Periodic Tabloid

e all experience fret now and then, that is, worried, distressed, vexed, or troubled feelings and emotions. Not good. FRET, by contrast, is not so bad when it stands for fluorescence resonance energy transfer.

By now most readers will have heard about the 9 July Pew Research Center report on the attitudes of Americans on science and scientists. At one level the news is good: Americans hold scientists in high esteem and believe science contributes to our economic well-being. At another level, though, the Pew report reveals the seeds of future problems.

Moore’s law states that the number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles about every two years. This is why computers keep on getting smaller, why memory chips keep increasing in storage capacity, and why digital cameras keep having more megapixels.But can Moore’s law hold forever?

Who were the most accomplished chemists of the 20th century? Of course such a question is unanswerable in any truly objective way, but that uncertainty doesn’t diminish our interest in speculating about “the answer.”

There are two fundamental ways that a healthy normal cell can traverse the pathway to becoming a cancer cell: Activation of an oncogene; inactivation of a tumor suppressor gene. It is easy to comprehend how inhibiting an overly active oncogene would throttle back cancer growth. In fact, it’s being done already with drugs like gleevec and rituxan. Harder to conceive is how to restore the function of a missing tumor suppressor gene.