Tag: "longstanding" at biology news

Global survey of lizards reveals greater abundance of animals on islands than on mainland ecosystems

...terparts on the mainland. Besides confirming that longstanding observation, the study signals an alarm for island populations in a rapidly warming world. It suggests that climate change may have devastating consequences for lizards and other animals that inhabit islands because their ecosystems are much more sen...

Imaging pinpoints brain regions that 'see the future'

...esults of this study offer a tentative answer to a longstanding question regarding the evolutionary usefulness of memory," McDermott concludes. "It may just be that the reason we can recollect our past in vivid detail is that this set of processes is important for being able to envision ourselves in future scena...

Protein fragments sequenced in 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex

...tence of such exceedingly ancient protein defies a longstanding assumption. When an animal dies, protein immediately begins to degrade and, in the case of fossils, is slowly replaced by mineral. This substitution process was thought to be complete by one million years. "For centuries it was believed that the p...

Ocean's 'twilight zone' may be a key to understanding climate change

..., including an experimental device that overcame a longstanding problem of how to collect marine snow falling into the twilight zone. ...

Road-crossing in chimpanzees: A risky business

...roads, sometimes necessitated by intersection with longstanding chimpanzee travel routes, presents a new situation that calls for flexibility of responses by chimpanzees to variations in perceived risk. Understanding how chimpanzees cross roads as a group would help shape our hypotheses about the emergence of hom...

Nanotech tools yield DNA transcription breakthrough

...ion. Taken together, the two studies answer the longstanding question of how the machine acquires the energy required to break its interactions with, and leave, the start site. The machine acquires this energy by unwinding DNA and pulling unwound DNA during initial transcription. As DNA is unwound, energy is s...

UCLA researchers unravel a mystery about DNA

...with researchers at Rutgers University have solved longstanding mysteries surrounding DNA transcription, the first step in carrying out instructions contained in our genes. The breakthrough described in an article in the Nov. 17 issue of the journal Science reveals important structural information about the gyrat...

Coral reefs are increasingly vulnerable to angry oceans

...searchers. "Our study offers a solution to this longstanding problem by factoring in the shape of different coral colonies, the strength of the sea-bed to which they attach, and the change in force of the waves as they move across the reef," said Madin. "This enables us to predict the likely changes in composi...

Oldest animal fossils may have been bacteria

...t there," Bailey said. The finding also solved a longstanding puzzle. Proponents of the animal theory had struggled to explain how eggs and embryos could be preserved, as neither fossilizes easily. These bacteria, on the other hand, make better fossil candidates. And by depositing phosphorite, Thiomargarita e...

Stormy days ahead for coral reefs

...ities." "Our study offers a solution to this longstanding problem by factoring in the shape of different coral colonies, the strength of the sea-bed to which they attach and the change in force of the waves as they move across the reef. "This enables us to predict the likely changes in composition of t...

No-mow grass may be coming to your yard soon

...report. Manipulation of plant stature has been a longstanding goal in horticulture, agronomy, and forestry. The ability to precisely control plant size would have broad implications for everything from urban forestry to crop and garden plant development. Beyond perpetually short grass, trees could be made more ...

Production of key Alzheimer's protein monitored for first time in humans

Science is now poised to answer an important and longstanding question about the origins of Alzheimer's disease: Do Alzheimer's patients have high levels of a brain protein because they make too much of it or because they can't clear it from their brains quickly enough? Researchers from the Alzheimer's Diseas...

Paleontologists learn how not to become a fossil

...he journal Science. That study showed, contrary to longstanding expectations, that clams with durable shells were not better represented in the fossil record than those more prone to dissolving. The PNAS co-authors suggest three remedies for dealing with the weaknesses they've documented in the fossil record. Fi...

Molecule by molecule, new assay shows real-time gene activity

...sed protein to a cell's membrane, sidestepping the longstanding difficulty of imaging single proteins zipping about in cell cytoplasm, where diffuse fluorescent signals tend to be overwhelmed by background noise. The gene coding for this combined protein was substituted for the well-studied lacZ gene in the Esch...

Mute swan population helps explain longstanding evolutionary question

... mute swans for more than two decades to explore a longstanding evolutionary question: whether the number of eggs laid by a female bird ?known as "clutch size" ?changes in accordance with natural selection. "Extensive debate in the literature…was first focused on the question: Why does a population's average clu...

Hot-spring bacteria flip a metabolic switch

...e cell at high temperatures, and also helps answer longstanding questions about how hot-spring microbial communities get essential nitrogen compounds. Carnegie's Arthur Grossman, Devaki Bhaya, and Anne-Soisig Steunou, along with colleagues from four partner institutions*, are studying the tiny, single-celled cya...

Ancient humans brought bottle gourds to the Americas from Asia

...es in the Western Hemisphere. The finding solves a longstanding archaeological enigma by explaining how a domesticated variant of a species native to Africa ended up millennia ago in places as far removed as modern-day Florida, Kentucky, Mexico and Peru. The work, by a team of anthropologists and biologists from...

'Smart' nanoprobes light up disease

...molecular targets." Rice's technology solves this longstanding problem by using emissive nanoparticles called quantum dots that give off light in the near-infrared (NIR), a rare portion of the spectrum that has no background component in biomedical imaging. Near-infrared light also passes harmlessly through skin...

Scientists develop nanotech-laser treatment that kills cancer cells without harming healthy tissue

... National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "One of the longstanding problems in medicine is how to cure cancer without harming normal body tissue," says Hongjie Dai, an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford and co-author of the study. "Standard chemotherapy destroys cancer cells and normal cells alike. That's ...

Brain networks change according to cognitive task

...mic and not static. This and other findings answer longstanding debates about how brain networks operate to solve different cognitive tasks. They are presented in the current (June 1) issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Equally important, the researchers discovered that the brain region that performed the inte...

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