Researchers from the University of Oviedo have labelled sulphur in brewer’s yeast with a non-radioactive method so that when feeding it to laboratory rats the course taken by the element can be tracked and the amino acids and proteins analysed at the point of incorporation. The technique could be very useful for studying the metabolism of this micro-nutrient in vivo and verifying how sulphur-based drugs behave in the organism.

The recipe and process for preparing Maya Blue, a highly-resistant pigment used for centuries in Mesoamerica, were lost. We know that the ingredients are a plant dye, indigo, and a type of clay known as palygorskite, but scientists do not know how they were ‘cooked’ and combined together. Now, a team of chemists from the University of Valencia and the Polythecnic University of Valencia (Spain) have come up with a new hypothesis about how it was prepared.