Pick in Biological News

Who will pick up the bill?

Ocean acidification, a direct result of increased CO2 emission, is set to change the Earth's marine ecosystems forever and may have a direct impact on our economy, resulting in substantial revenue declines and job losses. Intensive fossil-fuel burning and deforestation over the last two centur...

Bats pick up rustling sounds against highway background noise

Listening for faint rustling noises made by tasty beetles on a quiet day is simple for bats hunting with their exquisitely sensitive hearing. So try imagining what it must be like trying to locate rustling treats just metres from a roaring highway. It would seem to be almost impossible to pick out...

Got carrots? Vegetables may have bone to pick as calcium providers

COLLEGE STATION A specially developed carrot has been produced to help people absorb more calcium. Researchers at Texas A&M AgriLifes Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center studied the calcium intake of humans who ate the carrot and found a net increase in calcium absorption. The research, w...

Scientists find method to pick noncompetitive animals, improve production

A new statistical method of determining genetic traits that influence social interactions among animals may provide for more productive livestock. Scientists from Purdue University, the Netherlands and England designed mathematical equations based on traits to choose animals that are more congen...

Newly Discovered 'Branding' Process Helps Immune System Cells Pick Their Fights

Scientists have uncovered a new method the immune system uses to label foreign invaders as targets to be attacked. Researchers showed that the immune system can brand foreign proteins by chemically modifying their structure, and that these modifications increased the chances that cells known as lym...

New insights into health and environmental effects of carbon nanoparticles

...ses the possibility that flies and other insects that encounter nanomaterial "hot spots," or spills, near manufacturing facilities in the future could pick up and transport nanoparticles on their bodies, transferring the particles to other flies or habitats in the environment. The study on carbon nanopart...

Scientists are learning more about big birds from feathers

...a particular bird. Those tags can be used to determine population, parentage, roosting patterns and sex ratio. "In an afternoon, you can go out and pick up hundreds of feathers," DeWoody said, "As field work goes, it's about as easy as it gets." DeWoody's method is described in a chapter of the "Han...

The sound of light: Innovative technology shatters the barriers of modern light microscopy

...sions. This happens very quickly and creates small shock waves. In effect, the short laser pulse gives rise to an ultrasound wave that the researchers pick up with an ultrasound microphone. The real power of the technique, however, lies in specially developed mathematical formulas used to analyze the r...

Mate selection: How does she know he'll take care of the kids?

...ales could, but do not have to, provide parental care because females will pick up the slack. The Yale researchers focused on those species, like stickleback fish, where females cannot pick up the slack and males who do not provide care risk the survival of their o...

Why do we choose our mates? Ask Charles Darwin, prof says

... Charles Darwin wrote about it 150 years ago: animals don't pick their mates by pure chance it's a process that is deliberate and involves numerous factors. After decades of examining his work, experts agree that h...

Researchers create freestanding nanoparticle films without fillers

...multilayered nanoparticle films" published online in the journal Chemical Communications on May 27, 2009. "Our films are so resilient that we can pick them up with a pair of tweezers and move them around on a surface without tearing," says Dickerson. "This makes it particularly easy to put them into ...

Geography and history shape genetic differences in humans

...ect on many genes that together influence a biological characteristic. "We don't know enough yet about the genetics of most human traits to be able to pick out all of the relevant variation," says Pritchard. "As functional studies go forward, people will start figuring out the phenotypes that are associat...

NASA satellite detects red glow to map global ocean plant health

...ecades, we can also detect long-term trends in climate change and other human perturbations to the ocean." Climate change could mean stronger winds pick up more dust and blow it to sea, or less intense winds leaving waters dust-free. Some regions will become drier and others wetter, changing the region...

Apple enthusiasts welcome WineCrisp

...der apple variety that consumers are familiar with called Winesap. When you pick it up and squeeze it, it's very firm. We also wanted that characteristic in...hanging on the tree even after ripening, making it important for growers to pick the fruit at maturity when the background has turned greenish yellow in col...

