Unraveling Pseudoknots?

Researchers Uncover 3-D Structure of Virus Replication Technique; Development of New Anti-Viral Agents Possible
National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northwestern University Medical School have uncovered the structural basis of an elusive replication technique that allows viruses, especially retroviruses, to commandeer cells to manufacture the proteins they need for their own survival. The results appear in a paper published for the March 1999 issue of Nature Structural Biology. "For many years, scientists have studied a virus' ability to create an RNA structure called a pseudoknot, which allows it to control genetic material for its own purposes via a process called ribosomal frameshifting," explains Kamal Shukla, director of NSF's biophysics program, which funded the research. "Until now, the detailed three-dimensional structure of the pseudoknot - so called because the RNA is not truly knotted, but tightly bound together -- has not been known."    More...

Northern hemisphere mean annual temperature reconstruction in °C (thin black line) with 95% confidence bounds for the reconstruction shown by the blue shading. The thick black line is a 50 year lowpass filter (filtering out all frequencies less than 50 years) of the reconstructed data. The zero (dashed) line corresponds to the 1902-1980 calibration mean, and raw data from 1981 to 1997 is shown in red. Courtesy UMass Amherst News Office

1998 Warmest Year of Millennium, Climate Researchers Report
Researchers at the Universities of Massachusetts and Arizona who study global warming have released a report strongly suggesting that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium, with 1998 the warmest year so far. The scientists have also found that the warming in the 20th century counters a 1,000-year-long cooling trend. The study, by Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley of the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona, appears in the March 15 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union. The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF). "Temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century were unprecedented," said Bradley.    More...

U.S. Inventors "Patently" Productive -- At Home, and Around the World
When it comes to earning patents, United States inventors are among the world's most active and successful - both in the U.S. and abroad. A new Issue Brief from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Science Resources Studies (SRS), says U.S. inventors led all other foreign inventors in the number of patents granted in five of the 11 other nations studied. By a wide margin, they also led all countries in the number of patents awarded in the United States. "Sometimes, with the widespread availability of foreign products in the U.S. market, we lose sight of just how much products created by U.S. inventors are in demand all around the world," said Issue Brief author Lawrence Rausch.    More...

NSF Funds New High-Speed Network Connections; Program Now Reaches Institutions In Every State
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded 16 grants, worth a total of $6.3 million, to allow 19 universities to connect to the advanced high-performance computer networks that will constitute the Internet of the future. The new two-year grants bring to 150 the number of high performance connection grants awarded by NSF's Advanced Networking Infrastructure (ANI) program. The number of connections exceeds by 50 NSF's original goal for this part of President Clinton's Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative. Thirty-three of the 150 awards were made to institutions in 18 states in NSF's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). EPSCoR focuses on states that historically have received less federal research and development funding.    More...