The potential impact of lipid research has been increasingly realised both in disease treatment and prevention. Recent advances in soft ionisation mass spectrometry (MS) such as electrospray ionisation (ESI) have permitted parallel monitoring of several hundreds of lipids in a single experiment and thus facilitated lipidomics level studies. These advances, however, pose a greater challenge for bioinformaticians to handle massive amounts of information-rich MS data from modern analytical instruments in order to understand complex functions of lipids.

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Recent hyperspectral imaging of Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the USA’s Declaration of Independence has clearly confirmed past speculation that Jefferson made an interesting word correction during his writing of the document, according to scientists in the Library of Congress’ Preservation Research and Testing Division (PRTD).

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An experiment that has been on physicists’ wish-lists for many decades has delivered an unexpected result: the proton seems to be about 4% smaller than has been thought. As reported in Nature, the result calls into question either the value of the most accurately known fundamental constant or the validity of a remarkably successful physical theory.

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Exposure to chemical pollutants is of growing concern to regulators, health workers and environmentalist groups. Now, researchers in the USA and Russia have demonstrated that samples of human bone can act as a biological marker for dozens of metals and toxic elements across the periodic table. They describe details in a study published in the International Journal of Environment and Health [Vol. 4, Nos. 2/3, pp. 278–292 (2010)].

Read more: A ribbing yarn