trail 2 1

Tag: "trail" at biology news

Ants show us how to make super-highways

...some ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the trail leading back to the nest, making a flatter surface...The raid always remains connected to the nest by a trail of forager traffic, along which prey-laden foragers run back to run back to the nest. This trail can...

New research shows sharks use their noses and bodies to locate smells

... boat. A moving animal, similarly, leaves behind a trail of turbulent eddies flavored by its body odor," explained Atema. In an eight meter flume in the lab, Atema and Jayne Gardiner, a recently graduated Boston University Marine Program (BUMP) Masters student and study co-author, created two parallel, tu...

Chemical maps hint at drug's effects on schizophrenia

...n, but they also leave behind in the bloodstream a trail of hundreds of chemicals that may be used in the future to direct better treatment for schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions, say Duke University Medical Center researchers. The study is among the first to use metabolomics -- the measuremen...

Large size crucial for Amazon forest reserves

...ousands of square kilometers every year, leaving a trail of small forest fragments isolated by cleared land. Many species that occur in intact forest prior to destruction will not be present in a small fragment, but would they be found in an equally small plot surrounded by untouched forest? The answer to ...

Gene hunters close in on Lou Gehrig’s disease

...ynor cautioned that the 34 SNPs are not guaranteed trail markers for ALS genes. “If you roll dice 555,352 times, you are bound to get lucky by chance alone on some of those throws,?he says. “The next step is to go back and figure out which of these ‘hits?are real and which are false.? Thousands of other...

How fish conquered the ocean

...ring it. Yet it was this paradox that provided the trail of clues for us to follow". "The physiological problems of reverting from a fresh water environment to the saline seawater is demanding for the water balance of fishes", says professor Hans Jørgen Fyhn, a colleague of Dr. Finn, and adds, "This is ...

How ants find their way

...'s first trip to a food site it follows a chemical trail left by earlier ants. This is a slow way of travelling as the ant needs to walk with its antennae to the ground. However, this initial route forms the basis of an efficient learning strategy. On the first trip ants store images of the route as they t...

History-hunting geneticists can still follow familiar trail

...f each population, essentially providing a genetic trail for modern researchers to follow. Recently some scientists have raised doubts about this classic genetic system to study ancient migrations of people and to estimate the populations of people or animals as they existed tens of thousands of years ago...

Contrary to common wisdom, scientist discovers some mammals can smell objects under water

...demonstrated that the moles could follow the scent trail by sniffing alone (without the tactile star). F... tested on earthworm scent trails and followed the trail to its reward with accuracies ranging from 75 percent to 100 percent accuracy. Two moles were tested...

Like a snail through the intestinal canal

... the forward movement of a snail. A snail leaves a trail of slime behind it on the ground. This slimy material works simultaneously as a lubricant for gliding on and as a glue which the slug can grip hold of. An intestinal robot should also have a similar layer to use. To achieve this, an adhesive layer i...

Large-scale genomics project will hunt genes behind common childhood diseases

...to a child's genetic profile. "We are following a trail blazed by the Human Genome and HapMap Projects, but tailoring our approach to children," said Philip R. Johnson, M.D., chief scientific officer at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "As one of the world's largest and most comprehensive pediatri...

Movie spies on malaria parasite's sneaky behavior

...ers with weak immune systems. After leaving this trail of cellular death and destruction in its wake, the parasite is finally taken up again from the blood when another mosquito bites. Then it reproduces and waits for the mosquito to bite again to infect another person. Researchers have long assumed t...

Gene therapy injected into the brains' of mice with Huntington's disease

...his fall and a double-blinded, controlled Phase II trail in PD patients is planned for later this year. ...

Finding a virus is not all bad news

...ations in the virus accumulate, leaving a valuable trail of information about the host animal's relationships to each other. Because of the way the virus is transmitted, closely related cougars will have closely related viruses. It is for that reason we can use the viruses to track the cats and learn about...

Next good dinosaur news likely to come from small packages

...n the food web from the tropics to the arctic. The trail is laid by stubbornly durable molecules. She uses mass spectrometry, an analytical technique that determines what molecules are present. Molecules may be tiny, but they can be tough, Ostrom said. The plant that a mastodon munched some 10,000 years a...

DNA from feathers tells tale of eagle fidelity

A trail of feathers led a team of Purdue University scientists to confirm that eagles from central Asia are quite possibly the most faithful of birds. By performing DNA analysis on the feathers left behind at nesting sites, the researchers were able to iden...

While on trail of dioxin, scientists pinpoint cancer target of green tea

...world leader on dioxin, and it was by tracking the trail of dioxin's harmful effects on the body that his group made the green tea findings. His group has shown how dioxin and other substances like cigarette smoke manipulate a major cancer-causing molecule, the aryl hydrocarbon (AH) receptor, which frequen...

Falling ants glide back to trunk to avoid dangers of forest floor

...oor, he added, they're unlikely to find a chemical trail back to the nest, and most likely will be eaten by predators. Yanoviak said that perhaps more important from the perspective of survival, the forests are flooded as much as half the year, so an ant falling into the water will most likely end up as f...

Dinosaur DNA? New Patent Covers Degraded DNA recovery

...ng together strands of detached DNA into a genetic trail that could solve a crime or exonerate the falsely accused," says Dr. Ensley. This patent is part of a scientific progression that began in 1989 when DNA was recovered from 12 samples of ancient organic remains, ranging in age from 4 to 13,000 years....

1