Ageing and a low life expectancy are caused, at least partly, by oxidative stress. A team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Ivana Ivanović-Burmazović from the Chair of Bioinorganic Chemistry at FAU, together with researchers from the USA, have discovered that zinc can activate an organic molecule, helping to protect against oxidative stress. The results have now been published in Nature Chemistry*.

NOAA researchers recently unveiled “the radar of the future” – a new $38 million prototype that could improve warnings, protect lives and property, and reduce the economic impact of severe and hazardous weather.

For decades, doctors have been using antibiotics to fight tuberculosis (TB). And consistently, the microbe responsible for the disease, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has been fighting back. When confronted with current drugs, such as the antibiotic rifamycin, the bacterium often mutates in ways that make it resistant to the treatment.

Mercury is an incredibly stubborn toxin. Once it is emitted from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants, among other sources, the gas can drift through the atmosphere for up to a year before settling into oceans and lakes. It can then accumulate in fish as toxic methylmercury, and eventually harm the people who consume the fish.

Many vendors at farmers markets take inadequate precautions to prevent the spread of foodborne illness, and they should be trained to reduce food-safety risks, according to Penn State researchers who completed the final phase of an innovative five-year study.

Actively managed conifer forests may also provide important habitat for the pollinators that aid the reproduction of food crops and other flowering plants around the globe.

One of the high-risk geological structures lies near Istanbul, a megacity of 15 million people. The North Anatolian fault, separating the Eurasian and Anatolian tectonic plates, is a 1.200 kilometer-long fault zone running between eastern Turkey and the northern Aegean Sea. Since the beginning of the 20th century its seismic activity has caused more than 20.000 deaths. A large (Mw > 7) earthquake is overdue in the Marmara section of the fault, just south of Istanbul.

Energy production can be expensive, or inefficient, or toxic to the environment — or some unfortunate combination of the three. But Jesse Hinricher thinks it doesn’t have to be.

Halloween is just around the corner, and some people will celebrate by watching scary movies about brain-eating zombies. But even more frightening are real-life parasites that feed on the human brain, and they can be harder to kill than their horror-movie counterparts. Now, researchers have developed silver nanoparticles coated with anti-seizure drugs that can kill brain-eating amoebae while sparing human cells. The researchers report their results in ACS Chemical Neuroscience.

In a newly published study, researchers dug into how fertilizing with manure affects soil quality, compared with inorganic fertilizer.