Tag: "mysterious" at biology news

Modeling the restless brain

...ain activity sheds new light on how and when these mysterious fluctuations occur and offers insights into what t... of research in cognitive neuroscience, with their mysterious origin prompting one prominent researcher to label them the "brain's dark energy," Sporns said. As y...

NASA-funded robotic sub finds bottom of world's deepest sinkhole

...ion plunged repeatedly into the depths of Mexico’s mysterious El Zacatón sinkhole in late May, finding its previously undiscovered bottom 318 meters below the surface and generating a sonar map of its inner dimensions. The vehicle employed autonomous navigation and mapping systems developed by Carnegie Mellon U...

Female-led infanticide in wild chimpanzees

... in Uganda have discovered repeated instances of a mysterious and poorly understood behavior: female-led infanticide. The findings, reported by Simon Townsend, Katie Slocombe and colleagues of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and the Budongo Forest Project, Uganda, appear in the May 15th issue of the jo...

MIT model helps researchers 'see' brain development

...onkeys, and even cats--have brains with a somewhat mysterious feature: The outermost layer has a folded surface. Understanding the functional significance of these folds is one of the big open questions in neuroscience. Now a team led by MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School researche...

Tracking sperm whales and jumbo squid

...eir lifestyle—including feeding and hunting—are as mysterious today as they were when Melville made the followin...t the surface of the sea must still infer what the mysterious squid and the leviathan are doing at great depths, the use of modern electronic tagging methods will...

Is there a pilot in the insect?

...bot microhelicopter that can reproduce much of the mysterious natural insect behavior. Their work is published online in Current Biology, February 8, 2007. How does a tiny creature like a fly or a bee, with a brain the size of a pinhead, manage to make such a magnificent job of controlling its flight, and avoi...

Bats prey on nocturnally migrating songbirds

... the ground in total darkness? To elucidate the mysterious habits of giant noctule bats, an ambitious investigation led by young scientist Ana Popa-Lisseanu, under Prof. Ibañez' supervision, was launched by Spanish research teams based in Sevilla (Doñana Biological Station) and Granada (Zaidín Experimental S...

Penn study on lung-infecting bacterial enzyme suggests new approach to cystic fibrosis treatment

...that SMase plays a critical role in the heretofore mysterious pathogenesis of lung injury in CF patients. They also present a new paradigm for treating CF. Specific inhibitors against the enzyme, in conjunction with current antibiotic treatments and supportive measures, might be a viable near-term approach to i...

Researchers discover genetic cause for word-finding disease

...y researchers have discovered a genetic cause of a mysterious neurological disease in which people have trouble recalling and using words. The illness, Primary Progressive Aphasia, differs from Alzheimer's Disease in which a person's memory becomes impaired. In PPA, a little known form of dementia, people lose...

Prehistoric mystery organism verified as giant fungus

... have produced new evidence to finally resolve the mysterious identity of what they regard as one of the weirdest organisms that ever lived. Their chemical analysis indicates that the organism was a fungus, the scientists report in the May issue of the journal of Geology, published by the Geological Society of...

Who gives stem cells their marching orders?

...r? Understanding the choreography involved in this mysterious cellular signaling dance is crucial to our ability to coax stem cells to grow into specific tissues outside the body. And it is also important if we are to understand and perhaps correct what goes wrong when the chemical signaling system goes awry an...

Steep oxygen decline halted first land colonization by Earth's sea creatures

...ertebrates show up again, this time for good. The mysterious lull in vertebrate colonization of land is known as Romer's Gap, named for the Yale University paleontologist, Alfred Romer, who first recognized it. But the term has typically been applied only to pre-dinosaur amphibians, and there has been little u...

Better sludge through metagenomics

...n in the genome will lead to domestication of this mysterious organism, enabling further studies of its habits and lifestyle. "The genome sequence will also enable biologists and engineers to understand why and how these organisms accumulate phosphorus, and it will lead to major advances in optimizing and con...

Trotting with emus to walk with dinosaurs

... What emus revealed, says Breithaupt, is that many mysterious dinosaur tracks became quite easily understood whe... the emu revelations was one that helped resolve a mysterious "crossing over" track pattern seen at Red Gulch. Researchers had found that sometimes a dinosaur's t...

New angiogenesis finding may help fight cancer growth

...ened heart muscle. NK-B also plays a role in a mysterious but common syndrome called preeclampsia, in which soaring blood pressure and low blood oxygen levels harm or even kill pregnant women and their babies. Philip Lowry, at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, has found that NK-B levels spike...

Tyrannosaur survivorship -- tough times for teens

...plication of these findings is that the previously mysterious rarity of sub-adult tyrannosaur specimens is due to their exceptionally low mortality rates," said Currie. Some people have speculated that tyrannosaurs must have rocketed to adult size in a few years or less, leaving only a small fraction of devel...

New roles for growth factors: Enticing nerve cells to muscles

...showed that they were indeed the long sought-after mysterious substance," says Pfaff. Neural stem cells can now be coaxed to develop into motor neurons in a test tube. In that artificial environment, explains Pfaff, "Most external cues that guide immature motor neurons during embryonic development will be missi...

How sperm crack the whip

...could literally open a new window into its largely mysterious inner workings. Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator David E. Clapham and his colleagues published their findings in the February 9, 2006, issue of the journal Nature. Lead author on the paper was Yuriy Kirichok and the other co-author wa...

Researchers now able to look deep into heart to view triggers of a heart's beat

...g into an adult (called parthenogenesis) remains a mysterious process. One mystery has been the origin of the ...used preferentially." Centrosomes remain somewhat mysterious structures, Ferree said, but researchers may be able to learn more about them by purifying accessory...

Insects that produce males from unfertilized eggs reveal a surprising cellular feat

...g into an adult (called parthenogenesis) remains a mysterious process. One mystery has been the origin of the ...used preferentially." Centrosomes remain somewhat mysterious structures, Ferree said, but researchers may be able to learn more about them by purifying accessory...

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