Month: July 2017

Most of us are familiar with that iconic scene where Doctor Victor Frankenstein, on succeeding with his attempt to create human life cries out dramatically, “it’s alive”.  In reality, scientists are still on a quest to understand how to design life from scratch, long after it was imagined a possibility. Scientists today are able to alter and repair DNA, but not create new life.  Researchers led by project director Jef Boeke, are taking the radical perhaps controversial step to create entirely man-made, custom-built DNA at New York University lab in the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences in New York as part of the Synthetic...

Even a few random atoms out of place can actually affect transistor performance in nanocircuitry. Devices can even end up where the switches fail on the transistors, because of negative threshold voltages caused by the metal atoms perfect lattice becoming disarranged.  Researchers working with nanowires, carbon nanotubes, and other nanostructures in the past decade have struggled to create all but the most elementary circuits. But now a group of scientists led by University of Alberta physicist Robert Wolkow, have created an atomic error editing technique that promises to free up the potent innate properties in the atomic scale. The research team...

The majority of us that know we are going to spend some time in the sun, break out the plastic tubes and slather on some sunscreen.  Many of these products have chemicals like avobenzone, oxybenzone or octinoxate, or the physical barrier sunscreen like zinc oxide that can be harmful because when exposed to the sun’s radiation they produce free radicals that damage skin cells and potentially could cause cancer.  Of course going without sunscreen is much riskier as the ultra violet rays are recognized by the FDA as a known carcinogen.  But now scientists at Binghamton University, State University of New York...