Resting in Biological News

Siberian jays use complex communication to mob predators

... immediately escape upon detecting a predator. However, when encountering resting predators, many prey approach and mob predators despite the associated ... the study, both factors matter since they determine the risk posed by the resting predator. "The chatter of mobbing jays is rather complex. The birds use ...

Behind closed eyes

... magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in active and resting states. But fMRI is an indirect measurement of brain activity; it can't ... hallucinations or hear voices that aren't there during rest. The resting oscillations appear to be strongest when we sense nothing at all during ...

Research finds older women who are more physically fit have better cognitive function

... Poulin's team recorded and measured the women's cardiovascular health, resting brain blood flow and the reserve capacity of blood vessels in the brain, ... compared to the inactive group, the active group had lower (10 per cent) resting and exercising arterial blood pressure, higher (5 per cent) vascular ...

Clinical trial shows quadriplegics can operate powered wheelchair with tongue drive system

... have to stop the wheelchair before issuing the command to turn right. The stop command was selected automatically when the tongue returned to its resting position, bringing the wheelchair to a standstill. "Discrete mode is a safety feature particularly for novice users, but it reduces the agility of ...

How to text message and avoid pain

... MESSAGING Don't sit in the same position for a long time; instead try to vary your position. Use the chair's backrest. Relieve your forearms by resting them against a desk or your thighs. Use both thumbs. Avoid hunching over for a long time. Give your thumbs a break when typing long messages. Don't ...

Comprehensive cardiogenetic testing for families of sudden unexplained death victims can save lives

... the SUD victims was only 29.8 years old. The initial examination of the relatives consisted of taking personal and family medical history and a resting ECG. A second cardiac autopsy of the SUD victim was undertaken if tissue had been stored and was available. Additional cardiological examinations ...

Conservationists seek to identify prime stopover sites for migrating birds

... America. The fieldwork conducted by the volunteers will help verify a model that uses geographic information systems technology to select optimal resting locations based on distance from the lakeshore and the extent and diversity of wood cover. A pilot phase funded with $35,000 from the Nature ...

Heart protein regulates blood vessel maintenance

... cells undergo a process in diseases such as atherosclerosis or normal tissue damage caused by balloon angioplasty where they transition between a resting and proliferative state. The ability to transition between the two states is necessary for the normal development of blood vessels, regulating blood ...

Oral contraceptives impair muscle gains in young women

... were taken before and after the training and assessed to measure anabolic (muscle building) and catabolic (muscle breaking) hormone levels in blood. resting and fasting blood concentrations were measured for three anabolic hormones: DHEA, DHEAS and IGF1. Findings The researchers found that: ...

Oral contraceptives impair muscle gains in young women

... were taken before and after the training and assessed to measure anabolic (muscle building) and catabolic (muscle breaking) hormone levels in blood. resting and fasting blood concentrations were measured for three anabolic hormones: DHEA, DHEAS and IGF1. Findings The researchers found that: ...

Distinguishing single cells with nothing but light

... activation processes more explicitly. Preliminary IRAM experiments conducted on T cells have revealed perceivable differences between the initial resting state of a T cell and its state following an encounter with an invader. The next step will be to use IRAM to gather data continuously so that ...

Physical activity may strengthen children's ability to pay attention

... stimulus-discrimination tests known as flanker tasks, to assess their inhibitory control. On one day, students were tested following a 20-minute resting period; on another day, after a 20-minute session walking on a treadmill. Students were shown congruent and incongruent stimuli on a screen and asked ...

As good as it gets: Octogenarian muscles don't get stronger with exercise

... women had many fewer muscle fibers, the fibers they did have were large and healthy looking the genes involved in muscle growth are present in the resting muscle of the octogenarians at much higher levels compared to young people. These results suggest that the octogenarian muscle is already ...

UV-B light sensing mechanism discovered in plant roots

... normally covered in soil, should have sensors for UV-B light, but the RUS1 gene is crucial at the young seedling stage when a plant's roots are resting on the soil surface. Later in a plant's life, roots can be exposed after rainwash, geological movements or animal activity. The discovery of RUS1 ...

Stowers Institute's Linheng Li Lab expands understanding of bone marrow stem cell niche

... that the inner bone surface forms a special zone that includes both osteoblastic and endothelial components. This HSC zone maintains HSCs in their resting state and promotes HSC expansion in response to bone marrow stressors, such as irradiation." Tong Yin, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Fellow, is ...

'Living fossil' tree contains genetic imprints of rain forests under climate change

... hitched rides from Africa on rafts of vegetation, as monkeys did, Dick said. Even whole trunks, which can send out shoots when they reach a suitable resting place, may have made the journey. Because Central and South American had no land connection at the time, Symphonia must have colonized each location ...

Models of eel cells suggest electrifying possibilities

... pulse traveling through the cell. The channels then close and alternate paths open to pump the ions back to their initial concentrations during a resting state. In all, according LaVan, there are at least seven different types of channels, each with several possible variables to tweak, such as their ...

October 2008 GEOLOGY and GSA TODAY media highlights

... years ago). Evidence for all of these colossal events can be found preserved in tiny crystals from rocks dredged off the seabed, where they have been resting since the time of the dinosaurs. Modeling of gold scavenging by bismuth melts coexisting with hydrothermal fluids Blake Tooth et al., ...

Did walking on 2 feet begin with a shuffle?

... other researchers ideas about the origins of bipedalism. Chimpanzees are humans closest relatives. They basically walk on all fours, partially resting their weight on the knuckles of their hands. A chimps body plan is very much like that of a primitive ape, and our last common ancestor probably ...

