A team of researchers at the University of Illinois led by professor Wilfred van der Donk and professor Satish K. Nair have solved a 25 year old riddle on how a specific type of natural antibiotic molecule is formed. They focused on a class of compounds that have antibiotic properties, a common one studied was Nisin.

Nisin is naturally occurring in milk and has been used as a combatant for food borne pathogens since the 1960s. The sequence of the gene has been known to researchers, but after the peptide is formed it undergoes changes to give it the final form. This is a five ringed structure in which two rings disrupt the creation of bacteria’s cell walls and the remaining three destroy the bacteria’s membranes.

The mystery lay in how the peptide which is like a noodle gets shaped into the final form. The researchers established that  the amino acid glutamate was essential to nisin’s transformation. The dehydratase held the peptide and allowed the ring structures to be established. Then the newly formed molecule was hardened into place to hold the new shape.

The researchers were able to throw light on a problem that can now have many practical uses. This is a useful science project to producers of medicine.

On Earth we get to see a spectacular show every few years when a comet circling the sun comes within visual range. Astronomers tend to keep track of all the comets and most of the ones around the sun have been plotted out ages ago, although new stars are constantly being studied to see what comets go around them.

Each star is likely to have a couple of comets floating around it in an ecliptic orbit, but this star called Bata Pictoris really takes the cake with 500 comets going around it in orbit. It is located about63 light-years from the Sun. The astronomers using the The HARPS instrument at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile are calling this the largest census of comets around another star ever created.

The comets have been categorized into two families based on the observations of speed, light, size and gas clouds around them. An older set of exocomets that have made multiple passages near the star, and another younger set exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of one or more larger objects around the star. This study lasted from 2003 to 2011 and took into account more than a thousand observations. It has been a long and fulfilling science project.

Till the 1970s the world’s industries were unaware of any hazard associated with burning sulfurous coal. It was only when the hole in the ozone layer started causing climatic problems that the release of aerosols from this process was finally acknowledged. It was due to the presence of these polluting aerosols in the atmosphere that the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface was reduced. This was known as Solar Dimming.

As the world became more environmentally conscious and started to reduce the release of aerosols and other pollutants into the atmosphere the process of solar dimming gradually began to reverse itself. It was at its worst in the 1980s when the pollution was at its highest, but with decades of care and controlling air pollution, the atmosphere is finally beginning to clear out.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Exeter have shown that solar dimming managed to enhance river flows over regions in the heavily industrialised northern extra-tropics of Europe. They estimated that in the most polluted central Europe river basin, this effect led to an increase in river flow of up to 25% when the aerosol levels were at their peak, around 1980.

With water shortages likely to be one of the biggest impacts of climate change in the future, these findings are important in making projections for the future, said Nicola Gedney, lead author of the scientific study.

As the fuel in a super massive sized star finishes burning up it tends to collapse on itself becoming a black hole. This is what scientists thought happened to all stars that were a certain large size and above. However now new information has come to light about the unusual death of some ancient stars.

These huge primordial stars were 55,000 to 56,000 times the mass of our sun, but did not become black holes when they burnt out. The stars which are counted as the first generation of the universe’s celestial bodies burned out completely instead of turning into black holes.

They sent out chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium into space paving the way for the later generations of stars,  new solar systems and whole galaxies to be formed. Since the beginning of the universe is a mystery that human beings have long pondered and wanted to solve, finding out more about these stars will help us come step step closer to solving the mystery.

Astrophysicists from three different universities have been astounded by the finding that there was a narrow window where super massive stars could explode completely instead of becoming a super massive black hole. As no one has ever found this mechanism before it has led to a great deal of excitement and curiosity over this scientific study.

Becoming invisible has often been the inspiration for many fiction stories. Think of the Invisible Man, the cloak of invisibility owned by Harry Potter or the baseball cap that makes Annabeth disappear. Being invisible and doing as you wish has been a desire that each of us has cherished at one point of time or the other. That is why scientists have also been working on this project to make it a reality.

At the University of Rochester scientists are working on a project which hopes to make cloaking something to make it invisible to the human eye a reality. There have been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn’t there, often using high-tech or exotic materials, said John Howell, a professor of physics at the university.

However previous devices have used expensive and hard to get materials in their research. In this science project Professor Howell and graduate student Joseph Choi developed a combination of four standard lenses that keeps the object hidden as the viewer moves up to several degrees away from the optimal viewing position. Of course this science project is far from developing an item of clothing that you can wear and become invisible, but its ground breaking work all the same.