Rings in Biological News

Australia's climate: Drought and flooding in annual rings of tropical trees

Annual rings are acclaimed in representing natural climate archives. For the temperate latitudes it is known that the growth of these annual rings depend mainly on temperature and precipitation. In the tropics, however, with only slight seasonal variations, the correlation is not so evident. No...

Mystery of infamous 'New England Dark Day' solved by tree rings

COLUMBIA, Mo. At noon, it was black as night. It was May 19, 1780 and some people in New England thought judgment day was at hand. Accounts of that day, which became known as 'New England's Dark Day,' include mentions of midday meals by candlelight, night birds coming out to sing, flowers folding...

Mystery of infamous 'New England Dark Day' solved by 3 rings

COLUMBIA, Mo. At noon, it was black as night. It was May 19, 1780 and some people in New England thought judgment day was at hand. Accounts of that day, which became known as 'New England's Dark Day,' include mentions of midday meals by candlelight, night birds coming out to sing, flowers folding...

Navigating in the ocean of molecules

...structures in a kind of family tree based on their similarities: the program assigns smaller 'parent' scaffolds to each scaffold by gradually removing rings from the original 'child' scaffold. This generates innumerable parent-child relationships - structurally related molecules of varying complexity. The ...

Douglas-fir, geoducks make strange bedfellows in studying climate change

...PORT, Ore. Scientists are comparing annual growth rings of the Pacific Northwest's largest bivalve and its...changes in climate. Analyzed by themselves, the rings from a single tree or mollusk may sometimes reflec...ou add in a second species and compare the growth rings of geoducks and Douglas-firs, for example the rel...

'Invisibility cloak' could protect against earthquakes

... The technology involves the use of concentric rings of plastic which could be fitted to the Earth's su...ue could be applied to buildings by installing the rings into foundations. Sebastien Guenneau, from the...For each small frequency range, there is a pair of rings which does most of the work and these move about a...

Study may aid efforts to prevent uncontrolled cell division in cancer

...the journal Cell . "We showed that contractile rings constrict at a constant rate that is proportional to the initial size of the cell, so that rings in larger cells constrict proportionally faster than rings in smaller cells," said Karen Oegema, PhD, associa...

Healing wounds with lasers, vehicles that drive themselves, other cutting-edge optics

... metamaterial to turn a stream of THz waves off and on. It's called a metamaterial since it consists of an array of microscopic split metal rings. The rings can be controlled by nearby electrodes; modulating the ring's capacitance, in turn, modulates the radiation; that is, the THz light (sometimes called ...

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

...f forwards and backwards waves. "If there is a crack or corrosion, the waves will not retrace their steps," says O'Donoughue. The team is designing rings of these sensors to attach to the outside of pipes. The idea is to space out the rings, each which will eventually contain between four and eight sens...

Plants could override climate change effects on wildfires

...eserved plant parts, such as pollen, to determine the types of vegetation that dominated the landscape during different time periods in the past. Like rings in a tree, different layers of sediment represent different times in the past. The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the sediment's ...

New deep-sea coral discovered on NOAA-supported mission

...hanges in marine life with calcium-carbonate shells, such as corals, because of acidified ocean water. "Deep-sea bamboo corals also produce growth rings much as trees do, and can provide a much-needed view of how deep ocean conditions change through time," said Spinrad. Rob Dunbar, a Stanford Univer...

Young dinosaurs roamed together, died together

...the hill. In sum, more than 25 individuals were excavated from the site. They range in age from one to seven years, as determined by the annual growth rings in their bones. The team meticulously recorded the position of all of the bones and the details of the rock layers to try to understand how so many...

New deep-sea coral discovered on NOAA-supported mission

...hanges in marine life with calcium-carbonate shells, such as corals, because of acidified ocean water. "Deep-sea bamboo corals also produce growth rings much as trees do, and can provide a much-needed view of how deep ocean conditions change through time," said Spinrad. Rob Dunbar, a Stanford Univer...

