Before Botox, There Was Botulism

First there was hydrogen.

The history of hydrogen — the element that fills the world as we know it — consists of a most dramatic set of events. Hydrogen and helium atoms emerged a measly 379,000 years after the Big Bang. As the hot, dense plasma of protons, electrons and photons that was the universe began to cool and expand, electrons and protons gathered to form atoms. Four hundred million years later stars — such as ...

Daddy was there!

He had an additional reason to be inconsolable. What 5 year old would be happy without anything to eat and nothing on the horizon to correct this deficit? Not even the nurse could solve this problem. Armed with two drinks, the oral premedication and apple juice to wash it down, she tried to help gain some control by offering what had been withheld to this point. This smart little boy, however, ...

Was There a Big Bang ?

CIENCE IS a congeries of great quests, and cosmology is the grandest of the great quests. Taking as its province the universe as a whole, cosmology addresses the old, the ineradicable questions about space and time, nature and destiny. It is not a subject for the tame or the timid. For the first half of the 20th century, cosmology remained a discipline apart, as a clutch of talented but otherwo...

Now there are many (stages) where before there was one: In search of a pathophysiological classification of cirrhosis.

Alanine: then there was water.

An ab initio study of the addition of successive water molecules to the amino acid l-alanine in both the nonionized (N) and zwitterionic (Z) forms are presented. The main focus is the number of waters needed to stabilize the Z form and how the solvent affects conformational preference. The solvent is modeled by ab initio electronic structure theory, the EFP (effective fragment potential) model,...