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Tag: "great" at biology news

Clinical trial to test stem cell approach for children with brain injury

...unlikely. Even marginal improvement could mean a great deal to someone who suffers a brain injury. "It could be the difference between being able to recognize your loved ones and not being able to, or between doing things for yourself or having to rely on others. That would be a huge impact on families ...

'Perception' gene tracked humanity's evolution, scientists say

...ropologists that hominid divergence from the other great apes was fueled not by the origin of new genes, but by the quickening (or slowing) of the expression of existing genes. Hahn and his colleagues at Duke University, University College London and Medical University of Vienna first became interested i...

Key brain regulatory gene shows evolution in humans

...thin humans, or even between humans and any of the great apes," said Wray, who is a professor of biology. "So, if we found any variation in this gene due to evolution, it was likely to be in its regulation. And our premise is that the easiest way to generate evolutionary change is to alter regulation." In...

Wild Gorillas Handy with a Stick

...g tools in Liberia in 1951, little was known about great ape behavior in the wild. The sighting was publish...ll because they didn't need it. The largest of the great apes, gorillas can gnash nuts between their teeth and simply smash termite mounds to release their d...

Finding rewrites the evolutionary history of the origin of potatoes

...tivated potatoes for millennia, but there has been great controversy about the ubiquitous vegetable's origins. This week, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, a team led by a USDA potato taxonomist stationed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has for the first time demonstr...

Leading lampreys to slaughter: Pheromone for scourge of Great Lakes identified

...it. The key component is a steroid with potency so great that lampreys would smell a single gram dissolved in 10 billion liters of water, enough to fill 5,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This level of potency tops that of all other fish attractants, including those of salmon. To find the pheromone, the...

Jefferson scientists identify gene defect leading to abnormal skin development and cancer

...it. The key component is a steroid with potency so great that lampreys would smell a single gram dissolved in 10 billion liters of water, enough to fill 5,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This level of potency tops that of all other fish attractants, including those of salmon. To find the pheromone, the...

The brain is broadly wired for reproduction

...Buck acknowledges that they have already learned a great deal just by defining the circuits. "These findings now set the stage for studies in which the neurons in those circuits can be analyzed to determine the genes they selectively express. Then those genes can be used -- for example in gene knockout stu...

Engineered Stem Cells Show Promise For Sneaking Drugs Into The Brain

One of the great challenges for treating Parkinson's diseases and other neurodegenerative disorders is getting medicine to the right place in the brain. The brain is a complex organ with many different types of cells and structures, and it is fortified with a protec...

How E. coli bacterium generates simplicity from complexity

...omputer simulations. "When it comes to genomes, a great deal of complexity boils down to just a few simple themes," said Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering and co-author of the study, which was made available online Dec. 15. "Researchers have confirmed t...

USC researchers track down the stem cells that create feathers

... entire organ," Chuong says. Feathers are also of great interest to scientists due to their diverse shapes, each with its unique functional morphology. For example, the radially symmetric downy feathers found on chicks and on the trunks of adults are designed for warmth, while the bilaterally symmetric fe...

Technique offers new view of dynamic biological landscape

... yeast," Weissman explained. "And it also proved a great way to find new gene functions or to figure out how known genes were functioning and the processes they were likely to be involved in. But on top of that, we could identify groups of genes that were acting in a coherent way, to produce protein comple...

Carnegie Mellon U. transforms DNA microarrays with standard Internet communications tool

...reater sensitivity and specificity. The work holds great promise for vastly improving research on health and disease, according to Ziv Bar-Joseph, assistant professor of computer science and biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon. "We are very excited about introducing this versatile, powerful method to t...

Understanding the oceans microbes is key to the Earth's future

...mals, and all other life forms have evolved. "A great deal of research on the biogeography of marine microorganisms has been carried out, but many unknowns persist and more work is needed to elucidate and understand their complexity," says co-author David Karl of the University of Hawaii. "Uppermost on ...

T-rays: New imaging technology spotlighted by American Chemical Society

...ve radiation. Until recently, researchers have had great difficulty harnessing the potential of the THz region for lack of suitable radiation sources. Advanced materials research has provided new and higher power sources, and interest in THz sensing and imaging has exploded as a result. Objects at room te...

Why the Amazon rainforest is so rich in species

...ust have split recently. If the DNA has diverged a great deal between species, the species are probably ancient. Some groups contain very young and rapidly evolving species, such as the Amazonian tiger-stripe butterflies [the genus Melinaea], many of whose species are only a few hundred thousand years old...

Poison + water = hydrogen. New microbial genome shows how

...icrobe. Organisms that make spores have attracted great interest recently because this is a process found in the bacterium that causes anthrax. Sporulation allows anthrax to be used as a bioweopon because the spores are resistant to heat, radiation, and other treatments. By comparing this genome to th...

Contagious obesity? Identifying the human adenoviruses that may make us fat

... the other three groups, but the difference wasn't great enough to be significant by scientific standards. The authors concluded that Ad-37 increases obesity in chickens, but Ad-2 and Ad-31 do not. "Ad-37 is the third human adenovirus to increase adiposity in animals, but not all adenoviruses produce obes...

Parents need to be educated about HPV vaccinations for daughters

...death due to cancer, but is also responsible for a great deal of suffering. Tragically, its regions of highest incidence are those in which preventative screening cannot be provided due to lack of resources, and those least well equipped to treat the condition for the same reason. "In more affluent well...

Portable cocaine sensor developed at UC Santa Barbara

...n, but my students and post-doctoral fellows did a great job of mentoring and they all got a lot out of it, both the mentors and the mentorees." First author Brian Baker, a post-doctoral fellow, was one of these mentors. Elaine Doctor, a senior at Channel Island High School in Oxnard, Calif., and McCall W...

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