YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie

A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce.

The president took an oath to serve the American people. Instead, he’s focused his second term on enriching himself and his family.

The median salary rose to $120,000, with higher wages in New England and on the West Coast as well as in chemical engineering

What went wrong in the world of science

A plutonium-packed generator disappeared on one of the world’s highest mountains in a covert mission that the U.S. will not talk about.

Accumulating evidence has connected the chemically unstable, DNA-damaging gut bacterial natural product colibactin to colorectal cancer, including the identification of mutational signatures that are ...

From the onset of fundamental statistical mechanical constructs formulated in the late 19th century, alchemical free-energy methods slowly emerged and transitioned to become operational tools of biomolecular simulation applicable to a wide range of problems including protein–ligand binding for drug discovery research. This article reconstructs how statistical mechanical approaches such as thermodynamic integration and free-energy perturbation were reconfigured in the early 1980s to address the complexities of increasingly heterogeneous biomolecular systems. Drawing on oral history interviews and primary literature, the study examines the technical, institutional, theoretical, and infrastructural conditions under which these methods were implemented, and it became progressively operational. These conditions encompassed the consolidation of lab-specific software infrastructures, the formulation of practical simulation protocols, and essential statistical mechanical clarifications. From this perspective, the progress of free-energy methods proceeded less from a unified convergence than from an iterative troubleshooting process of alignment involving practical and theoretical considerations. The aim of the present article is to offer a historically grounded account of how free-energy techniques acquired practical and functional reliability.

We report the results of experiments to test the hypothesis that binding energy from the adenosine diphosphate (ADP) fragment of the NAD+ cofactor is utilized to drive a protein conformational change...