UNH researchers studying spiny dogfish, Gulf of Maine's mini shark

...spines, vertebrae and reproductive organs were brought back to the lab for further analyses. Similar to how the age of a tree is determined by the rings in the trunk, certain bony structures on a fish can be cross-sectioned and examined for bands, or annuli, that are laid down each year. The ages of fi...

Scripps scientists create first crystal structure of an intermediate particle in virus assembly

... Johnson and his research team have long studied HK97, and had "solved" the structure of the virus's mature outer coat. It is made up of 72 protein rings 12 pentagons and 60 hexagons locked together like the chain mail suits worn by knights. This coating forms the head of the virus, which is extremely...

The gold standard: Biodesign Institute researchers use nanoparticles to make 3-D DNA nanotubes

...veal for the first time the three-dimensional character of DNA nanotubules, rings and spirals, each a few hundred thousandths the diameter of a human hair. T...n, again using 5-nm size gold nanoparticles, the nanoparticles form stacked rings around the DNA. Click here for more information. ...

Viruses, start your engines!

...us assembles itself, the lower ring of the motor structure attaches to a strand of DNA, while the upper ring attaches to a capsid. The upper and lower rings have opposite charges, which allow the motor to contract and release, alternately tugging at the DNA like a ring of hands pulling on a rope. The pr...

Haag honored with Presidential Early Career Scientists Award

...ted important research on the production of growth rings in mussel shells. Like trees, mussels produce annual rings in their shells as they grow. Because some mussel species live for more than 50 years, these rings provide a wealth of information not only about the...

Timetable for Puget Sound restoration suffers setback

...is careful chemical analysis of the sediment layers provided a historical rap sheet of toxins including lead, arsenic and copper. Like the concentric rings of a tree, each centimeter of mud delicately displayed a historical biography of environmental conditions. Higher concentrations of lead and arsen...

Goose eggs may help polar bears weather climate change

...er the United States' Endangered Species Act and are classified as "vulnerable with declining populations" under IUCN's Red List. Polar bears' habitat rings the Arctic south of 88˚ latitude. Most of this area is sea ice from which bears hunt seals, although the breakup of sea ice over the summer force...

AGU journal highlights: Nov. 11, 2008

... up less than 5 percent of the total ion population. Because analysis of these minor species can provide clues to the origin and evolution of Saturn's rings and satellites, Martens et al. study molecular oxygen ions (O 2 + ), a minor species they estimate to compose, on average, 0.3 to 0.4 percent of the ...

Are you phonagnosic?

...ossible, and for many years has only answered 'booked calls'. KH books calls with friends or co-workers, so she knows who to expect when the telephone rings at a certain time. In the 1980s, KH had a job in which she introduced herself with a different form of her first name so she would know that it was so...

European researchers harness unique properties of boron to develop new drugs and diagnostics

...e distributions with greater 3D complexity than their carbon based equivalents. As Lesnikowski put it, while organic carbon molecules tend to comprise rings and chains, boron hydrides (compounds comprising mostly boron and hydrogen) are made up of clusters and cages. This 3D structure makes it possible to ...

Extreme nature helps scientists design nano materials

...", said Dr Nicole F. Steinmetz of the Scripps Research Institute. "We are looking into the use of the particles to generate complex structures such as rings or tetrapods". ...

Checking people at airports -- with terahertz radiation

...he possible applications extends from security check to the investigation of the spatial and/or time structure of the electron packages in the storage rings for synchrotron radiation production and in free-electron lasers, for which the receivers of the German Electron Synchrotron DESY characterized here a...

Fantastic photographs of fluorescent fish

...ish, and due to rapid attenuation of red light by water, even those that can see red will be able to see it over short distances only. Fluorescent eye rings may function as an indicator of presence or reveal the direction of gaze." ...

Slipping through cell walls, nanotubes deliver high-potency punch to cancer tumors in mice

...n cosmetics. The PEG they used was a form that has three little branches sprouting from a central trunk. Stuffing the trunks into the linked hexagonal rings that make up the nanotubes created a visual effect that Dai described as looking like rolled-up chicken wire with feathers sticking out all over. The ...

