Chickadees can help humans get their bearings
...ild-caught chickadees differed from all previously tested animals by ignoring angular features of their environment and following landmarks instead. Although able to learn geometry when guiding themselves to food in lab experiments, the birds consistently ignored the concept when a prominent landmark, in th...To translate touch, the brain can quickly rearrange its sense of the body
...longer as they felt their arm move. The team then tested how these bodily illusions rearranged the sense of touch. They touched subjects with two metal rods on the left index finger, and asked them to judge whether the distance between the rods was greater or smaller than the distance between two additiona...Scalpel-free surgery could reduce risk of HIV and hepatitis exposure for health care workers
...t The Johns Hopkins Hospital occur in patients who tested positive for a bloodborne germ. "While these rate... pathogen, and almost half (47 percent) of all men tested positive for at least one infection. HIV accounted for 26 percent of infections, hepatitis B for 4 p......ons from computer modeling of the bee brain can be tested via human brain imagining studies. For example, Sejnowski said that by using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood flow to reveal which regions of the brain are active, researchers in his laboratory have discovered that our brai...How monarch butterflies are wired for navigation
...iolet polarized light to navigate, the researchers tested the insects in a "flight simulator," in which they could control the light polarization and thus influence the butterflies' direction of flight. The researchers found that when they placed a UV-interference filter over the polarized light source, the...Researchers develop new method for facile identification of proteins in bacterial cells
...l components," he said. Halden and his colleagues tested their technique using Sphingomonas wittichii strain RW1, the only bacterium known to consume the backbone of toxic polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans as a food source. The researchers already knew that feeding dioxins to RW1 would ca...Environmental chemical cocktail may sabotage sperm
...had an even stronger effect. In addition, when she tested one chemical, genistein (found in soya and legumes...ounds than mouse sperm." Prof Fraser and her team tested combinations of three chemicals: genistein, 8-prenylnaringenin which is found in hops, and nonylphen...Novel plague virulence factor identified
...eria is very similar to that of mammals." Aballay tested Y. pestis in his model because another research team recently reported that the bacterium killed C. elegans by creating a "biofilm" over the worm's pharynx, causing it to die of starvation. Since mammals infected with Y. pestis do not die in this man...Anthrax inhibitors identified by Burnham team
...afe for use in humans. Three lead compounds where tested in mice infected with anthrax spores, in combinati...l rate for mice treated with each of the compounds tested in the combination therapy was two-fold over mice treated with Ciprofloxacin alone. "This represent...New Look at DNA Hints at Origin of UV Damage
...eria is very similar to that of mammals." Aballay tested Y. pestis in his model because another research team recently reported that the bacterium killed C. elegans by creating a "biofilm" over the worm's pharynx, causing it to die of starvation. Since mammals infected with Y. pestis do not die in this man...Harmless virus may hold key to more effective HIV drug discovery
...ses of anti-viral drugs before these compounds are tested in the clinic, which is currently an expensive and...sed in the study. New anti-HIV compounds are being tested by Dr. W. Ed Robinson, Jr. in the Department of Pathology. Weiss and Olszewski have made their met...Human embryonic stem cells have the potential to develop into eggs and sperm in the laboratory
...s called embryoid bodies. The embryoid bodies were tested to see which genes were active, or 'expressed', in them and it was found that within two weeks a very tiny proportion of cells in the embryoid bodies began to express some of the genes that are found in human primordial germ cells. Some cells also ex...Most common lung cancers may begin in newly discovered cells
...as K-ras, which is found in about one-third of all tested non-small cell lung cancers in people. A specially designed virus can activate the mutation in only a few cells. The mouse is known as a conditional mutant strain. In this case, the mouse inhales a small amount of virus that activates the K-ras oncog...Promiscuous Catalytic Activity Possessed by Novel Enzyme Structure
...ey have had a prenyl group added. The researchers tested whether their new enzyme could modify a wide range of small aromatic molecules, ranging from plant flavonoids ?for instance, compounds found in hops that give beer its bitter taste or in other plants act as sunscreens, pigments, or antibiotics ?to ol...Space matters: Estimating species diversity in the fossil record
...00 occurrences of species in all. The authors then tested the fossil data for species-area effects by plotting fossil species richness against different geographic areas. After correcting for possible biases in sample size that might influence the number of species, Barnosky et al. found a strong species-ar...Stem cell training program to make its Stanford debut
...ey have had a prenyl group added. The researchers tested whether their new enzyme could modify a wide range of small aromatic molecules, ranging from plant flavonoids ?for instance, compounds found in hops that give beer its bitter taste or in other plants act as sunscreens, pigments, or antibiotics ?to ol...Gambling monkeys give insight into neural machinery of risk
...ey're identical," said Platt. The researchers also tested whether the monkeys were simply responding to the novelty of the risky target. "We wondered whether the monkeys preferred the risky target because the experiment was dull and boring, and they wanted the variability," said Platt. "But when we made t...Scientists show that tick-borne flaviviruses use a novel mechanism to evade host defenses
...or recovery from these infections that it is being tested in clinical trials to treat infection with various flaviviruses. But the treatment appears to fail in about half of cases. Dengue virus, West Nile virus and yellow fever virus have a protein called NS4B that prevents interferon from functioning prop...Compound from Chinese medicine shows promise in head and neck cancer
... as a male contraceptive. More recently, it's been tested as a cancer treatment. Wang found the negative isomer of gossypol binds at a site to block the active Bcl-xL protein. A prior study conducted by researchers in the U-M Head and Neck Oncology Program showed Bcl-xL protein is often highly expressed in ...Secrets to antibody's success against West Nile Virus surprise scientists
...dies required before the West Nile antibody can be tested in humans. Meanwhile, researchers at Washington Un...e virus, but notes that when he and his colleagues tested the ability of several antibodies to prevent West Nile from reproducing inside macrophages, they fou...