-- Despite the fact that sleep is essential to our health, its function and what makes it necessary have remained mysterious. Over the years, scientists have accumulated data showing that sleep, or the lack thereof, affects the brain. Most of this work…
-- The idea that we could grow fuel from a renewable resource is incredibly exciting. Researchers have been hard at work developing biofuels that will allow us to run our society using easily renewable resources. These efforts have gained a lot of media…
-- In the last decade or so, various fields with the suffix –omics have risen in biological and biomedical sciences. The oldest and most well-known is genomics, the high throughput study of all the genes in the genome. Together with other emerging fields…
-- Despite major advances in healthcare and disease prevention in the last hundred years, some of the most painful and serious non-infectious human diseases have eluded a cure. These are the so-called genetic diseases, in which a problem in a person’s…
-- Obesity and smoking are the two largest causes of premature death in the United States. Obesity causes over 160,000 preventable deaths per year, while cigarette smoking causes over 440,000. The list of diseases caused by obesity and smoking are…
-- It has been said that “water is the next oil." Just like oil, water — specifically, clean drinking water — is a resource that is rapidly depleting. Every year, 1.2 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, and millions of people die,…
-- A fifty-year famine provoked by drought threatens millions in the sub-Saharan Sahel region of Africa with crop failure, cattle loss, starvation and death. As policy makers work to provide relief for the drought-ravaged nations, scientists in Europe…
Prof. Whitesides is a prolific chemist with a long and distinguished career spanning almost five decades. Over the years he has published more than a 1000 scientific articles and has won multitudes of awards, including the Priestley Medal (2007), the…
In today’s society, contributions from the field of chemistry are evident all around us. Advancements in chemistry have led to the production of medicines to alleviate our pain, polyester to keep us warm, fertilizers to provide our crops with…