New giant clam species offers window into human past

... reefs," they wrote. "Declining marine and terrestrial resources, by human and climatic factors, respectively, may have acted in concert to thwart the precocious but short-lived colonization of the Near East by anatomically modern but technologically primitive humans at the end of the last interglacial." ...

14-year-old CEO makes chemistry a game with 'Elementeo'

... of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans, Samar will present his inventive card game. While other 14-year olds play on their Xbox, this precocious CEO hopes to secure $500,000 in funding so his Silicon Valley-based startup can begin mass producing the game. I have always wanted to show the ...

Hormones and growth: The control of body size and developmental growth rate in fruit flies

... of ecdysone release during development of the fruit fly. They induced precocious ecdysone release by specifically expressing an activated form of the signaling molecule Ras in the endocrine prothoracic gland. This precocious ecdysone release caused flies to develop more rapidly and exhibit a much ...

Autistic brain has fewer neurons for processing emotion

... research using magnetic resonance imaging with children has shown that the amygdala in young males with autism is abnormally large in volume due to precocious maturation. "It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that there are ultimately fewer neurons in the autistic amygdala," says Schumann. Schumann ...

New brain hormone puts brakes on reproduction

... in humans and other mammals, it would offer physicians another means of tweaking the reproductive system to fix problems ranging from infertility to precocious puberty, and also provide animal breeders with a new way to manipulate the productivity of livestock. The findings by Kriegsfeld and colleagues ...

Discovery that bacterium is phosphate gourmet key clue to what makes it most social of bacteria

... are enough to make it a phosphate gourmet, the level of interactions between up to 150 pathways will easily be enough to give Myxococcus xanthus its precocious social skills. ...

A gene's first 'kiss' sets off that affair known as puberty

... this process has been a great mystery. An appreciation of puberty's deep-seated neurobiological mechanisms could, for instance, help prevent precocious or delayed puberty from occurring in some children," noted the study's lead author, Tony Plant, Ph.D., a professor in the departments of cell biology ...