According to the study, the molecules bind to specific sites on the neurotoxin protein, increasing protease activity and enhancing the toxin's effect. In some cases, the study noted, the activation power of the new molecules was as much as fourteen-fold, the greatest increase in activation ever reported for a protease; before this study, a two-fold activation of a protease was referred to as a state of "superactivation." Proteases are enzymes that act as cellular catalysts, breaking up proteins into smaller elements such as amino acids and reducing the amount of energy needed for the activation.

Almost three metres of tightly-coiled DNA strands fit into a cell's nucleus. As DNA replicates, the strands unwind and unfold and then re-package into chromosomes, the genetic blueprints of life – but what happens if this process becomes entangled?

Image of cancer cell illuminated by gold nanorods bound to anti-EFGR. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco, have found an even more effective and safer way to detect and kill cancer cells. By changing the shapes of gold nanospheres into cylindrical gold nanorods, they can detect malignant tumors hidden deeper under the skin, like breast cancer, and selectively destroy them with lasers only half as powerful as before – without harming the healthy cells. The method, which allows for a safer, deeper penetrating noninvasive cancer treatment, has just appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, volume 128.

The University of Manchester has received £1m (€1.67m) to develop a new device able to 'sniff out' harmful infections.

Researchers at Children's Hospital & Research Center at Oakland (CHRCO) have published a new study that is the first to explain how brain cells die in patients with Alzheimer's Disease. This discovery is an important first step to helping researchers devise ways to slow, prevent and eventually cure a disease that affects an estimated 4.5 million Americans.

Who better to invent "nanorice" than researchers at Rice University? But marketing and whimsy weren't what motivated the team of engineers, physicists and chemists from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) to make rice-shaped particles of gold and iron oxide.

An overall computer-simulated view of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus credit: University of Illinois/NCSA When Boeing and Airbus developed their latest aircraft, the companies' engineers designed and tested them on a computer long before the planes were built. Biologists are catching on. They've just completed the first computer simulation of an entire life form -- a virus.

High exposure to a fibrous volcanic mineral called erionite was associated with a high incidence of a type of cancer called mesothelioma, according to a study in the March 15 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.