National Institutes of Health award Williams professor $217,710 research grant

...arlier work on pyran-based products, which was funded by a 2003 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. Chiral pyran-based ring systems (six-membered rings composed of carbon and oxygen atoms) are found in numerous biologically relevant natural product classes. At Williams since 1998, Smith teaches cou...

Researchers reveal insights into hidden world of protein folding

...n comes out folded," Frydman said. "It is a very complex mechanism." The rings at each end of the barrel have to synchronize their actions for the sequence of events to happen correctly. "We don't know how the rings coordinate," Frydman said. "What we have is evidence that this machine work...

Saltwater sleuths: Seeking clues to help determine the ages of fish and shellfish populations

...it is not as well known to the public as dendochronology, the study of tree rings used to determine age and environmental changes, sclerochronology has becom...ns, such as the daily banding in coral reef skeletons and the annual growth rings in mollusk shells. Growth patterns can reflect monthly, fortnightly (every ...

Warning buoys for right whales installed along Massachusetts Bay

...iately get put to use in the form of timely warnings to ship captains." Each "auto-detection" buoy recognizes the right whale's call, automatically rings up recorders at the lab and uploads the sound. Analysts verify the call and then feed the signals to the listening network's Web site and to the North...

NYU dental professor discovers biological clock linking tooth growth to other metabolic processes

...dental professor Dr. Timothy Bromage discovered the rhythm while observing incremental growth lines in tooth enamel, which appear much like the annual rings on a tree. He also observed a related pattern of incremental growth in skeletal bone tissue the first time such an incremental rhythm has ever been o...

UC San Diego researchers eliminate drug discovery bottleneck

...to replicate our findings with newly discovered, potentially therapeutic peptides. The UCSD researchers have shown that it is possible to break NRP rings apart and then break the resulting peptide strings into smaller and smaller subunits of the original ring using multiple passes with a mass spectromet...

Researcher provides tool to enable determination of age of anchovies with greater precision

... marking during captivity, for the first time the daily formation of growth rings in this species has been validated. The chemical marking was carried out, a...es deposit as a daily ring of growth in their otoliths. The daily growth rings deposited in the otoliths form a complex pattern of daily growth which were...

Nanorings

...appear under an atomic force microscope to be tiny rings with little bits missing are actually nanoscopic rings made of double-stranded DNA with a little gap in t...molecules that have the potential to transform the rings into versatile nanocomposites for various applicat...

Researchers visualize complex pigment mixtures in living cells

...nent that is attributed to photosystem I, because it disappears in mutants lacking this photosystem, was of higher relative intensity toward the inner rings of the thylakoids. Together, the results suggest compositional heterogeneity between thylakoid rings, with the inner thylakoids enriched in photosyste...

Uncharged organic molecule can bind negatively charged ions

...n eight-member macrocycle with a 3.7 angstrom hole in the middle. The more-or-less symmetrical molecule that Flood and Li built contains four triazole rings sporting three nitrogen atoms each. It is presumed the nitrogens withdraw electron density from the carbon and hydrogen atoms closest to the molecule'...

NOAA science story tips -- AAAS 2008 edition

...year. Fish ear bones, called otoliths, grow in rings similar to annual growth rings found in trees. Researchers know the year that the fish was collected, and can count growth rings back to estimate the age of the fish. If the amoun...

New decontamination system kills anthrax rapidly without lingering effects

...d with sodium bisulfite vapor and vented from the building. The new decontamination system resembles a coat rack with radiation modules arranged on rings at various heights that face outward to broadcast radiation throughout a room. Since the X-rays and UV-C are lethal at the flux densities used, the sy...

February Geology and GSA Today media highlights

...e Holocene and are in the Anthropocene. Annual patterns within tree rings of the Arctic middle Eocene (ca. 45 Ma): Isotopic signatures of precipitati...spectacular preservation of Eocene (approximately 45-million-year-old) tree rings allowed the reconstruction of the seasonal environment of an extinct polar ...