A team of Rutgers scientists, including Leonard Lee and Shaohua Li, have taken an important step toward the goal of making diseased hearts heal themselves – a new model that would reduce the need for bypass surgery, heart transplants or artificial pumping devices. The study, recently published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, involved removing connective…

Rutgers scientists have developed catalysts that can convert carbon dioxide – the main cause of global warming – into plastics, fabrics, resins and other products. The electrocatalysts are the first materials, aside from enzymes, that can turn carbon dioxide and water into carbon building blocks containing one, two, three or four carbon atoms with more…

Rutgers scientists have created a tiny, biodegradable scaffold to transplant stem cells and deliver drugs, which may help treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, aging brain degeneration, spinal cord injuries and traumatic brain injuries. Stem cell transplantation, which shows promise as a treatment for central nervous system diseases, has been hampered by low cell survival rates,…

Global average sea-level could rise by nearly 8 feet by 2100 and 50 feet by 2300 if greenhouse gas emissions remain high and humanity proves unlucky, according to a review of sea-level change and projections by Rutgers and other scientists. Since the start of the century, global average sea-level has risen by about 0.2 feet.…

Sea lettuce, a fast-growing seaweed that spawns massive “green tides,” is a prolific thief, according to research that for the first time sequenced the genome of a green seaweed. An international team including Rutgers scientists found 13 cases where the sea lettuce Ulva mutabilis stole genes from bacteria. Remarkably, this ubiquitous seaweed expanded more than…

Green algae that evolved to tolerate hostile and fluctuating conditions in salt marshes and inland salt flats are expected to survive climate change, thanks to hardy genes they stole from bacteria, according to a Rutgers-led study. These Picochlorum single-celled species of green algae provide clues to how nature can modify genomes, and suggest ways in…

Persistent weather conditions, including dry and wet spells, generally have increased in the United States, perhaps due to rapid Arctic warming, according to a Rutgers-led study. Persistent weather conditions can lead to weather extremes such as drought, heat waves, prolonged cold and storms that can cost millions of dollars in damage and disrupt societies and…

Ordinary WiFi can easily detect weapons, bombs and explosive chemicals in bags at museums, stadiums, theme parks, schools and other public venues, according to a Rutgers University-New Brunswick-led study. The researchers’ suspicious object detection system is easy to set up, reduces security screening costs and avoids invading privacy such as when screeners open and inspect…

Rutgers University-New Brunswick engineers have created a smart wristband with a wireless connection to smartphones that will enable a new wave of personal health and environmental monitoring devices. Their technology, which could be added to watches and other wearable devices that monitor heart rates and physical activity, is detailed in a study published online in…

Star-shaped gold nanoparticles, coated with a semiconductor, can produce hydrogen from water over four times more efficiently than other methods—opening the door to improved storage of solar energy and other advances that could boost renewable energy use and combat climate change, according to Rutgers University-New Brunswick researchers. “Instead of using ultraviolet light, which is the…

A Rutgers-led team of physicists has demonstrated a way to conduct electricity between transistors without energy loss, opening the door to low-power electronics and, potentially, quantum computing that would be far faster than today’s computers. Their findings, which involved using a special mix of materials with magnetic and insulator properties, are published online in Nature…

Rutgers University-New Brunswick engineers have created a 3D-printed smart gel that walks underwater and grabs objects and moves them. The watery creation could lead to soft robots that mimic sea animals like the octopus, which can walk underwater and bump into things without damaging them. It may also lead to artificial heart, stomach and other…

Rutgers scientists have found the “Legos of life” – four core chemical structures that can be stacked together to build the myriad proteins inside every organism – after smashing and dissecting nearly 10,000 proteins to understand their component parts. The four building blocks make energy available for humans and all other living organisms, according to a…

Samuel McDowell, the late herpetologist and professor at Rutgers-Newark, spent a good part of his life studying ground snakes in New Guinea. Forty years later, Sara Ruane – who joined the Department of Biological Sciences faculty last semester – was able to find evidence that the snakes McDowell studied were, in fact, a new species…

Seeking a better way to capture radioactive iodides in spent nuclear reactor fuel, Rutgers-New Brunswick scientists have developed an extremely efficient “molecular trap” that can be recycled and reused. The trap is like a tiny, porous super-sponge. The internal surface area of just one gram of this material could stretch out to cover five 94-by-50-foot…

Biofuels like the ethanol in U.S. gasoline could get cheaper thanks to experts at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Michigan State University. They’ve demonstrated how to design and genetically engineer enzyme surfaces so they bind less to corn stalks and other cellulosic biomass, reducing enzyme costs in biofuels production, according to a study published this month…