Tag: "unfamiliar" at biology news

Ecological destruction fuels emerging diseases

..., we're just reacting out of ignorance whenever an unfamiliar disease catches us off guard and we call that management," says Dr. Brooks. "We're always behind the curve, because we don't know where these things are coming from." In fact, while parasites like malaria are well known, we may have identified only ...

Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

...to focus their keen senses of smell and hearing on unfamiliar noises and odors in the air. But O'Connell-Rodwell...mine if they can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar calls that are played back as seismic signals," O'Connell-Rodwell explains. To record the elephants...

Census of Marine Life explorers surprised by diversity, density of Arctic creatures

...e. "Several creatures brought aboard the Healy are unfamiliar to expedition experts and may well prove new to sc...long. In addition to collecting a large number of unfamiliar specimens, Census scientists use DNA extractions to discern previously unknown differences between s...

Bumblebees copy one another when contending with unfamiliar flowers

...rs from which they collect nectar. When faced with unfamiliar plants, foraging bees do not choose flowers entire...adjust their behavior when dealing with flowers of unfamiliar plant species. The observations are reported in the June 21 issue of Current Biology in a new paper...

Monkeys understand numbers across senses

...s monkeys the sound of natural "coo" calls made by unfamiliar monkeys, either with two or three animals making the calls. At the same time they gave the monkeys a choice to look at video images of either two or three monkeys. The researchers found that the monkeys overwhelmingly chose to look at video images th...

Worms know bad food when they smell it

...w and the bad bacteria they know to two completely unfamiliar bacteria that they've never seen before," Bargmann explained. "Those experiments let us figure out that they learn both, actually ?they learn that the good bacteria are safe and they learn that the bad bacteria are bad." The worms' avoidance of foo...

Mice lacking social memory molecule take bullying in stride

...d" animals vigorously avoided former aggressors or unfamiliar mice. BDNF and an indicator of gene expression increased markedly in their social memory circuit. Yet, the social avoidance behavior was reversible by giving the animals antidepressants. Next, borrowing a page from gene therapy, the researchers inj...

Memory loss affects more of the brain than previously thought

...ll names of familiar faces and to learn and recall unfamiliar face-name associations. All patients showed brain activation in several brain regions during the task, but, compared with the controls, the patients with MCI showed a lower level of activation in the prefrontal cortex (during formation and retrieval)...

Studies suggest new brain protein may help in treating schizophrenia, insomnia and anxiety

...hases of sleep and lessens anxiety in stressful or unfamiliar situations. Now, at ICN 2006, Dr. Reinscheid's group reports how NPS also can reduce the biochemical and behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia in an established animal model for this mental illness that affects some 2 million Americans. Animals pre...

MIT 'seeing machine' offers hope to blind

...he Internet, view the face of a friend, "previsit" unfamiliar buildings and more. Recently the machine received...nvironment, raising the potential for "previewing" unfamiliar buildings a person wants to visit. Goldring explained that visually challenged people are often te...

Light guides flight of migratory birds

...ive to the home loft when they were released at an unfamiliar site. The birds were housed in a loft with a "pinwheel" arrangement of deflector panels attached to the four screened walls of the loft to rotate direction of the wind. Pigeons housed in the so-called "deflector lofts" showed the predicted (clockwise...

Zebra finch males prefer females with exaggerated maternal traits

...to a preference for this familiar stimulus over an unfamiliar one, it has generally been assumed that imprinting itself could not give rise to preferences for novel, exaggerated traits. In their new work, the researchers tested the sexual preferences of zebra finch males that were raised by white parents diffe...

Where we change our mind

Whether finding your way through an unfamiliar neighborhood to a friend's house or deciding on a political candidate, your brain is adept at adapting. It can make decisions based on incomplete information and update those decisions based on new information. The nature of such sophisticated decis...

Blue eyes -- A clue to paternity

... The pictures were close-ups of young adult faces, unfamiliar to the participants. The eye color of each model was manipulated, so that for each model's face two versions were shown, one with the natural eye color (blue/brown) and another with the other color (brown/blue). The participants' own eye color was ...

Patients can report statins' adverse effects on new web site

...ts of statins and other cholesterol drugs, but are unfamiliar with the adverse experiences with these drugs that many people have reported ?such as effects on muscle pain or weakness, memory and thinking, or mood," said Beatrice A. Golomb, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine, and head of the UCSD Stati...

Newly discovered behavior in cancer cells signals dangerous metastasis

...o aggressively invade and then peacefully adapt in unfamiliar territory, the scientists said. "The prevailing notion has been that the more mesenchymal the cancer cells, the more mobile and metastatic they would be," Garcia-Blanco said. "In reality, aggressive cancer cells are not homogenous, but are extremely...

Does a peptide affect the heart's response to social isolation?

...sor (a five minute social interaction test with an unfamiliar animal). Results The researchers found that: the animals exposed to isolation had an increase in heart rate and a reduction in heart rate variability. The administration of oxytocin significantly improved both heart rate and heart ...

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

...s of PTZ and investigated the animals?responses to unfamiliar objects and a T-shaped maze. In the first example, he allowed the animals to explore two similarly sized, yet obviously different, objects for 15 minutes. Twenty-four hours later he exposed the same animals to one of the previously seen objects and a...

Fish can determine their social rank by observation alone, study finds

...relationships serve as the basis for understanding unfamiliar ones. "Transitive inference is essential to logical reasoning," Fernald explained. "It's something that kids generally figure out by age 4 or 5--Mary is taller than Fred, Fred is taller than Pete, therefore Mary is taller than Pete. It's been dem...

Bats prey on nocturnally migrating songbirds

...ally migrating songbirds, while venturing into the unfamiliar night sky for accomplishing their long, challenging trans-continental migrations, could at least release anti-predator vigilance thanks to the concealment of darkness. A new study by Spanish and Swiss scientists ?published this week in PLoS ONE ?show...

1 2