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The transparent organism: EMBLEM and Carl Zeiss give labs a unique look at life

... fuzzy. In SPIM, a sample is passed through a thin sheet of light, capturing high-quality images layer-by-layer. The sample can be rotated and viewed along different directions, further eliminating the blurry and unwanted light which prevented scientists from looking deep into tissues in the past. The enti...

Ice core 'dipstick' indicates West Antarctic ice has thinned less than believed

... sea level. In an area called Siple Dome, the ice sheet currently rises 1,000 meters -- more than half a m...me places they do now. "If you are making the ice sheet thinner over time, you're also stretching it much farther, so the individual layers get much thinner...

Falling ants glide back to trunk to avoid dangers of forest floor

... the same species of ant in freefall, with a white sheet standing in for the tree trunk. Yanoviak's earlier observations combined with the videotaped tests in Panama established that the ants basically reorient their bodies so their hind legs and abdomen point toward the tree, and use their head-up fall t...

Chemicals in tattoo inks need closer scrutiny

...k fall to local jurisdictions, according to a fact sheet issued by the FDA Office of Cosmetics and Colors http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/cos-204.html. This effectively gives a tattoo artist license to inject whatever he or she deems appropriate under the skin, according to the researchers. "Tattoos are no ...

The lopsided brain: Attention bias is shared by humans and birds

...cancel-out" evenly distributed visual targets on a sheet of paper placed before them. The finding that birds also exhibit spatial pseudoneglect is somewhat surprising, given that birds lack a corpus collosum, the structure in human brains that is thought to facilitate rapid communication between the two h...

Ebola virus: from wildlife to dogs

...ntre Pasteur of Cameroon. (2) See Scientific news sheet n° 192 ?Jabuary 2004, " Virus Ebola : les populations de grands singes menacées ". reference publication: E.M. Leroy, P. Rouquet, P. Formenty, S. Souquière, A. Kilbourne, J.M. Froment, M. Bermejo, S. Smit, W. Karesh, R. Swanepoel, S. R. Zaki, and P.E...

Climatologists discover deep-sea secret

...obal warming could cause part of the Greenland ice sheet to melt, giving rise to increased levels of freshwater in the Atlantic Ocean. This could reduce the strength of the gulf stream, creating a cooler, dryer climate in Europe and North America. However, according to the authors of this latest study, th...

Census of Marine Life explorers surprised by diversity, density of Arctic creatures

...d in early 2002. Roughly 500 billion tonnes of ice sheet (3,250 square kilometers, about the size of Rhode Island) disintegrated in less than a month, what scientists have called "staggering" speed. The work builds on that of marine scientists who have plumbed the depths of the Weddell Sea, off the coast ...

Proteomics brings researchers closer to understanding microbes that produce acid mine drainage

...rounding streams. The film, which can form a tough sheet that is millimeters thick, sits atop green, 108 degree Fahrenheit runoff containing zinc, iron, copper and arsenic. "This system is a very tightly coupled biogeochemical system, and we are just trying to find out how it works," she said. "This micr...

Study casts doubt on 'Snowball Earth' theory

...ove that large parts of the ocean remained free of sheet ice during the pre-Cambrian glaciation. It is statistically unlikely but possible, Olcott said, that the drill core found one of the tiny "refugia" for marine life whose existence is allowed under the "Snowball Earth" hypothesis. But, she said, "fin...

Tagging pathogens with synthetic DNA 'barcodes'

...y dot blotting, in which the sample is spread on a sheet of absorbent paper and made visible to the naked eye. Or the color can be observed directly through a fluorescent light microscope, which is useful in situations where the geographic distribution of the target molecules is important, Luo said. For c...

Women cautioned against using herbal supplements

...associate with BCERF and the co-author of the fact sheet "Herbal Medicines and Breast Cancer Risk," which is available free on BCERF's Web site at http://envirocancer.cornell.edu/ . "Some of these substances may prove to have beneficial effects -- and, in fact, may become part of conventional medicine in ...

