious diarrhoea differ significantly in their chemical composition and could be used to diagnose quickly diseases such as Clostridium difficile (C. Diff.).

Indoor air purifiers that produce even small quantities of ozone may actually make the air dirtier when used at the same time as household cleaning products, scientists at UC Irvine have discovered.

Scientists at Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory have discovered a new type of phase transition-a change from one form to another-in vanadium, a metal that is commonly added to steel to make it harder and more durable. Under extremely high pressures, pure vanadium crystals change their shape but do not take up less space as a result, unlike most other elements that undergo phase transitions. The work appears in the February 23 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Carnegie Mellon University's Philip LeDuc predicts the use of artificially created cells could be a potential new therapeutic approach for treating diseases in an ever-changing world. LeDuc, an assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering, penned an article for the January edition of Nature Nanotechnology Journal about the efficacy of using man-made cells to treat diseases without injecting drugs.

A team of UCLA and California Institute of Technology chemists reports in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Nature the successful demonstration of a large-scale, "ultra-dense" memory device that stores information using reconfigurable molecular switches. This research represents an important step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and could be more powerful than today's silicon-based computers.

Richard Larock sorted through a pile of neatly labeled baggies filled with the plastics he makes from corn, soybean and other bio-based oils.

The genetic code may seem like a recipe for life scripted with cold precision, but scientists are discovering that the code reads more like a poem in which syllables within words can bear hidden and critical meaning, according to an article scheduled for the Jan. 22 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

Researchers have synthesized a new class of aluminum-hydrogen compounds with a unique chemistry that could lead to the development of more powerful solid rocket fuel and may also, in time, be useful for hydrogen-powered vehicles or other energy applications.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have found a way to organize molecules in a crystal so that the poles align in the same direction. In preliminary tests, the scientists also have discovered that aligned crystals hold potential to change the frequency of light, making them important to the future of telecommunications and computing.