Simplifying the process for forming compounds that can be used in many everyday products, such as pharmaceuticals and plastics, has earned one University of Houston chemist a prestigious honor.Olafs Daugulis, assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UH, is among 118 outstanding young scientists, mathematicians and economists in the United States and Canada to be named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow for 2008.

Workas a hairdresser or barber has been confirmed as a potentialcarcinogenic influcence, according to a Working Group report of theInternational Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), as published in theApril2008 issue of The Lancet Oncology. Hair dyes are presently classified as permanent, semipermanent, ortemporary dyes. The permanent (also called oxidative) dyes representapproximately 80% of the available products.

Imagine having one polymer and one small molecule that instantly assemble into a flexible but strong sac in which you can grow human stem cells, creating a sort of miniature laboratory. And that sac, if used for cell therapy, could cloak the stem cells from the human body's immune system and biodegrade upon arriving at its destination, releasing the stem cells to do their work.Futuristic" Only in part.

CytRx Corporation (Nasdaq: CYTR), a biopharmaceutical company engaged in the development and commercialization of human therapeutics, announced that Shi Chung Ng, Ph.D.

Two of Australia's leading life scientists have been chosen from a highly competitive field of candidates to take part in an initiative by Merck Sharp & Dohme and Advance to boost the capability of the country's burgeoning biopharmaceutical industry.

Biologists at Purdue University have determined why dengue virus particles undergo structural changes as they mature in host cells and how the changes are critical for enabling the virus to infect new host cells. The findings pertain to all viruses in the family of flaviviruses, which includes a number of dangerous insect-borne diseases such as dengue, West Nile, yellow fever and St. Louis encephalitis. Dengue is prevalent in Southeast Asia, Central America and South America.

Aiming for more major licensing deals like the one his company recently secured with top 20 global pharmaceutical company, Teva, is front of mind for rising Australian biotechnology star, Antisense Therapeutics Ltd (ASX code: ANP)Research Director Dr Christopher Wraight when he meets with leading industry figures in the US in May.

Gleaning critical technical knowledge and building important international relationships is top of the agenda for rising Australian biotechnology star, DendriMed Research Director Dr Raisa Monteiro, when she meets with leading industry figures in the US in May.

Scientists have uncovered the therapeutic properties of bitter melon, a vegetable and traditional Chinese medicine, that make it a powerful treatment for Type 2 diabetes.Teams from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica pulped roughly a tonne of fresh bitter melon and extracted four very promising bioactive components.

Harvard University researchers have discovered a new type of retinal cell that plays an exclusive and unusual role in mice: detecting upward motion. The cells reflect their function in the physical arrangement of their dendrites, branch-like structures on neuronal cells that form a communicative network with other dendrites and neurons in the brain.The work, led by neuroscientists Joshua R. Sanes and Markus Meister, is described this week in the journal Nature.

Nitrites dilate vessels in case of hypoxia and protect retina from ischemia. The conclusion has been made by specialists of the Moscow Research Institute for Eye Diseases named after Gelmholtz and the N.M. Emanuel Institute of Biochemical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences. Their discovery is the outcome of a series of experiments on rabbits. It is premature to talk about its clinical use. Ischemia is a rather widespread pathology of retina and optic nerve.

Ignacio Lopez-Goni and David Garcia, researchers of the Department of Microbiology and Parasitology of the University of Navarra, have launched a new product for the detection and characterization of the Brucella bacteria, which is the causative agent for brucellosis, also known as Mediterranean fever.

A new method of filming blood-vessel cells that move in accordance with targeted signals has been developed by researchers at Uppsala University in collaboration with researchers at the University of California. The method can also be used to study how migration of cancer cells and nerves can be controlled. These interesting findings have now been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Researchers from the University of Turin, Italy and the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, have devised a new method that may help the medical community to determine the genetic basis of many common diseases. Their findings are described in an article published March 28th in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology. Thousands of human diseases originate from mutations in one or more genes.

Neurons spoke to Dr. Joe Z. Tsien when he was a sophomore college student searching for some meaningful extracurricular activity.He had stopped by the lab of a brain researcher at Shanghai's East China Normal University. The room was dark except for a light shining on the brain. "You could hear this pop, pop, pop, pop," says Dr. Tsien, brain scientist who recently came to the Medical College of Georgia from Boston University. "At that moment, I got interested in the brain.

The brain can sense the calories in food, independent of the taste mechanism, researchers have found in studies with mice. Their finding that the brain's reward system is switched on by this "sixth sense" machinery could have implications for understanding the causes of obesity. For example, the findings suggest why high-fructose corn syrup, widely used as a sweetener in foods, might contribute to obesity.

Targeted immune suppression using human umbilical cord blood cells may improve the pathology associated with Alzheimer's disease, a new study in a mouse model of this currently untreatable neurodegenerative condition reports. The study, led by researchers at the University of South Florida, is published online in the peer-reviewed journal Stem Cells and Development (http://www.liebertpub.com/scd).

Ten years ago great attention was attracted by the discovery that it was possible to demonstrate signal transfer in proteins using statistical methods. In an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) Uppsala researchers are now presenting results of experiments that contradict the theory.Proteins govern nearly all chemical processes in the body's cells.

Invitrogen Corporation (NASDAQ:IVGN), a provider of essential life science technologies for research, production and diagnostics, has introduced GIBCO® FoamAway™ Irradiated AOF (Animal Origin Free), a first of its kind sterile, ready-to-use, anti-foaming reagent that contains no components of human or animal origin. It is being offered in addition to the original FoamAway™ Irradiated released in June 2007.

One day soon patients may spit in a cup, instead of bracing for a needle prick, when being tested for cancer, heart disease or diabetes. A major step in that direction is the cataloguing of the "complete" salivary proteome, a set of proteins in human ductal saliva, identified by a consortium of three research teams, according to an article published in the Journal of Proteome Research.