How can you convert waste into energy in the most efficient way possible? The secret is in riboflavin.

The microorganisms have the ability to change the chemistry of the environment. This is known for a long time, but if some of these can generate energy from the degradation of organic compounds has not yet been clarified. One answer comes from an American study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Pnas): BioTechnology researchers from the Institute of the University of Minnesota have found that the riboflavin, better known as vitamin B-2, is the key to the production of electricity by the microorganism Shewanella, a bacterium that is commonly found in water and soil.

Muliple mutations of a single gene lead to the accumulation of a protein in motor neurons that causes death.

Mutations in a single gene could be the basis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Sla), the neurodegenerative disease that leads to progressive paralysis and that affects every year in Italy 1,500 people, mainly men of average or advanced age. The discovery, the result of years of studies conducted by international team in which the names of Emanuele Buratti Baralle Francisco and the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Icgeb) in Trieste, and guided by Christopher Shaw of King College London, appeared in Science.

A survey published on PloS Medicine considers the effects of "the happiness pill clinically nonexistent". And in Great Britain this survey resulted in an outbreak of controversy.

Prozac, the antidepressant Seroxat and in general antidepressants do not produce clinically significant benefits. It had the effect of an earthquake relationship. Irving Kirsch, director of the psychology department of Hull University, which - published in the online journal PloS Medicine - assess the outcomes of total 47 studies (known and unpublished) of British and American experts on the real effects of "happiness pill", Prozac.

Printed immediately on the front pages of major British newspapers, The Guardian and The Independent Times immediately attacked by the pharmaceutical companies concerned. The study argues that this type of medicines - given annually by more than 40 million people around the world -- found minimal improvements compared to the simple placebo, amounting to just two points on the Hamilton depression scale (comprising 51 points total). Findings for fluoxetine (Prozac), venlafaxine (Efexor), paroxetine (Seroxat) and similar molecules have been put on the market, but which do not reach the three points needed by the British National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) to recognize their significant clinical differences .

No more black and white images: a new electronic tool will observe the chemical species to the wavelengths of visible

The color images provided by an ordinary microscope can not make a resolution at the level of individual atoms, while the electronic microscopes, capable of atomic resolution, providing black and white images. In these images different atoms appear as different shades of grey. Now, an electron microscope of a new generation, recently designed and installed at Cornell University and the subject of a study published in Science, will obtain color images at atomic resolution.

Filming particles is now possible. It was done for the first time by a group of Swedish researchers using extremely short pulses of light

Getting images of electrons that do not appear to "move" has been impossible because of the speed of these microscopic particles. But a group of researchers in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Lund (Sweden) now has found a way to shoot the movement of an electron using an innovative technique that provides for the use of flash light of extremely short duration.

Infm-Cnr and Federico II University have developed a technique ultra-miniaturized to study the behavior of red blood cells.

In the film "Fantastic Journey" of 1966, to study the physiology of the human body some scientists were miniaturized and were injected with their micro-bus, in the bloodstream. Today is, in a sense, the opposite: to understand the behavior of red blood cells reproduces the circulatory network on a device the size of a chip. The device has been developed by researchers of the center Coherentia at the National Institute for Physics of Matter (Infm-Cnr) and the Department of Chemical Engineering University Federico II of Naples. Their results were presented today at the conference "The research ideas to work" in the Corsican town.

Presented today, the Italo-Spanish computer Janus, has a high level of parallelism, in which the architecture of physical connections is established when you run the program!

He was baptized Janus, as the Roman god Janus Bifronte, dual supercomputer programmability, where the programmer decides not only what instructions to follow but also, with the same lines of code, which is the exact structure of links physical on which the program should be run.