Penicillin redux: Rearming proven warriors for the 21st century

Penicillin, one of the scientific marvels of the 20th century, is currently losing a lot of battles it once won against bacterial infections. But scientists at the University of South Carolina have just reported a new approach ...

Radiation damage at the root of Chernobyl's ecosystems

Radiological damage to microbes near the site of the Chernobyl disaster has slowed the decomposition of fallen leaves and other plant matter in the area, according to a study just published in the journal Oecologia. The resulting ...

The Carolina hammerhead, a new species of shark, debuts

Discovering a new species is, among biologists, akin to hitting a grand slam, and University of South Carolina ichthyologist Joe Quattro led a team that recently cleared the bases. In the journal Zootaxa, they describe a ...

Laying down a discerning membrane

One of the thinnest membranes ever made is also highly discriminating when it comes to the molecules going through it. Engineers at the University of South Carolina have constructed a graphene oxide membrane less than 2 nanometers ...

Viewing Fukushima in the cold light of Chernobyl

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster spread significant radioactive contamination over more than 3500 square miles of the Japanese mainland in the spring of 2011. Now several recently published studies of Chernobyl, directed ...

Using pressure to swell pores, not crush them

More than a decade ago, Thomas Vogt and Yongjae Lee, then colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory, uncovered a counter-intuitive property of zeolites. When they put these porous minerals in water, and then put the water ...

Putting more science into the art of making nanocrystals

Preparing semiconductor quantum dots is sometimes more of a black art than a science. That presents an obstacle to further progress in, for example, creating better solar cells or lighting devices, where quantum dots offer ...

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