Plants can do it: they simply grab carbon dioxide out of the air and covert it into biomass. In this process, known as photosynthesis, the plants use light as their energy source. Chemists would also like to be able to use CO2 as a carbon source for their synthetic reactions, but it doesn’t work just like that. A team headed by Markus Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces has now taken an important step toward this goal. As described in the journal Angewandte Chemie, they have successfully activated CO 2 for use in a chemical reaction by using a special new type of metal-free catalyst: graphitic carbon nitride.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have discovered how a protein from a bacterium acts like a cunningly designed poison pill box that could now be used as a basis of a new range of natural insecticides. It had been known that nematode worms can infect and kill insect pests with the help of a bacterium which they harbour inside their intestine.

Scientists hoping to find new treatments for one of the world’s most deadly infectious diseases say drugs used to treat common fungal infections may provide the answer.

The arrival of genetically modified crops has added another level of complexity to farming in the developing world, says a sociocultural anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is an almost uniformly fatal disease regardless of the stage at time of diagnosis. However, a small percentage of patients develop a form of ductal adenocarcinoma associated with cystic lesions that can be detected earlier, is less aggressive and has a 50 percent long-term survival rate. Why cystic ductal pancreatic cancer behaves differently, despite carrying the same basic genetic mutations as the more common and deadly type of ductal pancreatic cancer, has long been a mystery. Now researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have unlocked the genetic reason why.

A new study by researchers led by Kurt Kroenke, M.D., of the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. reports that nearly 20 percent of patients seen by primary care physicians have at least one anxiety disorder. The study outlines the effectiveness of a new screening tool which can alert busy primary care physicians to those patients with one or more anxiety disorders. The study is published in the March 6 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

A newly published study by Northwestern University researchers suggests that Mom was right when she insisted that you continue music lessons -- even after it was clear that a professional music career was not in your future.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield have received joint funding from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to develop an innovative sensor to detect bacteria. The new method will use a polymer which will give a fluorescent signal when it encounters bacteria, allowing scientists to easily identify infected wounds much earlier than using conventional methodologies.