News

The technique, dubbed VEGAS, works in mammalian cells and can yield useful new molecules within days, providing scientist with a powerful new research tool and a potential route to better therapeutics for various diseases.

A crowdsourcing project which uses thousands of idling smartphones has helped to uncover anti-cancer properties of everyday foods and medicines.

DNA molecules are well known as carriers of huge amounts of biological information, and there is growing interest in using DNA in engineered data storage devices that can hold vastly more data than our current hard drives. But new research shows that DNA isn’t the only game in town when it comes to molecular data storage.

The preservation of plant biodiversity is the task of the roughly 1,750 gene banks which are distributed around the world, storing samples from around 7.4 million species in total. It is expected that quicker and cheaper genetic sequencing will mean more detailed genetic information will become commonplace in gene banks.

Sure, computers can be used to play grandmaster-level chess, but can they make scientific discoveries? Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown that an algorithm with no training in materials science can scan the text of millions of papers and uncover new scientific knowledge.

Researchers have mapped the crystal structure of a protein that resides in our cells and determined, for the first time, how a drug latches onto it. The finding could help develop disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

One in five patients in the UK hospital system uses alcohol harmfully, and one in ten is alcohol dependent, according to a new review of evidence from the UK.

Medications that target tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα), a protein involved in inflammation, have revolutionized the management of certain autoimmune diseases, but paradoxically, these agents might provoke the development of other autoimmune conditions.

Treatment for individuals who experience psychosis, such as hallucinations and delusions as a result of a psychiatric illness, can be targeted to a specific structural mutation, according to a new study.

Predicting the properties of a quantum system is enormously complex, but significant progress has been made thanks to a new computational method that simulates quantum systems with neural networks.