Potentially harmful chemicals found in forest fire smoke

...them in air during fire season, but no one had directly measured them coming off a fire. The PNNL researchers had recently developed the technology to pick out alkaloids from the background of similar molecules. To investigate chemicals given off by fires, the team captured some smoke from test fires o...

Laughing hyenas, wailing levees, the sound of cheese and blaring bagpipes

...in a joint can change the way it vibrates," says Guarino. Using a pattern detection technique called the continuous wavelet transform, the team can pick out which ranges of frequencies change the most. Their results suggest that the signatures of unscrewing may be found in certain mid-to-high frequenci...

Signals from stroking have direct route to brain

...thy subjects using a technique called microneurography. "By inserting a thin electrode into a nerve in the forearm we can listen in on the nerve and pick up signals from one of the thousands of nerve fibres that make up a nerve," explains Associate Professor Hkan Olausson, who is leading the research gr...

NIH funds development of resistance-breaking insecticides to reduce malaria transmission

...n the mosquito brain, while leaving the related human enzyme untouched. The promising new idea was that the malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, would pick up two inactive molecules from a bed net that would then bind to AChE within the mosquito and thus disable it. "That initial concept has not yet been ...

TGen helps promote cancer awareness for vast Navajo Nation

...er, the students from Dine College, and even the woman who catered our event, who between serving food all day, visited every cancer resource booth to pick up booklets to take home to friends and family in Tuba City.'' Kavanagh praised as top-notch the presentation by Dr. Bodour Salhia, a TGen post-doc...

New wheat disease could spread faster than expected

... "This is something that we shouldn't take a chance on. It's already spread to Iran, and the new research shows that its global spread may be about to pick up speed." People are aware of this problem, already working on it, and hopefully they will be able to develop wheat varieties that are more resis...

Molecular fingerprints point the way to earlier cancer diagnosis and more targeted treatment

...reasons he believes in strength in numbers. "In the real world of biomarkers, you want 100 percent sensitivity. If the patient has cancer, you want to pick it up. We need to have a kind of multiplex test where you can test for say10 different entities and have a greater confidence that what you are statin...

Female mammals follow their noses to the right mates

...McAuliffe. Recent studies have shown that mammalian females use scent to pick out genetically dissimilar males. Parents with dissimilar genes in a certai... offspring. So male mammals advertise their genotype via scent, and females pick up the signal and preferentially mate with dissimilar males. This ability t...

Dancing 'adatoms' help chemists understand how water molecules split

...om". Chemists can only see water molecules if they drop the temperature dramatically -- at ambient temperature, water moves too fast for the method to pick them up. In this work, PNNL scientists studied water's reactions with titanium dioxide at ambient temperature at EMSL, the DOE's Environmental Mole...

The genetics of fear: Study suggests specific genetic variations contribute to anxiety disorders

...ctions and that "genes may act through the environment by making carriers of particular gene combinations more likely than other individuals to easily pick up and retain fear of stimuli associated with threat and trauma." The authors go on to suggest that these findings may indicate that individuals with ...

Pulmonary hypertension in children may result from reduced activity of gene regulator

...ell signaling. The way it's supposed to work is all about balance: the same amount of blood that comes into the heart being pumped to the lungs to pick up oxygen then going back to the heart to be pumped to the body. In their animal model, and in some children with heart defects, three times more bloo...

Study offers clues to beating hearing loss

... the causes of some forms of deafness. The Leeds team has discovered that the myosin 7 motor protein - found in the tiny hairs of the inner ear that pick up sound - moves and works in a different way from many other myosins. Dr Michelle Peckham from the University of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sci...

Musicians have biological advantage in identifying emotion in sound

... EVANSTON, Ill. --- Looking for a mate who in everyday conversation can pick up even your most subtle emotional cues? Find a musician, Northwestern University researchers suggest. In a study in the latest issue of European...

