Equilibrium in Biological News

Greenhouse gas auction revenues can help cut Md. electric use significantly, says study

... national economic simulation model of electricity markets based on market equilibrium concepts. Haiku was created by Dallas Burtraw, Karen Palmer and Anthony ... was developed by Ben Hobbs and Yihsu Chen. It is a regional market equilibrium model for the mid-Atlantic power generation market. It is designed to ...

Diet and lifestyle critical to recovery, says study

... unwanted proteins. The proteasome is important as it maintains the equilibrium of the cell, said Dr Delneri. When this equilibrium is lost it can result in a number of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, ...

Coral reef fish harbor an unexpectedly high biodiversity of parasites

... with it. Hosts and parasites form a system that reaches a certain equilibrium as evolution proceeds. Destruction of this equilibrium could influence the regulation of fish populations, in letting the less ...

LSUHSC's Bazan awarded ARRA grant to preserve vision

... cellular damage or repair. This balance is fundamental to the maintenance of corneal integrity and function and extensive damage occurs when the equilibrium between chemical messengers (lipid mediators) that are released in response to tissue injury in the cornea is lost. Dr. Bazan's research will focus ...

New book suggests Earth perhaps not such a benevolent mother after all

... In the past 50 years it has become commonplace to think of Earth as a nurturing place, straining mightily to maintain equilibrium so that life might continue and flourish. The Gaia hypothesis, named for the ancient Greek goddess of Earth, even put forth the idea that our ...

Forget the freezer: Research suggests novel way to control water behavior

... striking. In particular, the observation that a tri-layered system, with two frozen layers sandwiching a fluid intermediate layer, can exist as an equilibrium state because of confinement is very exciting." Debenedetti noted there are numerous applications for an increased understanding of the ...

Why you can't hurry love

... payoff from mating with any female, though his payoff is higher if he is "good" than if he is "bad". The study looks for evolutionarily stable equilibrium behaviours, in which females are doing as well as they can against male behaviour and males are doing as well as they can against female behaviour. ...

Ocean acidification could have broad effects on marine ecosystems

... of ocean water, pushing it closer to the acidic end of the scale, although it is still slightly alkaline. A small decrease in pH affects the chemical equilibrium of ocean water, reducing the availability of carbonate ions needed by a wide range of organisms to build and maintain structures of calcium ....

The role of stem cells in renewing the cornea

... propose that the expanding epithelia of the cornea and the conjunctiva act like tectonic plates, squeezing the limbus between them into a kind of equilibrium zone. Due to the constant expansion, stem cells accumulate in this zone. In the event of a rupture in the equilibrium, such as a large corneal ...

October 2008 GEOLOGY and GSA TODAY media highlights

... gold deposits. Tooth et al. illustrate the importance of this additional liquid phase during ore deposit formation by presenting equilibrium thermodynamic modeling of a coexisting aqueous fluid and a bismuth-rich melt. The model's predictions match observations in a modern seafloor ...

How plants fine tune their natural chemical defenses

... complexity," says O'Maille. This first glimpse revealed a rugged landscape of catalytic activities, where small changes gradually shift the equilibrium between both phytoalexins and in some cases cause rapid evolutionary jumps. "It isn't the specific amino acid change that's important but rather the ...

Oxidative stress: Mechanism of cell death clarified

... colour quickly and deteriorates, because the oxygen in the air produces chemical reactions in the tissues (oxidation of biomolecules). If the equilibrium in the organism moves towards oxidative processes, then this is known as oxidative stress. Oxidative stress, for instance, is associated with the ...

Soil's carbon storage capacity investigated

... a study was conducted in a corn agroecosystem experiment to test the soil C saturation concept which postulates that there is an upper limit to the equilibrium soil C level of mineral soils even when soil C input is increased. In this experiment, a gradient of soil C input was produced with four N fertilizer ...

Circadian rhythm-metabolism link discovered

... be translated into how our cells act." The findings also suggest that proper sleep and diet could help maintain or rebuild the CLOCK-SIRT1 equilibrium and may help explain why lack of proper rest or disruption in our normal sleep patterns is known to increase hunger, which can lead to obesity and ...

Predicting the distribution of creatures great and small

... can become before becoming extinct. After millions of virtual years of new species evolving and old species becoming extinct, the model reaches an equilibrium in which the tendency of species to grow larger is offset by their tendency to become extinct more quickly. By using fossil data on extinct ...

A novel X-ray source could be brightest in the world

... electron bunch and again travels back along the undulator. This pattern is repeated indefinitely with the x-ray intensity growing each time until equilibrium is reached. X-FELO will open up breakthrough scientific opportunities in various research fields. For example, the inelastic x-ray scattering ...

Dinosaur diggers bring mobile lab, new techniques to Eastern Montana

... the specimens, the better." Schweitzer's hypothesis is that fossils can stay deep in the ground for 68 million years and because they are in equilibrium with their sandstone environment, they can remain in nearly their original state. It was a deep sandstone environment that preserved the soft tissue ...

Biodiversity as a natural resource

... Germany on 29 May, which will be followed by an event open to the general public the same evening. "Biological diversity not only maintains the equilibrium of ecosystems, it is also an inexhaustible source of potential new drugs. It helps sustain a healthy food chain and promotes water and soil quality," ...

Spin control: New technique sorts nanotubes by length

... that a variation of the same technique can separate nanotubes by length. They showed that while the nanotubes ultimately will move to a point of equilibrium in the centrifuge tube dictated by their buoyancy, due to friction they will move at different rates depending on their lengths. When we spin the ...

