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Tag: "thought" at biology news

Neural bottleneck found that thwarts multi-tasking

...l phone simultaneously?" Researchers have long thought that a central "bottleneck" exists in the brain that prevents us from doing two things at once. Dux and Marois are the first to identify the regions of the brain responsible for this bottleneck, by examining patterns of neural activity over time. The...

Bumblebee house warming -- it takes a village

... heat," he said. "Task switching was previously thought to be common among bumblebee workers," said O'Donnell. "But this study indicates that there is strong specialization in labor among individuals, and body size seems to play a role in what jobs they perform. In addition, their ability to thermoregul...

Do you hear what i see?

...used to call the ‘auditory cortex?should really be thought of as much more complex in terms of its response properties," says Robert Zatorre, PhD, head of the auditory cognitive neuroscience laboratory at McGill University. "The textbook-standard view of sensory systems as isolated from one another is no lon...

Pregnancy hormone key to repairing nerve cell damage

...ghest rates of the disease in the world. "It is thought that during pregnancy, women's immune systems no longer destroyed the myelin," said Weiss, director of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and senior author of the study. "However, no previous study has tested whether pregnancy actually results in the prod...

New protein implicated in autism

...al, communicative, and behavioral functions. It is thought that genetic make-up predisposes an individual to autism, and several genes have been associated with the development of autism. Although a region of human chromosome 7 has been identified to be associated with susceptibility to autism, none of the g...

MIT biologists solve vitamin puzzle

...rder to make the DMB," said Walker. "We originally thought that BluB might be just one of several enzymes involved in DMB synthesis." Therefore, it came as a surprise when Taga isolated the BluB protein and showed that it could make DMB all by itself. Nicholas Larsen, lead co-author and a former colleg...

Microfluidic chip helps solve cellular mating puzzle

...arge of the courtship process, while the other was thought to be moonlighting away from its main job in anoth...They were surprised to find that this second MAPK, thought to be relatively unimportant, actually helped the yeast cells do a better job of finding a mate thro...

Moonlighting enzyme linked to neurodegenerative disease

...wo or more different functions. These proteins are thought to have evolved because they can provide cells with significant advantages, namely, the ability to increase the spectrum of metabolic activities without increasing the number of protein-coding genes, and the ability to coordinate different metabolic ...

Birds found to plan for the future

... diets. It suggests they have advanced and complex thought processes as they have a sophisticated concept of past, present and future and factor this into their planning.? Previous research by Clayton’s team has shown that scrub-jays have a concept of the past. They remember what they have cached where and...

Meat and two neutrons -- the key to a longer life

... to human life. Food enhanced with isotopes is thought to produce bodily constituents and DNA more resistant to detrimental processes, like free radical attack. The isotopes replace atoms in susceptible bonds making these bonds stronger. 'Because these bonds are so much more stable, it should be possibl...

Organic is healthier: Kiwis prove that green is good

... insects, and higher antioxidant activity which is thought to be a natural by-product of stress. However, some people are still unsure about the potential benefits of antioxidants and other compounds elevated in organic farm produce. Carl Winter, director of the FoodSafe Program at UC Davies, asks whethe...

Liposuctioned fat stem cells to repair bodies

...yos. Adult stem cells, such as those from fat, are thought to have more limited potential. Collas insists that the transformation is possible. The hurdle lies not with the genes but with a cell’s epigenetic status, the subtle chemical modifications of DNA and its surrounding histone proteins. Epigenetic ...

Short chromosomes put cancer cells in forced rest

... "We were confused as to what was going on; we thought for sure that blocking the cells?ability to commit suicide would lead to the cancer’s returning," says Greider. A closer look showed microtumors in the mice’s lymph nodes that had begun the road to cancer, but stopped, falling instead into a state of...

'Terror bird' arrived in North America before land bridge, study finds

...ical and physical properties. "It was previously thought that Titanis immigrated to Texas across the Panamanian land bridge that formed about 3 million years ago connecting North and South America," said MacFadden, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at UF. "But th...

Common mechanisms for viral DNA replication

...DNA in similar ways. In both cases, DNA binding is thought to initiate assembly of a complex of the full-length proteins on DNA. Interestingly, SV40 T-ag DNA-binding domains do not interact with one another when bound to DNA. In addition to describing the molecular details of the DNA–protein interactions and...

Chemicals in brown algae may protect against skin cancer

... (UVB) radiation. UVB radiation in sunlight is thought responsible for 90 percent of the estimated 1.3 million cases of non-melanoma skin cancer diagnosed in the United States annually. Researchers applied the BAPs to the skin of hairless mice and fed it to the animals in their diet. In both cases, t...

Drug treatment improves learning in mice with Down syndrome symptoms, Stanford/Packard study shows

... that allows efficient learning. In contrast, it’s thought that Down syndrome patients have too much GABA-related inhibition, making it difficult to process information. "In general, learning involves neuronal excitation in certain parts of the brain," said Garner. "For example, caffeine, which is a stimu...

Coated nanoparticles solve sticky drug-delivery problem

...ng who was lead author of the journal article. "We thought that if we could coat a drug-delivery nanoparticle with a chemical that had these characteristics, it might not get stuck in the mucus barrier." To make their nanoparticles behave like viruses, the researchers coated them with polyethylene glycol...

Dinosaur extinction didn't cause the rise of present-day mammals, claim researchers

... years ago, and survived the meteor impact that is thought to have killed the dinosaurs. However, throughout the Cretaceous epoch, when dinosaurs walked the earth, these mammal species were relatively few in number, and were prevented from diversifying and evolving in ecosystems dominated by dinosaurs. T...

CSIRO imagery shows Outer Great Barrier Reef at risk from river plumes

...February 9 to 13 this year, challenge conventional thought that sediment travelling from our river systems in... travelling to parts of the reef scientists hadn't thought to look before." The images were taken from NASA's MODIS satellite by GeoScience Australia's Alic...

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