‘It’s a serious degree’: Students across US now majoring in marijuana at colleges

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, N.J. (CBS) — Colleges are now adding cannabis to their curriculum. Grace DeNoya is used to getting snickers when people learn she’s majoring in marijuana.

“My friends make good-natured jokes about getting a degree in weed,” said DeNoya, one of the first students in a new four-year degree program in medicinal plant chemistry at Northern Michigan University. “I say, ‘No, it’s a serious degree, a chemistry degree first and foremost. It’s hard work. Organic chemistry is a bear.’”

As a green gold rush in legal marijuana and its non-drug cousin hemp spreads across North America, a growing number of colleges are adding cannabis to the curriculum to prepare graduates for careers cultivating, researching, analyzing and marketing the herb.

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Water Oxidation Advance Boosts Potential for Solar Fuel

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Chemists have developed the most potent homogeneous catalyst known for water oxidation, considered a crucial component for generating clean hydrogen fuel using only water and sunlight.

Emory University chemists have developed the most potent homogeneous catalyst known for water oxidation, considered a crucial component for generating clean hydrogen fuel using only water and sunlight.

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How Ocean Bacterium Turns Carbon Into Fuel

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Fluorescent labeling of proteins inside the carboxysome show that cyanobacteria create carboxysomes in numbers proportional to length and space them evenly along their longest axis.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. We hear this mantra time and again. When it comes to carbon‹the “Most Wanted” element in terms of climate change‹nature has got reuse and recycle covered. However, it’s up to us to reduce. Scientists at Harvard Medical School are trying to meet this challenge by learning more about the carbon cycle, that is, the process by which carbon moves from the atmosphere into plants, oceans, soils, the earth’s crust, and back into the atmosphere again.

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Single Atom Controls Motility Required for Bacterial Infection

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The binding and release of a single atom (calcium, shown in light blue) to a bacterial protein is necessary for microbial walking and infection.

Bacteria can swim, propelling themselves through fluids using a whip-like extension called a flaggella. They can also walk, strolling along solid surfaces using little fibrous legs called pili. It is this motility that enable some pathogenic bacteria to establish the infections — such as meningitis — that cause their human hosts to get sick or even die.

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Small Hairy Balls Hide Foul-Tasting Healthful Enzymes

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Dutch researcher Saskia Lindhoud has discovered a new way to package enzymes by causing charged polymers to form a ‘ball of hair’ around them.

Dutch researcher Saskia Lindhoud has discovered a new way to package enzymes by causing charged polymers to form a ‘ball of hair’ around them. Her approach significantly increases the utility of the enzymes. For example, healthy enzymes with a foul taste can be packaged in such a way that they are released in the stomach without being tasted.’

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NASA Reproduces A Building Block Of Life In Laboratory

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Stefanie Milam, Michel Nuevo and Scott Sandford.

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life.

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Scientists Bend Nanowires Into 2-D And 3-D Structures

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This is a false-color scanning electron microscope image of the zigzag nanowires in which the straight sections are separated by triangular joints and specific device functions are precisely localized at the kinked junctions in the nanowires.

Taking nanomaterials to a new level of structural complexity, scientists have determined how to introduce kinks into arrow-straight nanowires, transforming them into zigzagging two- and three-dimensional structures with correspondingly advanced functions.

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Cement’s Basic Molecular Structure Finally Decoded

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Concrete being poured from a cement truck chute on a new sidewalk construction project.

In the 2,000 or so years since the Roman Empire employed a naturally occurring form of cement to build a vast system of concrete aqueducts and other large edifices, researchers have analyzed the molecular structure of natural materials and created entirely new building materials such as steel, which has a well-documented crystalline structure at the atomic scale.

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Component Of Mothballs Is Present In Deep-space Clouds

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Also known as M42, the Orion Nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud some 1,500 light-years away.

Interstellar clouds, drifting through the unimaginable vastness of space, may be the stuff dreams are made of. But it turns out there’s an unexpectedly strange component in those clouds, and it’s not dreams but—mothballs?

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Spontaneous Assembly: A New Look At How Proteins Assemble And Organize Themselves Into Complex Patterns

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PALM is an an ultrahigh-precision visible light microscopy technique that enables scientists to photo-actively fluoresce and image individual proteins.

Self-assembling and self-organizing systems are the Holy Grails of nanotechnology, but nature has been producing such systems for millions of years. A team of scientists has taken a unique look at how thousands of bacterial membrane proteins are able to assemble into clusters that direct cell movement to select chemicals in their environment. Their results provide valuable insight into how complex periodic patterns in biological systems can be generated and repaired.

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