-- On a Monday morning, as he was sorting through Petri dishes of Staphylococci he had left on his laboratory bench before going on vacation, Dr. Alexander Fleming noticed one that had become contaminated with mold. Fungal contamination was not…

-- Every organism is an incredibly complex machine whose biological processes benefit from 3.6 billion years of refinement through natural selection. Thus, it should not be surprising that designing biological systems is still difficult for scientists…

Scientists have shown that resveratrol and resveratrol-like molecules may prolong life, but how might they do this?

-- 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…