The aroma of roasted cocoa beans – the key ingredient of chocolate – comes from substances that individually smell like potato chips, cooked meat, peaches, raw beef fat, cooked cabbage, human sweat, dirt and an improbable palate of other distinctly un-cocoa-like aromas. That’s among the discoveries emerging from an effort to reverse engineer the essential […]
The discovery of a new type of symmetry in the structure of materials will greatly expand the options available for designing or discovering new materials with desirable properties. The finding is important and has broad relevance to the fields of physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. Before the discovery, detailed in the journalNature Materials, scientists and […]
Investigating how stress affects gastrointestinal function, scientists say they’ve unwittingly stumbled upon a chemical compound – astressin-B – that induces “remarkable” hair growth by blocking a stress-related hormone associated with hair loss. The serendipitous discovery is described in the journal PLoS One. “Our findings show that a short-duration treatment with this compound causes an astounding […]
