Tag: "claimed" at biology news

DNA analysis suggests under-reported kills of threatened whales

...al Soviet whaling in the aftermath of World War II claimed about 48,000 humpback whales; the actual number reported was 3,000. Dolphins and other whale species also have been exploited without regulation or reporting in many countries. "The incentive, obviously, is financial," Baker said. "The result of u...

Bats prey on nocturnally migrating songbirds

...ut a heated controversy among bat scientists. Some claimed that eating feathers was no proof of preying upon birds: they suggested that giant noctules could simply, and accidentally, ingest feathers hovering in the air, which are particularly numerous during migration events. According to the detractors of a...

Study uncovers a lethal secret of 1918 influenza virus

...that echoed historical accounts of how the disease claimed its victims. Importantly, the new work shows tha...e strain of bird flu present in Asia and which has claimed nearly 150 human lives but has not yet shown a capacity to spread easily among people. "What we s...

Mayo Clinic collaboration mining of ancient herbal text leads to potential new anti-bacterial drug

...ively control bacteria that can cause diarrhea, as claimed by naturalist Georg Eberhard Rumpf, circa 1650. He documented his traditional healing methods in the book Ambonese Herbal. The Mayo Clinic-led team's report appears in the Dec. 23 edition of The British Medical Journal, www.bmj.com . In their repor...

Polynesia explorers created worldwide web of scientific knowledge

...vert." Because of their continuous fieldwork, they claimed to be better informed than the scientists. In their conception of what it meant to know another culture, the missionaries "diminished the aesthetic and racial categories so important to the naturalists" and "supplemented them with ethical and relig...

Indonesia - disaster relief aid in action

...rta, near the southern coast of Java, its path has claimed more than 3,000 people, with thousands more injured. The disaster relief team left from Brussels 19:00, Sunday 28 May, reaching Jakarta the following day. Their immediate mission includes assessing the availability of both dialysis hardware and medi...

Just the expectation of a mirthful laughter experience boosts endorphins 27 percent, HGH 87 percent

...he added. "Why do you think Reader's Digest has claimed that 'Laughter is the Best Medicine' for so many years?" Berk concludes. ...

Study finds evolution doesn't always favor bigger animals

... Cope, a 19 th century American paleontologist who claimed the fossil record showed that lineages became larger over time--may simply be an evolutionary manifestation of Bergmann's Rule, which holds that animals increase in mass in colder environments. Biologists had long assumed that Bergmann's Rule--name...

UW-Madison engineers squeeze secrets from proteins

...laundry detergent. A popular ad for detergent once claimed that "protein gets out protein." The idea behind this is that engineered enzymes are at work in the wash breaking down elements of a stain. "Once a protein is folded, you can actually unfold it or destabilize it, either by heating it up, or by addin...

DNA conclusive yet still controversial, Carnegie Mellon professor says

...then using DNA to confirm their case. Some critics claimed that this practice could snag an innocent person, but Roeder has demonstrated through her own research that the likelihood of a false hit are miniscule -- in one case, for example, it was about 1 in 26 quintillion, a probability so slight it needn't ...

Exercise training in ordinary people affects the activity of 500 genes

...sting disease. Most of the muscle genes previously claimed to be specific for Duchenne were also activated with endurance training. Maybe the musculature in Duchenne patients strive to adapt in part similar to what happens in training. The results from this study will help to clarify which genes are uniquely...

Study shows humans have ability to track odors, much like bloodhounds

...y years ago, Nobel Prize laureate Georg von Bekesy claimed that humans had the ability to localize odors, based on experiments in 1964 with human subjects. He suggested this was done the same way we locate sounds: by contrasting either the intensity of the odor or the time of arrival. Since then, however, s...

Supercomputers to focus brains on AIDS dilemma

...ecades after it burst onto the scene, HIV/AIDS has claimed more than twenty million lives and continues to devastate societies around the world, particularly in Africa and other developing countries. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after years of effort AIDS researchers succeeded in developing a class of ...

Double triumph in stem cell quest

...st year Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University claimed to have created an ESC line from a cloned human embryo for the first time. But there were doubts about the results. The technique requires an adult cell and an egg, and because in Hwang's experiment both came from the same person, it was difficult to...

Genes In The Interferon System Important In Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

...al Sciences were virtually the only researcherswho claimed that the interferon system, which is involved in the body'sdefense against viruses, etc., was also behind the autoimmune diseaseSLE. Since then they have shown the importance of the interferon systemin a number of works. This has led to the recogniti...

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