NMR turns gold

Silver and Gold NMR

Silver and gold, together with copper, form the transition metal group IB elements in the periodic table and possess very different nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic properties. While there is only one gold isotope ((197)Au), which has a spin of 3/2 and therefore a quadrupole moment, silver occurs in two isotopic forms ((109)Ag and (109)Au), both of which have a spin 1/2 and simila...

Mate choice turns cognitive.

Evolutionary psychology has revolutionized research on human mate choice and sexual attraction in recent years, combining a rigorous Darwinian framework based on sexual selection theory with a loosely cognitivist orientation to task analysis and mechanism modelling. This hard Darwinian, soft computational approach has been most successful at revealing the adaptive logic behind physical beauty, ...

Stroke turns 40.

Crumbs turns the corner

rumbs (Crb) helps flies distinguish apical from basal in their epithelia. Now two new studies show that it is required for cell expansion independently of its specification of apical polarity. During cell expansion, the apical domain of photoreceptors elongates perpendicular to the apical–basal axis so that the domain can extend from the top to the bottom of the fly eye. The process may be cons...

When splicing turns bad.

RNA splicing, the process that removes introns from pre-mRNA and links exons together to generate the fully mature messenger RNA (mRNA), is a complicated and highly regulated process. Splicing is catalyzed by the spliceosome, a large RNA-protein complex composed of several small nuclear ribonucleoprotein complexes (snRNPs) that each have a specific task during splicing. Correct splicing is impo...