Arctic marine mammals on thin ice

... disciplines. Sea ice is the common habitat feature uniting these unique and diverse Arctic inhabitants. Sea ice serves as a platform for resting and reproduction, influences the distribution of food sources, and provides a refuge from predators. The loss of sea ice poses a particularly severe ...

Into the abyss: Deep-sixing carbon

... of 2.2 days of current global emissions. Now try to picture that container, measuring up to 100 metres in radius and several kilometres long, resting benignly on the seabed more than 3 kilometres below the oceans surface. At first blush, this might appear like science fiction, but its an idea ...

Genetic contributions to human brain morphology and intelligence

... as in adulthood are needed since brain volume changes dynamically throughout life. New brain-imaging methods, such as DTI-fiber tracking and resting state functional MRI, allow to study the heritability of neural networks underlying brain functioning. These new methods, in coherence with ...

After drought, ponds keep up with the Joneses

... is the bullfrog. Their tadpoles require two years to grow, so they often dont rebound very well from drought. Some of the zooplankton have resting eggs that are deposited in mud. They rebound well when the ponds refill. Some frogs leave the pond when it dries up. Lots of different types of ...

Expecting an afternoon nap can reduce blood pressure

... disappears) Changes Found Only in Pre-Sleep Researchers found a significant drop in blood pressure during the sleep trial, but not during the resting or standing trials. Whats more, this drop in blood pressure occurred mostly after lights out, just before the volunteer fell asleep. This ...

AIDS interferes with stem cells in the brain

... seasons or cycles, known as G1, S, G2, and M (for mitosis, or cell division). They found that cells exposed to HIV/gp120 got stuck in the G1 or resting phase, and that the cell cycle was arrested. Cell cycle is studied intensively by cancer researchers who have delineated certain checkpoint ...

Modeling the restless brain

... "Our model suggests that the cortical resting state is not time-invariant, but instead contains ... to generating and shaping brain activity in the resting and active brain. Empirical work on the ... researchers better understand where the observed resting state fluctuations come from. It also would let ...

Hearts of male and female rainbow trout are different

... when the trout heart is contracting and not under resting conditions. The study is entitled Sex ... of oxygen consumption and lactate release under resting conditions; the inhibition of oxidative ... cardiac performance dramatically, and elevated resting tension and lactate release in both males and ...

The reason why antiviral therapy can't annihilate HIV infection, and what to do about it

... They demonstrate that HIV persists in both resting and activated CD4+ T cells of patients having ... Their data also suggest that latently infected, resting CD4+ T cells may become reactivated, most likely ... reactivation process may spread to neighboring resting as well as activated CD4+ T cells; direct ...

Gladstone investigators discover how resting T cells avoid HIV infection

... Moreover, they detected only the small form in resting CD4 T cells, where HIV fails to grow, and only ... production of the small, active form of A3G in resting CD4 T cells was sufficient to make these normally resistant resting cells highly susceptible to HIV infection. ...

Potential heart benefit found in stem cells

... viability and local wall motion abnormalities, as well as the size of resting and stress-induced perfusion defects. They also measured the global EF ... follow-up EF levels, and negatively correlated to the stress-induced and resting perfusion defects. "In at-risk patients, combined treatment with ...

Cancer stem cells similar to normal stem cells can thwart anti-cancer agents

... cells and their progeny in samples obtained from normal lung and lung cancer tissue samples. The researchers identified a very small, rare set of resting cancer stem cells in the lung cancer samples that looked and behaved much like normal adult lung tissue stem cells. Both the cancer and normal stem ...

Freeze! Scientists film proteins at work by freezing them at different states

... freezing it at several states. They publish their results this week in Science. Most of the research done on proteins is based on their study in a resting state and their study in movement is extremely limited due to technological limitations. Today, a French team has made a movie of an enzyme (a ...

'Terror bird' arrived in North America before land bridge, study finds

... approach compares bones of disputed age with those of known age. If the chemistry matches, the bones are of the same age irrespective of their final resting place." David Gradstaff, a professor and chairman of the geology department at Temple University, said the technique is timely and important. ...

Does a peptide affect the heart's response to social isolation?

... they displayed behaviors similar to depression and cardiovascular changes indicating a possible increased risk of heart disease (including elevated resting heart rate, reduced heart rate variability, and reduced parasympathetic regulation of the heart). This study examines whether oxytocin plays a ...

Breathing easy: When it comes to oxygen, a bug's life is full of it

... system built to provide quick access to a lot of oxygen, can survive for days without it. The insect respiratory system is so efficient that resting insects stop taking in air as they release carbon dioxide, according to research by Stefan K. Hetz of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. This ...

Researchers show that veins stiffen as we age

... Then each participant was involved in a series of research trials at UD's Human Performance Lab on the Newark campus. While each subject lay resting on a gurney, various gauges, connected to computers, were placed on their arms and legs. An arterial cuff was attached to an upper arm to monitor ...

Gladstone investigators identify a new protective action for the powerful anti-HIV factor, APOBEC3G

... are in an inactive state, awaiting a stimulus to move into action. In these cells, A3G blocks HIV at an early step in its life cycle. However, when resting CD4 T cells are stimulated by a foreign protein or other signal, A3G is rapidly recruited into large RNA protein complexes within the cells. This ...

Fishy cooperation

... to survival, highly intelligent solutions are within the reach of animals as different from us as fish. (Watch a grouper signal to a giant moray eel resting in a cave by shaking its head in front of the moray in this video.) ...

Clue found to Epstein-Barr virus' ability to form and sustain tumors

... information is converted first into RNA and then into protein. Mutating the unique segment of amino acids prevented EBNA-1 from transforming resting B cells into proliferating cells. Under normal conditions, a cellular protein binds this 25-amino acid segment of EBNA-1, allowing transcription ...