Menopause Symptoms May Come Back After Stopping Menopausal Hormone Therapy

...associate with BCERF and the co-author of the fact sheet "Herbal Medicines and Breast Cancer Risk," which is available free on BCERF's Web site at http://envirocancer.cornell.edu/ . "Some of these substances may prove to have beneficial effects -- and, in fact, may become part of conventional medicine in ...

Researchers Create DNA-Based Sensors for Nano-Tongues and Nano-Noses

.... Single-walled nanotubes are formed from a single sheet of carbon molecules connected together and then rolled. It is a unique material in which every atom is on both the surface and the interior. Although nanotubes have many applications, they are extremely sensitive to electrostatic variations in their ...

MIT researcher presents new view of how the cortex forms

...in development are dead. The cerebral cortex is a sheet of around 10 billion neurons divided into distinctly separate areas that process particular aspects of sensation, movement and cognition. To what extent are these areas predetermined by genes or shaped by the environment? The protomap and protocortex...

What can change in the brain? Electrical synapses, research shows

...s came from the thalamic reticular nucleus, a thin sheet of neurons that is part of the thalamus. The thalamus is a small region in the center of the brain responsible for relaying sensory information to the cerebral cortex, where it is transformed into memories and emotions, speech and movement. The thal...

Microbes under Greenland Ice may be preview of what scientists find under Mars' surface

...en at the bottom of Greenland's two-mile thick ice sheet could help guide scientists searching for similar ...p alive, just as the microbes in the Greenland ice sheet are doing. ...

Environmental metagenomics diagnosing extreme environments, tapping opportunities for clean energy

...ng two liters of hydrogen from fermenting just one sheet of paper. Rubin will discuss these advances on a panel entitled "Biosphere Monitoring and Ecosystem Forecasts: Sensing the Pulse of the Planet," organized by Stan Wullschleger and Thomas Wilbanks of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at the American As...

Study indicates dramatic rise in antibiotic-resistant community-acquired staph infections

... MRSA infections. In the meantime, the CDC's fact sheet on MRSA suggests that preventing MRSA may be as simple as employing the tried and true cure of soap and water: "Practice good hygiene," is its primary advice. ...

Imaging study links key genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease to myelin breakdown

...lity and overall on-line capability." Myelin is a sheet of lipid, or fat, with very high cholesterol content -- the highest of any brain tissue. The high cholesterol content allows myelin to wrap tightly around axons, speeding messages through the brain by insulating these neural "wire" connections. As t...

Mirrors in the mind: New studies elucidate how the brain reflects onto itself the actions of others

... with a straw) and hand actions (such as ripping a sheet of paper or opening a zipper), brain areas are activated that overlap with areas activated by the execution of those actions by the subjects themselves. Within this area, a subregion was preferentially activated when mouth actions were either heard o...

Motorola researchers develop selective sensors based on carbon nanotubes

...ces so powerful. "The nanotubes basically are a sheet of interconnected atoms rolled into a tube," Tao said. "Every single atom in the tube is exposed to the environment and can interact with chemicals and molecules. That is why it is so sensitive. But without the peptides, it would not recognize specif...

Neural networking nanotubes

...ques including deposition and resemble a rolled up sheet of chicken wire, but on a tiny scale. They are usually just a few nanometers across and up to several micrometers in length. The researchers built up layers of their SWNTs to produce a film that is electrically conducting even at a thickness of j...

Ultrathin films deliver DNA as possible gene therapy tool

... 10,000 of them to equal the thickness of a single sheet of paper. As it turns out, making the DNA-containing films is relatively straightforward, Lynn says, but "getting [the DNA] back out of the films is the hard part." The secret to films that release DNA is in the choice of the polymer and the lay...

Ice Age extinction claimed highly carnivorous Alaskan wolves

...colonized by wolves that survived south of the ice sheet in the continental United States, Leonard said. The ancient Alaskan wolves differed from modern wolves not only in their genes, but also in their skulls and teeth, which were robust and more adapted for forceful bites and shearing flesh than are t...

CT scan reveals ancient long-necked gliding reptile

...Because the researchers did not want to cut up the sheet of rock in which the fossilized glider was embedded, they gave up total resolution of all of the bones. Because this fossil has been identified and named from CT scan, one benefit is that the bones themselves have not been destroyed or even moved....