Atmosphere threatened by pollutants entering ocean, prof says

... plants to form, Duce explained. Oceanic plant life is produced from marine carbon (bicarbonate) in the ocean, and that amount of bicarbonate is in equilibrium with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So when more bicarbonate is used up to produce marine plant life, it disrupts the equilibrium, and carbon ...

Fishing throws targeted species off balance, Scripps study shows

... and undershooting occurs in unexploited stocks, but to a lower extent. Therefore, classical single-species population models that require equilibrium are unlikely to be very successful in stock forecasts, except perhaps in the very short term. "Other methods that do not rely on these assumptions ...

Overeating and obesity triggered by lack of BDNF

... the United States is obese and another third is overweight. Excessive weight gain is elicited by alterations in energy balance, the finely modulated equilibrium between caloric intake and expenditure. But what are the factors that determine how much food is consumed" Part of the mystery is unfolding in the ...

Biophysical Society announces winners of 2008 Student Travel Awards

... via Electronic Circular Dichroism and Absorption Spectroscopy. Kyle P. Eagen, Cornell University, Effect of a Mutation on the Channel-opening equilibrium of a Malfunctioning GABA(A) Receptor Linked to Epilepsy. Thomas C. Edrington, University of Connecticut, The Effect of Bleaching on the ...

Lipids in the brain an important factor for Alzheimer's disease?

... the formation of protofibrils. Their research also indicates that the concentration of lipids in the brain greatly influences the biological equilibrium between non-toxic plaques and toxic oligomeres. These results open up new avenues of research into the effects of fat metabolism for diseases such as ...

A study proposes a new universal rule to explain the equilibrium of plant populations

... for Advanced Studies (CSIC University of the Balearic Islands) has allowed the first-time formulation of a universal rule that explains the equilibrium of plant communities, showing how plants assure the survival of their species whether their lives last a day or are prolonged over centuries. The ...

A study proposes a new universal rule to explain the equilibrium of plant populations

... for Advanced Studies (CSIC University of the Balearic Islands) has allowed the first-time formulation of a universal rule that explains the equilibrium of plant communities, showing how plants assure the survival of their species whether their lives last a day or are prolonged over centuries. The ...

New research shows sharks use their noses and bodies to locate smells

... the normal function of motion sensitive "hair cells," the receptor cells of the lateral line. At high doses it has been known to cause hearing and equilibrium problems in humans, senses that are also based on hair cells. Sharks with their lateral lines intact demonstrated a preference for the odor ...

End of deforestation in view? Experts advance new way to size up global forest resources

... of Earth's two most populated nations no longer increase atmospheric carbon concentration: China's forests are expanding; India's have reached equilibrium ?changes due in large part to urban migration, agricultural yield increases and reforestation policies. The paper, published Nov. 20 in the ...

Gene linked to rare disease activates fat breakdown

... wrote. Further study will examine how CGI-58 activation of the lipase affects energy metabolism in various tissues. As disruption of the equilibrium of lipid synthesis and degradation can result in prevalent metabolic diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, the findings might have important ...

Genetic tug of war determines sexual differentiation

... are in equal balance in the early stages of development in the mammalian gonad before it commits to either a male testis or a female ovary. If this equilibrium is tipped in favor of Wnt4, the gonad develops into an ovary, while an Fgf9 victory leads to the formation of a testis. What tips the balance in ...

For the first time: Longevity modulated without disrupting life-sustaining function

... metabolic requirements for extending longevity without causing diverse, wide-ranging effects on the development and maintenance of the physiological equilibrium in the organism," said Dillin. ...

Manipulating single cell receptor alters animal behavior

... The study examines intracellular signaling pathways stimulated by AT1, a receptor for angiotensin, a polypeptide hormone that regulates internal equilibrium among body fluids. By using drugs to effect these neural signaling pathways in animal subjects, the team was able manipulate this equilibrium, a ...

Diverse tropical forests defy metabolic ecology models

... and mortality patterns were consistent with predictions. Similarly, tree size distributions corresponded more closely to a model based on demographic equilibrium theory that incorporated differences in growth and mortality among sites. What next? The results of these two studies clearly demonstrate that ...

Pitt professor's theory of evolution gets boost from cell research

... the notion that organisms routinely change to adapt to the environment. Actually, Schwartz argues, it is the environment that knocks them off their equilibrium and as likely ultimately kills them as changes them. And so they are being rocked by the environment, not adapting to it. The article's ...

'Acid rain' and forest mass: Another perspective

... standard protocols. The location of parcels was carried out as a function of their distance from different foci of emission of contaminants. A flow equilibrium model for the canopy was drawn up together with a generalised micrometeorological model in order to estimate the total deposition of atmospheric ...

Microreactor efficiently regenerates cofactors for biocatalysis

... adjusting the flow rates of the two streams, the researchers can focus the reactant stream close to the cathode, and a normally unfavorable reaction equilibrium is driven into the desired direction of cofactor regeneration. "In large batch reactors, a spontaneous reverse reaction prevents the regeneration ...

Unraveling a stomach cancer puzzle

... several substantial contributions to the understanding of Stat3, the protein linking those 'genes behaving badly' and central to development, tissue equilibrium and the immune system. "We showed that, in mice, hyperactive Stat3 shuts down a vital controller of stomach cell growth, called TGF beta, and this ...

HIV-1 spread through six transmission lines in the UK

... in high-risk behaviour among men having sex with men, a significant increase in condom use has been reported since 1990, which could explain the equilibrium reached for the number of infections. “Antiretroviral therapy may also have impacted on transmission rates, but our evidence does not demonstrate ...