Crab claws pack strengthening bromide-rich biomaterial

...f the striped (or lined) shore crab (Pachygrapsus cassipes) as the pinchers pick and hold prey. It also is present on the walking legs of Dungeness crabs (C... their claw tips rely on the tips fitting together like forceps in order to pick and hold bits of food, and fracture damage could make the tips useless," sa...

Link between unexploded munitions in oceans and cancer-causing toxins determined

..., Inc., with the technical expertise of machinists at the UGA instrument shop. "When you remove the bomb, you remove the problem but you've got to pick it up," said Porter. ...

Nanoparticle toxicity doesn't get wacky at the smallest sizes

...t of these genes behaved the same for all nanoparticle sizes tested. This indicated to the researchers that, for these genes, the nanoparticles didn't pick up weird chemical properties as they shrunk in size. "The big fear is that you'd see unique biological pathways being affected when you get down to...

Engineers create intelligent molecules that seek-and-destroy diseased cells

...d Smolke in her move to Stanford), was described in a paper published in the Oct. 17, 2008, issue of Science. "We do our design on the computer and pick out sequences that are predicted to behave the way we like," Smolke said. When researchers generate these sequences inside the operating system of a c...

Pubic hair provides evolutionary home for gorilla lice

...ppily, this may not be as sordid as it sounds. According to Weiss, "Before one conjures up a King Kong scenario, it should be noted that predators can pick up parasites from their prey. The close contact involved in human ancestors butchering gorillas could have enabled Pthirus to jump hosts, rather as bu...

Single gene lets bacteria jump from host to host

...ated with it," says Mark J. Mandel, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. "We pick up our microbial partners from the environment and they provide us with a raft of services from helping digestion to protection from disease." In t...

New computational technique allows comparison of whole genomes as easily as whole books

...n down into words. "I can compare two books in two different ways. I can pick a few sentences, say a hundred that I subjectively decided are important, a...een the first and second words - the local syntax - which was impossible to pick up from the word frequency method. Apparently, that is very important." ...

Substantial work ahead for water issues, say scientists at ACS' Final Report briefing

...re." Ball urged political action on nutrient reductions, the so-called 'low-lying fruit.' "But we also have to strategize on what the next fruit to pick could be and even what trees to plant, and that takes a lot of planning," he said. Risk is another factor that takes planning, said Charles Haas,...

Microbot motors fit to swim human arteries

...agged behind in the age of technological miniaturisation and provide the key to making robots small enough for injection into the bloodstream. "If you pick up an electronics catalogue, you'll find all sorts of sensors, LEDs, memory chips, etc that represent the latest in technology and miniaturisation. T...

American Chemical Society's weekly PressPac -- Jan. 14, 2009

...ence fiction, chemical and biomolecular engineers in Maryland are describing development of microscopic, chemically triggered robotic "hands" that can pick up and move small objects. They could be used in laboratory-on-a-chip applications, reconfigurable microfluidic systems, and micromanufacturing, the r...

How mirror neurons allow us to learn and socialize by going through the motions in the head

...cated to control of hand movement. This led to the surprising observation that some of the neurons responded in the same way when monkeys saw a person pick up a piece of food as when they were doing it themselves. This introduced the principle of the mirror neuron as a neuron capable of being triggered by...

A BBVA Foundation project comes up with a system enabling detection of cetacean hearing loss

...racterized by a series of unique morphological adaptations allowing them to pick up frequencies that their auditory channels translate into accurate acousti...ing an external auditory conduct for the purposes of hearing. Instead, they pick up sound waves through their jaws which transmit the information directly t...

New satellite data reveal impact of Olympic pollution controls

...he study. The reductions only became noticeable when the investigators focused tightly on the Beijing area. "If you take a wide view, you start to pick up long distance transport of pollutants," Schoeberl said. That seemed to be the case with sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), which has a longer lifetime in the ...