(DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory) DOE has just released the 27th edition of the Transportation Energy Data Book. Specialized skills and instruments are helping a major manufacturer of microturbines make products expected to set new standards for performance and reliability.Fragments of tektites, natural glass objects, discovered by a team of geologists and geochemists help support a theory that a meteorite may be responsible for the sudden climate change that devastated large mammals in North America 11,000 years ago.

(DOE/Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility) New theory work at the US Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has shown that more than half of the spin of the proton is the result of the movement of its building blocks: quarks. The result, published in the Sept. 5 issue of Physical Review Letters, agrees with recent experiments and supercomputer calculations.

(The Earth Institute at Columbia University) An ongoing rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels might be kept below harmful levels if emissions from coal are phased out within the next few decades, say researchers. They say that less plentiful oil and gas should be used sparingly as well, but that far greater supplies of coal mean that it must be the main target of reductions.

(Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB)) The new magnetic resonance tomograph which is delivered to its new location on Sept. 11, will be the only one of the modern 7 tesla generation in the world, in which a metrology institute is also involved. And for the first time in the world, cardiovascular research carried out on such a device is now also to play an important role.

(Universidad de Granada) They have used a simulated layer system with the Transmission Line Matrix Modelling method, which is able to hide, in certain frequencies, the objects placed in an electromagnetic simulator. This research work has been carried out by scientists of the University of Granada in collaboration with researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been recently published in two papers in the prestigious journal Optics Express.

(Crop Science Society of America) Representatives Norman Dicks (D-WA) and Ralph Regula (R-OH) will be presented with the first USGS Coalition Leadership Award on Monday evening, Sept. 15, 2008. The USGS Coalition is an alliance of 70 organizations united by a commitment to the continued vitality of the unique combination of biological, geological, hydrological and mapping programs of the US Geological Survey.

(American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) Researchers have uncovered a gene in corals that responds to day/night cycles, which provides some tantalizing clues into how symbiotic corals work together with their plankton partners.

(American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) A new study has shown that an investigational drug, R207910, is quite effective at killing latent bacteria. This revelation suggests that R207910 may lead to improved and shortened treatments for this globally prevalent disease.

Scientists have discovered a fundamental shift in an enzyme’s function that could help expand the toolbox for engineering biofuels and other plant-based oil products.

Water’s unrivaled omnipresence and the crucial role it plays in life drive scientists to understand every detail of its unusual underlying properties on the microscopic scale. Researchers now report how water solvates its intrinsic hydroxide (OH-) anion. Unraveling this behavior is important to advance the understanding of aqueous chemistry and biology.