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Cancer cells break down sugars and produce the metabolic acid lactate at a much higher rate than normal cells. This phenomenon provides a telltale sign that cancer is present, via diagnostics such as PET scans, and possibly offers an avenue for novel cancer therapies. Now a team of Chilean researchers and Carnegie’s Wolf Frommer have devised a molecular sensor that can detect levels of lactate in individual cells in real time.

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Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people. New research led by Carnegie’s Julia Pongratz examines the potential effects that geoengineering the climate could have on global food production and concludes that sunshade geoengineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security.

Carnegie astronomer Mark Phillips will share the 2007 Cosmology Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation for his role in discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate...

Baltimore, MD—Carnegie’s educational outreach program, BioEYES, will be the recipient of the 2012 Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Prize from the Society for Developmental Biology. BioEYES founders Steve Farber and Jamie Shuda (University of Pennsylvania), will accept the award at the upcoming annual meeting of the society in Montreal in July. BioEYES, with program manager Valerie Butler, is also currently featured in a video on the front page of the Baltimore City Schools' website.

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The scientific community needs to make a 10-year, $100 billion investment in food and energy security, says Carnegie’s Wolf Frommer and Tom Brutnell of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in an opinion piece published in the June issue of The Scientist. They say the importance of addressing these concerns in light of a rapidly growing global population is on par with President John Kennedy’s promise to put man on the moon—a project that took a decade and cost $24 billion.

The Patent Office has granted a patent for the work of Russell Hemley, Ho-kwang Mao, and Chih-Shiue Yan related to the manufacture of a hard, single-crystal diamond...

Nobel laureate and Carnegie trustee emeritus Charles H. Townes has received the 2006 Vannevar Bush Award. At the age of 90, Townes is an active researcher at UC Berkeley...

The contents of the deep Earth affect the planet as a whole, including life at its surface, but scientists must find unusual ways to “see” it. Only recently have researchers been able to produce the extreme temperatures and pressures found inside our planet to understand how it is forming and evolving...

Since NASA’s Stardust mission returned the first solid comet samples retrieved from space, scientists have studied the minuscule grains, looking for clues to the history of our solar system...