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Tag: "modern" at biology news

Scientists discover stem cell origin of neck and shoulders

... animals. They found that it appears to survive in modern vertebrates as the scapular spine. Dr Koentges commented, "Now that we have identified these key players in forming the neck and the shoulders we can start looking for the genes that are on in these stem cells and which are ultimately responsible fo...

Space matters: Estimating species diversity in the fossil record

...raphic sampling influences diversity counts in the modern landscape, the species-area effect strongly influences counts in the fossil record. Taking this into account will alter historical estimates of species distributions and extinction. Barnosky et al. used mapping and imaging systems that generate dire...

Investigating 'brain shrinkage' in alcoholics

...m autopsies on alcoholic subjects. Scientists used modern molecular techniques to study the control mechanisms (genes) and building blocks (proteins) of the main component of white matter ?the myelin. They found that the expression of genes that control the manufacture of structural proteins of the myelin w...

Analysis of flower genes reveals the fate of an ancient gene duplication

...over a hundred million years ago in an ancestor of modern plants. The work is reported in Current Biology by a team led by Brendan Davies of the University of Leeds, England. Gene duplication--a relatively uncommon event in which a single copy of a gene is transformed into two separate copies--is thought t...

MSU researchers receive $4 million grant to uncover gene functions

...nts and visiting researchers to become educated in modern genomic and bioinformatic techniques that will be widely applicable in the future." This functional genomics research is a collaborative effort spanning several departments in the College of Natural Science, including the departments of Biochemistry...

Beauty queens urge girls not to sacrifice their bones

... appealed to girls and young women to realize that modern ideas of "beauty" can damage their bones and lead to osteoporosis later in life. The women, from Australia, Austria, Panama, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela, were speaking at "IOF Beauties and the Bones", an event organized by International Osteoporo...

'Sinkers' provide missing piece in deep-sea puzzle

One of the biggest questions in modern oceanography is how animals in the deep sea get enough to eat. Marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently published a paper that helps answer this question, at least for animals that live on the deep seafloor o...

Past droughts geographically widespread in the West, according to tree-ring data

...ablished in 1937 by A. E. Douglass, the founder of modern tree-ring science. ...

Study: Predatory dinosaurs had bird-like pulmonary system

What could the fierce dinosaur T. rex and a modern songbird such as the sparrow possibly have in comm...They compared the dinosaur skeletons with those of modern birds to draw comparisons of how the soft tissues in the dinosaurs may have been structured. Birds ...

Virginia Tech, Nanjing Institute researchers discover half-billion year-old fossils

...i, lichen, or algae do today." The resemblance to modern fungi, lichen, or algae may stop at the seemingly similar life position on ocean floor. "In fact, the morphology of the new fossils is unlike any living macroscopic life," Xiao said, "and at this time it is still uncertain how the Ediacara fossils fr...

Neanderthal teeth grew no faster than comparable modern humans'

...e had an accelerated childhood compared to that of modern humans but that seems flawed, based on a new asses...mparable to that of three different populations of modern humans. And since the rate of tooth growth has become a more-accepted tool for estimating the leng...

Ships bring alien jellyfish invaders to our shores

... compare physical characteristics can benefit from modern techniques such as DNA analysis," he says. ...

The roots of civilization trace back to ... roots

...ts abundance of fruit and leaves, the mainstays of modern chimpanzee diets. Laden and Wrangham believe that savannah-dwellers may have adopted game as their primary food in place of fruit. But for a fallback food, they may well have taken to eating roots and tubers, which are much more abundant on savannahs...

“Hitchhiking?Viruses as Cancer Drug Delivery System

...ts abundance of fruit and leaves, the mainstays of modern chimpanzee diets. Laden and Wrangham believe that savannah-dwellers may have adopted game as their primary food in place of fruit. But for a fallback food, they may well have taken to eating roots and tubers, which are much more abundant on savannahs...

New technique could alter field of mouse genetics

... ago. The P element has since become a backbone of modern fruit fly genetics. Researchers in Xu's group first tried to adapt the P element for use in mice and to improve the efficiency of the Sleeping Beauty transposon system. When those efforts failed, they chose piggyBac because its enzyme looked and act...

Drugs from the deep blue

...products such as plants or bacteria. Molinski says modern developments in analytical chemistry, including highly sensitive instrumentation, sophisticated screening capabilities and discoveries from mapping the human genome, have created a renaissance of interest in these sources of potential medicines. Mol...

DNA traces evolution of extinct sabertooths and the American cheetah-like cat

... specimen from the state of Wyoming) with DNA from modern felid (cat-family) and carnivore species. The anal...hat the sabertooth cats were a sister group to the modern cats--that is, they diverged early on from the ancestors of modern cats and are not closely related ...

North & South American researchers find architectural abnormalities in T. cruzi ribosome

...ns, Frank sees the parasite as a primitive link to modern eukaryotes and its ribosome as a source of potential insights into the evolution of more complex organisms. "Ribosomes perform the translation of genetic information into protein in all organisms," Frank said. "The principle is always the same in pl...

Human brain is still evolving

...se two genes are still evolving under selection in modern human populations. "In the earlier studies, we loo... 5,800 years ago ?both well after the emergence of modern humans about 200,000 years ago. "In the case of Microcephalin, the origin of the new variant coincid...

Study shows big game hunters, not climate change, killed off sloths

...he prehistoric ground sloths grew to the size of a modern elephant and fed on bushes and the leaves of lower branches of trees, today's only surviving descendants are several small tree sloths whose range extends from southern Mexico to southern Brazil, he said. Such an experiment might be similar to the o...

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