Home-Made Anti-Oxidant to Fight Malaria

Reported in the journal PNAS is a naturally occurring defense against malaria. The magic stuff is called heme oxygenase 1 or HO1 for short and it’s normally released by the body anyway, to at least mediate the symptoms of malaria. When a person is infected with the malaria parasite, which is calle...

It's Alive: Urban Areas are Organisms Too

I’m sure you’ve heard people use phrase like ‘heart of the city, lungs of the city and almost certainly arteries’ but now scientists are increasingly viewing urban environments as living, breathing entities of their own. And at the American Chemical Society meeting this week that was the major debat...

Blasting Away Fungal Attacks

Good news for rice this week as researchers have located the gene responsible for protecting it from fungal attack. Publishing in the journal Science, a team from Japan have identified one of the key protecting elements against a disease called blast. Blast is a type of fungus which causes massive p...

The Protein Bouncer

Protein shakes, protein receptors, protein markers, protein signals and protein enzymes – it seems there’s nothing you can’t do with a protein! Well scientists have been synthesizing chemical proteins for a little while now and the latest off the production line is an anti-HIV protein mimic. This we...

This week in science history - The eruption of Krakatoa

This week in science history saw, in 1883, the catastrophic eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia. The eruption and subsequent pyroclastic flows and tsunami killed at least 40 thousand people, destroyed towns and villages and had effects on global climate for several years...