sampling in Biological News

New cleaning protocol for future 'search for life' missions

... chemicals that were applied and tested on various sampling devices, including a glacial ice core drill and a ... noise' and to document just how clean our sampling devices really are before we use them," she adds. "We are now able to fully decontaminate sampling devices in the lab and field to null levels of ...

Searching for pollution in the Caribbean

... teaching the team proper procedures in the use of sampling tools and sample treatment in the laboratory. The ... plotted next steps ahead. With its recent field sampling in Puerto Cortes, Honduras became the 9th country ... by various participating laboratories. Core sampling is scheduled up to June 2009 for Costa Rica, ...

Europe cores in EUROCORES: Ocean drilling in EuroMARC

... and cooled in containers before undergoing more sampling procedures. Life on the cruises is rather ... As not all techniques can be run on board, the sampling is either done in the individual labs or as a joint activity in form of a science sampling party like in Bremen. "Everyone ...

Scientists integrate data in three dimensions to study climate effects on young fish

... and below the surface to develop a track line or sampling route of the ocean floor within their study ... he said. "We're able to move with a moving ocean, sampling with advanced technology and seeing it as it happens so we can adjust our sampling strategies as necessary. It is exciting to think ...

The proof is in the tree bark

... tree bark can be used as nature's own passive sampling device for detecting the presence and relative ... a very convenient technique," Hites said. The sampling doesn't hurt the tree, and "you get an integrated ... higher than those found in bark at more distant sampling sites, including Indiana, Virginia and Maryland. ...

New theory gives more precise estimates of large-scale biodiversity

... Census takers have mastered this art, profiling the U.S. population by sampling small representative subsets. When biologists try to profile specific ... "There really is a universal curve people are sampling, they are just sampling along different parts of the curve depending on the habitat or class of ...

Researchers gain genome-wide insights into patterns of the world's human population structures

... South East Asia, East Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Oceania. This global sampling came from The Human Genome Diversity Project - Center for the Study of ... the best way to design human population genetics research in terms of sampling individuals and populations, but that progress is likely. "Now that we ...

UCSB scientists document fate of huge oil slicks from seeps at coal oil point

... almost certain that it is ending up in the sediments." An all-night sampling marathon on the research ship R/V Atlantis, funded by the National Science ... and Reddy leading the way, the team used what Reddy called an "old school" sampling device to take 16 sediment samples from the ocean floor, following a ...

EPA to study Puerto Rico waters and marine habitat

... and analytic equipment including side scan sonar, underwater video, water sampling instruments, and sediment sampling devices, which scientists use in a wide variety of ocean monitoring ...

Execretion analysis aids primate social studies

... feces and urine. Alberts will provide examples of what this new sampling has taught researchers in a symposium on the origins of complex societies ... things will not go so well." Her research group's own DNA and hormone sampling at a baboon population in Kenya has revealed that "males actually provide ...

Microarray analysis improves prenatal diagnosis

... to analyze samples taken during amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling for chromosomal abnormalities. Amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling allow researchers to obtain fetal cells for testing. "Larger studies ...

When it comes to forest soil, wildfires pack 1-2 punch

... unprecedented opportunity to directly examine how wildfire changes soil by sampling soils before and after a wildfire. The study appears in the November issue ... "This study, covering over 300 acres, provided nearly 400 soil sampling points as well as extensive tree and understory plots to use in our ...

Brainy genes, not brawn, key to success on mussel beach

... under the California sun." Gracey led the first real-time molecular sampling of mussels in their natural habitat, the results of which appear online ... collected genetic material every three to four hours over three days, sampling mussel beds just south of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. They ...

New blood test for Down syndrome

... as a diagnostic test in short order." Amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling (CVS), which are currently considered the "gold standard" in prenatal testing, involve sampling cells in amniotic fluid. Those cells are obtained by inserting a needle ...

Brookhaven scientists take off for southeastern Pacific climate study

... sample the lower atmosphere and upper ocean during the experiment. Two sampling sites operated by research groups from Chile, Sweden, and the United States with conduct complementary sampling studies in the coastal region of Chile south of Santiago. "We are ...

Mussels to determine how much contamination is in the ports

... present in the water", said Dr. Etxebarria. Biological and chemical sampling Each year Vigo, Bilbao and Pasajes are visited and simples are taken ... canals and along all coasts. "We wish to know if our methodology and the sampling tools that we have developed are useful for this purpose", said Dr ...

US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute announces new genome sequencing projects

... 60 billion nucleotides of data to be generated through this biodiversity sampling campaignroughly the equivalent of 20 human genomes. "The scientific and ... 2009 projects include the following: One metagenome project entails a sampling of the foregut of Opisthocomus hoazina leaf-eating Amazonian pheasant-like ...

New study links fate of personal care products to environmental pollution and human health concerns

... By analyzing vertical cores of sediment deposited over time in the two sampling locations on the East Coast, they showed that TCC, and to a lesser extent, ... Unfortunately this cannot be said for the bottom-dwelling organisms in the sampling locations on the East Coast. Here, Halden concludes, the affected ...

Fecal microorganisms inhabit sandy beaches of Florida

... Traditionally, the cleanliness of a beach is monitored by sampling the bathing water a few meters from shore. But since sand is an effective ... risk. The authors suggest that water quality managers should consider sampling water further from shore than is routinely practiced (say 10 m from the ...

AMNH scientists grace Science & Nature covers

... look at evolutionary relationships from sponges to humans. Genetic sampling allows researchers to see relationships among species that could be hidden ... de Madagascar and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The phylogenomic sampling by Wheeler and colleagues was primarily funded by the National Science ...

MRSA in hospital intensive care -- what's growing where?

