Mention watermelon and people immediately think of sweet, juicy, crimson-colored fruit. But watermelons didn't start that way, notes Angela R. Davis of the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. Wild watermelons in their native Africa are white fleshed, the size of softballs, and "hard like softballs," she notes. Bitter and anything but sweet, watermelons hardly started as dessert.

On the other hand, U.S. domesticated watermelons are so sweet that they tend to be off-limits to most of the nation's 20 million people with diabetes. People adhering to low-carb diets also shun the fruit. So, Davis, a melon geneticist and enthusiast, embarked on developing a low-sugar alternative to the standard U.S. supermarket melon. She started by screening a host of noncommercial melons, including many that retained some of their wild traits.

LOOKS THE SAME, BUT. . . These melons may resemble the conventional supermarket versions, but they're far less sweet. That means they would fit well into sugar- or calorie-paring diets. Davis

"The project took a lot longer than we expected," she says. "Because there's a correlation between color and sugar content," low-sugar variants that the researchers initially found—including some wild varieties—had unappetizingly white flesh inside. However, Davis' team eventually ran across one melon that bore yellow flesh and little sugar. Seven generations of crossbreeding progeny of this melon yielded two lines of fruit whose seeds now uniformly grow into pink, low-sugar melons. Another, even redder line produces melons with midlevel sugar content.

Davis' group, based in Lane, Okla., describes these new melons in a pair of papers slated to be published later this year in HortScience.

The new melons may not start out sweet enough to satisfy everyone's taste. However, adding a dash of artificial sweetener usually takes care of the problem, Davis finds. Indeed, in one taste test her group conducted, people eating the melons actually preferred a low-sugar watermelon treated with an artificial sweetener over a conventional supermarket melon.

New Polymer-class Discovery Defies Age-old Polymer Chemistry Textbooks

Defying the age-old polymer chemistry textbooks, the UD researchers have come up with a new class of ultra-thin polymer films. The films have potential applications that range from coating tiny microelectronic devices to plastic solar cells.

Focusing on formerly nonpolymerizable ethylenes, the research also used several natural source-derived compounds — like cinnamon, and those which are FDA-approved for use in fragrances and foods. According to the scientists, one of these compounds is found in milkshakes.

Snively, a research associate in Lauterbach’s laboratory group noted,

There’s been a rule that these molecules wouldn’t polymerize. When I first saw that in a textbook when I was in graduate school, I said to myself, ‘Don’t tell me I can’t do this.

And thus, this discovery is the beginning of disproving the widely accepted — scientific rule of thumb.

The Nov. 28 edition of Macromolecules — a scientific journal published by the American Chemical Society — has reported this discovery as a “communication to the editor”.

A computer performing on DNA! Israeli scientists have devised such a computer. And it can perform 330 trillion operations per second, which is more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. It’s all happening with the help of DNA.

It was a year ago — a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips was unveiled by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

But now, the team has gone one step further. And in the new device, the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel. It is surely a giant step in DNA computing.