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UCLA scientists strengthen case for life more than 3.8 billion years ago

... the crustal rocks and sediments." An unanswered question is how life originally could have arisen from lifeless molecules and evolved into the already sophisticated isotope fractioning life forms recorded in the Akilia rocks. ...

Scientists aim to thwart use of flu as bioweapon

...er flu will be weaponized; it's crucial to ask the question and to be prepared." The focus of Wu's center, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. When the flu virus infects the body, for instance, a cascade of complex events occur to fight the virus ...

The structure of a virus infecting bacteria resembles a human virus

... Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The virus in question is a bacteriophage, which means that instead of eukaryotic cells it infects bacteria. To the researchers' surprise, its structure turned out to be very similar to human viruses, such as rotavirus. Rotaviruses are the most common cause of severe diarr...

How HIV 'exhausts' killer T cells

...utioned against over-optimism. "Obviously, the big question is whether you could manipulate this pathway in HI...ay have already been developed for cancer, so that question should be able to be addressed in the very near future. "However, one has to proceed with real...

A new tool against brain disease

...utioned against over-optimism. "Obviously, the big question is whether you could manipulate this pathway in HI...ay have already been developed for cancer, so that question should be able to be addressed in the very near future. "However, one has to proceed with real...

The vicious cycle of rainforest destruction

... and savanna are able to thrive. It's not a simple question of rainfall: areas in Africa with 1800mm of rainfall a year are rainforest; in South America, areas with the same rainfall are savanna. Other issues such as soils, fertility and drainage must play a part, the researchers believe. They will make meas...

Breast stem cells have features similar to 'basal' tumors

... of normal breast cells including the stem cell. A question of particular interest is whether the breast stem cell expresses receptors for oestrogen and progesterone and the marker 'Her2', since these help define the subtypes of breast cancer; and also guide currentapproaches to therapy. The WEHI team, tog...

Gene expression becomes heterogeneous with age in humans and rats

... In the new work, researchers put to the test the question of whether gene-expression heterogeneity increases with age. Using a wide range of expression data from both humans and rats, the researchers showed that levels of gene expression become more variable with age. Furthermore, they found that the tenden...

Research highlights how bacteria produce energy

... intended in the oil reservoir. The next important question is whether our approach will recover entrapped oil economically. We saw an increase in oil production after our test, but we need to measure oil production more precisely to be certain," says McInerney. ...

Tiny airborne particles are a major cause of climate change

...ions in the long run. Also controversial is the question of how such tiny localized particles affect weather systems thousands of kilometers away from their sources. There is no doubt that aerosols do play a role, but the skeptics believe it is negligible compared to meteorological key players such as temp...

When the going gets tough, slime molds start synthesizing

...ity, groups come together to address a fundamental question in biology. In the process, we collectively discov...sed to treat disease today. "The major fundamental question in our case is why do organisms make chemicals, what role do these molecules play in nature and how ...

Tropical forest CO2 emissions tied to nutrient increases

...nal Science Foundation funded the study. "One big question is how tropical rain forests are responding to climate change," said Cleveland, an INSTAAR research associate who led the study. "What we have demonstrated is that even small changes in nutrients could have a similarly profound impact on the release ...

Heal thyself: Systems biology model reveals how cells avoid becoming cancerous

...If true, the model may demystify the long-standing question of why DNA damage influences the expression of hundreds of genes not involved in the actual repair process. "What we quickly realized is that we had uncovered not just a model of DNA repair, but a blueprint of how the initial event of DNA damage is...

'Sticky' mice lead to discovery of new cause of neurodegenerative disease

...ll allows it to produce offspring. "So, a major question to be explored in human populations is whether the subtle loss of translational fidelity from such a defect could lead to various human diseases ?particularly those that involve the accumulation of misfolded proteins," she said. Ackerman and her...

Primates take weather into account when searching for fruits

...s in the June 20th issue of Current Biology. The question of why primates, and especially humans, have more strongly developed cognitive skills than other mammals has a long history in science. The most widely accepted notion has been that primates' superior cognitive abilities have evolved in the social re...

Fatty spheres loaded with siRNA shrink ovarian cancer tumors in preclinical trial

...s," Sood says. "It works well in the lab, but the question has been how to get it into tumors." Short pieces of RNA don't make it to a tumor without being injected directly, and injection methods used in the lab are not practical for clinical use. The research team took siRNA that targets a protein that ...

Molecular DNA switch found to be the same for all life

... of these different mechanisms, it also calls into question some cherished models in the field." The two studies by Nogales, Berger, Botchan and their colleagues also show how when nature finds a mechanism that works well, such a mechanism is conserved through evolution. Said Nogales, "The specializati...

Light guides flight of migratory birds

...st 30 years have failed to resolve the fundamental question of how migratory birds integrate multiple sources of directional information into a coherent navigational system. Last autumn, Rachel Muheim, a postdoctoral associate in biology professor John Phillips' lab at Virginia Tech, captured Savannah sparr...

Computational analysis shows that plant hormones often go it alone

...e plant biologists closer to answering the age-old question of how plants grow, the Salk researchers predict. "Microarrays are very useful for those of us studying physiology and development. They can reveal new interactions, or lack thereof, between biological processes and identify candidates for direct tar...

Agriculture and tropical conservation: rethinking old ideas

...forests in the Atlantic coast rainforest, the real question is not how much forest is left, but what's between those patches that are left, and will it support the necessary migrations from patch to patch as local extinctions occur, which they inevitably do?" If forest patches are separated by barren pastur...

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