... are finding out which bugs grow in intensive care units to develop a novel sampling regime that would indicate the threat of MRSA and other superbugs in the ... Edinburgh International Conference Centre. We are developing a standard sampling regime to take swabs from sinks, taps, floors and other surfaces like ...

AGU Journal Highlights -- March 19, 2008

... possibly triggering the aftershock. The authors expect that higher sampling rates for GPS solutions will help scientists gain greater insight into ... constrain the height of smoke plumes with great precision, but horizontal sampling is very poor on large scales. Spaceborne stereo imaging has much greater ...

Northern right whales head south to give birth, leave genetic 'fingerprints' with NOAA researchers

... fingerprinting project. Conger arrived in Florida in early January. sampling is tightly controlled by federal authorities, and Pace and colleagues are ... may warrant a similar designation. The NOAA Fisheries Service genetic sampling team from Woods Hole will continue their efforts in the spring when right ...

Pervasive environmental sensing a possibility

... Chemical Fluxes Coastal Environment Algorithms for Adaptive sampling in Coastal Zone Environment Algorithms for Creation of Solid Models from ... Optics for AUV Navigation and Map Generation Algorithms for Adaptive sampling in Coastal Zone Environment Algorithms for Creation of Solid Models from ...

December GEOLOGY and GSA TODAY media highlights

... have a greater impact than agricultural effects. Through detailed sampling of the surface water, Hogan et al. identified a series of salinity ... Waitakere 0653, New Zealand. Pages 1099-1102. Using a breakthrough in sampling technology in order to understand how precious metal ore deposits form, ...

Atmospheric measuring device for understanding smog formation

... a mountaintop setting, but has not yet been deployed on an aircraft for a sampling mission. It is designed to be flown on atmospheric sampling aircraft, such as the Department of Energy's Gulfstream 1, which has been ...

AGU journal highlights -- Aug. 6, 2009

... for methane is similar to basin-wide studies of the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that IPCC overestimates were likely generated by an overly coarse sampling method. Title: Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the ocean: A reassessment using basin-wide observations in the Atlantic Authors: T. ...

University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers reveal ocean acidification at Station ALOHA

... processes. Despite the global environmental importance of ocean acidification, there are few studies of sufficient duration, accuracy and sampling intensity to document the rate of change of ocean pH and shed light on the factors controlling its variability. In 1988, Dave Karl and Roger Lukas ...

New computer simulation helps explain folding in important cellular protein

... to a question: Could they use a Monte Carlo Simulation along with the Wang-Landau algorithm to discover an efficient simulation method capable of sampling the energy density states that allow such folding? Perhaps remarkably, they did. The first step in studying the dimerization process was to ...

Exploring standards to advance microbial genomics

... impact on human health or activities. Thus, vast realms of biodiversity remain unexplored. Kyrpides applauds the effort to coordinate balanced sampling of the Tree of Life recently launched through GEBA: the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea ( ...

New tracking approach will help protect polar bears

... materials hundreds of kilometres by skidoo, and set up the cabins. Coupled with ongoing polar bear surveys in which local residents set up the sampling stations and analyze tracks, this work is expected to provide an economic boost for the communities involved. And when the refurbished huts each ...

The straight poop on counting tigers

... in tiger population estimation, but is impractical in several areas where tiger densities are low or field conditions too rugged. "We see genetic sampling as a valuable additional tool for estimating tiger abundance in places like the Russian Far East, Sunderban mangrove swamps and dense rainforests of ...

Rainforest rehab in every sense

... favourable for rapid natural regeneration of degraded rainforest environments. A network of ten sensor nodes, connected wirelessly, has been sampling parameters such as rainfall, humidity, temperature, soil moisture and the amount of available light inside the forest every five minutes since May ...

Toward cheap underwater sensor nets

... said Benson. Greater energy efficiency means batteries can last longer and the sensors can sample the environment more frequently. Higher sampling rates can greatly increase the utility of the collected data and enable scientists to plan experiments when the conditions are just right. ...

UCSD researchers make first direct observations of biological particles in high-altitude ice clouds

... the actions of aerosols on clouds represent what scientists consider the greatest uncertainty in modeling predictions for the future. "By sampling clouds in real time from an aircraft, these investigators were able to get information about ice particles in clouds at an unprecedented level of ...

A biological basis for the 8-hour workday?

... driven circadian protein transcription the 24-hour component which was unshifted by the feeding change," Hogenesch says. The high-density time sampling had an additional payoff: The team gained a sharper picture of the genes controlled by the 24-hour circadian clock. "We were able to more precisely ...

Satellites show how Earth moved during Italy quake

... calculated every few days. The COSMO-SkyMed data together with the Envisat data and possibly SAR data from other satellites will ensure a dense sampling of the ground deformation around the L'Aquila area in the next months, which could make this earthquake one of the most covered by SAR Interferometry ...

Field stations foster serendipitous discoveries in environmental, biological sciences

... in biological infrastructure," he said. "They provide scientists with research opportunities, while fostering the regional and continental scale sampling provided through the LTER Network and the National Ecological Observatory Network [NEON]." The paper, "Biological Field Stations: Research ...

Penn biologists demonstrate that size matters... in snail shells

... and aperture width of N. lapillus shells from 19 lots and then resampled the same 19 sites in 2007 by using Colton's site descriptions and maps of sampling locations. The team also classified the relative wave exposure at each site as exposed coast, semiexposed shore or sheltered cove, allowing the ...

UK robot sub searches for signs of melting 60 km into an Antarctic ice shelf cavity

... arrays to record the variability in ocean properties and circulation over the next two years, extensive profiling of 'warm' and melt-laden seawater, sampling the perennial sea ice and swath-mapping deep, glacially-scoured troughs on the sea floor. Autosub is an AUV Automated Underwater Vehicle, ...