In a flight of imagination to the beginning of the universe submerge your mind in the vastness of the newly formed space. Imagine you can see the constituents of the first atoms: electrons, protons, and neutrons. Now imagine the first atom as an electron surrounding a proton: hydrogen has been created…Add a second proton and two neutrons to the hydrogen nucleus, then add another electron around it, and helium is formed…And as the daydream continues the next element can be created by the...

When Newlands made an analogy between his Law of Octaves and the musical scale he was ridiculed by the members of the English Chemical Society, and his paper describing this law was rejected. But Newlands was not so incongruent. Seeking musical patterns in natural phenomena has been a frequent endeavor throughout history. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras of Samos argued that celestial bodies in rotation gave off pitched sounds that blended into a cosmic harmony, which he...

We now possess the ability to read and write DNA. These tools are not only revolutionizing biotechnology but also the basic life sciences as well. The challenge is that we are still learning the grammar. In other words, we often do not know which genetic perturbations to make in order to alter the behavior of an organism. As a result, synthetic biology still involves much trial and error. Moreover, we are still far from the point where we can engineer new organisms from scratch – rather,...

Aptamers have until recently been tightly held by IP restrictions, Base Pair Biotechnologies Founder Bill Jackson presents information and data they have generated on aptmers in diverse assays such as biosensor and lateral flow. Presentation is from the American Society for Cell Biology meeting Dec 16, 2012

What's it really like to be an engineer or a scientist? What do they really do all day? You're about to find out! Meet the next generation of engineers and scientists in these profiles of young professionals, who may just inspire you to join them. Roselle Rojas shows us some of the latest biochemistry projects taking place at Gatorade's Sport Science Institute and what her typical day is like inside and outside the lab.

What's it really like to be an engineer or a scientist? What do they really do all day? You're about to find out! Meet the next generation of engineers and scientists in these profiles of young professionals, who may just inspire you to join them. Rommie Amaro tells us what it's like to be a biophysical chemist.