Fleming Visits FSU as
Distinguished Visitor

Fleming

Physical Biosciences Division Director Graham Fleming visited Florida State University last week as part of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program, which gives students and faculty the chance to learn from some of science’s leading authorities. Professor Fleming shared his work on electron transfer in photosynthesis, and specifically discussed how plants optimize their photosynthetic processes during the course of a day in response to brighter and dimmer sunlight. While there, the FSU radio program Headlines interviewed Fleming. Go here to listen to the broadcast (Real Audio required).

Gold

These Chinese 'Cures' Can Cause Cancer

Herbal products such as “Mother Earth’s Cough Syrup” and “PMS-Ease” are sold over the Internet as “natural” medicine even though they contain a cancer-causing agent that was banned for import by the FDA two years ago. Berkeley Lab scientist Lois Gold, director of the Carcinogenic Potency Project at UC Berkeley, co-authored a letter in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine warning about more than 100 products that contain aristolochic acid, a known carcinogen that’s used in traditional Chinese medicine. Gold’s NEJM letter can be read here.


Scientist Shows Power
Of 'Experimental Math'
By Lysander Jim

Bailey

If you want to make a mathematician scoff, tell him that you will make an original discovery about pi. The presumption, of course, is that you'll catch something that over 2,000 years of mathematics has not. This skepticism explains the astonishment of the mathematical community at a discovery in 1996. That year, David Bailey, now chief technologist for the National Energy Research Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and two collaborators published their findings—a new formula for expressing pi as an infinite series. Full story.