Scientists in Biological News

What scientists know about jewel beetle shimmer

"Jewel beetles" are widely known for their glossy external skeletons that appear to change colors as the angle of view changes. Now they may be known for something else--providing a blueprint for materials that reflect light rather than absorbing it to produce colors. Scientists at the Georgia ...

Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC scientists identify enzyme important in aging

PITTSBURGH, July 10 The secret to longevity may lie in an enzyme with the ability to promote a robust immune system into old age by maintaining the function of the thymus throughout life, according to researchers studying an "anti-aging" mouse model that lives longer than a typical mouse. The ...

2 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientists receive Presidential Early Career Award

SEATTLE President Obama today announced that two Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center investigators have been awarded the nation's highest honor for scientists at the beginning of their independent research careers. Basic scientist Harmit Singh Malik, Ph.D., and cancer-prevention researcher Ulr...

Forsyth scientists suggest linkages between obesity and oral bacterial infection

A scientific team from The Forsyth Institute has discovered new links between certain oral bacteria and obesity. In a recent study, the researchers demonstrated that the salivary bacterial composition of overweight women differs from non-overweight women. This preliminary work may provide clues to...

Double success for Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia scientists working on chromosome segregation

Lars Jansen's work on the formation of the centromere, a key cellular structure in powering and controlling chromosome segregation and accurate cell division, has just earned him a paper in Nature Cell Biology and a prestigious EMBO installation grant, of 50,000 euro per year, for a maximum of f...

International team of students and scientists on month-long field course in Siberian Arctic

Scientists and undergraduate students from across the United States and Russia are departing July 2 for a month-long field course in the Russian Arctic. The program, known as The Polaris Project, is training future leaders in arctic research and education, and informing the public about the impact...

Harvard scientists solve mystery about why HIV patients are more susceptible to TB infection

A team of Harvard scientists has taken an important first step toward the development of new treatments to help people with HIV battle Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) infection. In their report, appearing in the July 2009 print issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology ( http://www.jleukbio.or...

Scripps Research scientists observe human neurodegenerative disorder in fruit flies

La Jolla, CA, June 24, 2009 -- A team of scientists from The Scripps Research Institute, Katholeike Universiteit Leuven, and the University of Antwerp, Belgium, among other institutions, has created a genetically modified fruit fly that mimics key features of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a common ...

CSHL scientists harness logic of 'Sudoku' math puzzle to vastly enhance genome-sequencing capability

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. A math-based game that has taken the world by storm with its ability to delight and puzzle may now be poised to revolutionize the fast-changing world of genome sequencing and the field of medical genetics, suggests a new report by a team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbo...

International collaboration by scientists culminates in novel ion channels database

An important resource consolidating understanding of the roles played by Ion channels in drug action is now available for scientists and students. The International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR) announce the publication of a new ion channels database, covering both the voltag...

Children's Hospital Oakland scientists first to discover new source for harvesting stem cells

June 23, 2009Oakland, Calif. A groundbreaking study conducted by Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland is the first to reveal a new avenue for harvesting stem cells from a woman's placenta, or more specifically the discarded placentas of healthy newborns. The study also finds there are fa...

Leading scientists and scholars urge action on climate issues

In an open letter addressed to President Barack Obama and the United States Congress, twenty leading scientists and scholars assert that the currently stated objectives in limiting the climatic disruption are grossly inadequate and urge the nation's leadership to take clear leadership towards meet...

Horse whisperers, lion tamers not needed: Scientists find genetic regions that soothe savage beasts

In what could be a breakthrough in animal breeding, a team of scientists from Germany, Russia and Sweden have discovered a set of genetic regions responsible for animal tameness. This discovery, published in the June 2009 issue of the journal GENETICS ( http://www.genetics.org ), should help ani...

Seventy-three scientists elected to the American Academy of Microbiology

Seventy-three microbiologists have been elected to Fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology. Fellows of the Academy are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbi...

Singapore scientists elected into National Academy of Sciences

Renowned Singapore-based cancer geneticists Neal Copeland, Ph.D., and Nancy Jenkins, Ph.D., who are among the top 50 most-cited biomedical scientists in the world today, have been elected into the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Dr. Copeland, Executive Director of the Institute...

Caltech scientists reveal how neuronal activity is timed in brain's memory-making circuits

PASADENA, Calif.Theta oscillations are a type of prominent brain rhythm that orchestrates neuronal activity in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for the formation of new memories. For several decades these oscillations were believed to be "in sync" across the hippocampus, timing the firing of...

City rats loyal to their 'hoods, scientists discover

In the rat race of life, one thing is certain: there's no place like home. Now, a study published this week in the journal Molecular Ecology finds the same is as true for rats as for humans. Although inner city rodents appear to roam freely, most form distinct neighborhoods where they spe...

Queen's scientists discover eco-friendly wood dissolution

Scientists at Queen's University Belfast have discovered a new eco-friendly way of dissolving wood using ionic liquids that may help its transformation into popular products such as bio fuels, textiles, clothes and paper. Dr Hctor Rodrguez and Professor Robin Rogers from the University's School...

Stanford scientists find heat-tolerant coral reefs that may resist climate change

Experts say that more than half of the world's coral reefs could disappear in the next 50 years, in large part because of higher ocean temperatures caused by climate change. But now Stanford University scientists have found evidence that some coral reefs are adapting and may actually survive...

UCSB scientists document fate of huge oil slicks from seeps at coal oil point

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) Twenty years ago, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez was exiting Alaska's Prince William Sound when it struck a reef in the middle of the night. What happened next is considered one of the nation's worst environmental disasters: 10.8 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the...

UCLA scientists discover ultrasonic communication among frogs

UCLA scientists report for the first time on the only known frog species that can communicate using purely ultrasonic calls, whose frequencies are too high to be heard by humans. Known as Huia cavitympanum , the frog lives only on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo. Ultrasounds are high-p...

EMBL scientists develop first fully automated pipeline for multiprotein complex production

Most cellular processes are carried out by molecular machines that consist of many interacting proteins. These protein complexes lie at the heart of life science research, but they are notoriously hard to study. Their abundance is often too low to extract them directly from cells and generating th...

March of Dimes awards $250,000 prize to scientists unraveling the causes of muscular dystrophy

BALTIMORE, MAY 3, 2009 Two scientists whose work has led to new and better ways to diagnose and potentially treat muscular dystrophy have been chosen to receive the 2009 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. Kevin P. Campbell, Ph.D. and Louis M. Kunkel, Ph.D., will share the 2009 Mar...

Stanford scientists turn adult skin cells into muscle and vice versa

In a study featured on the cover of the May issue of The FASEB Journal , researchers describe how they are able to reprogram human adult skin cells into other cell types in order to decipher the elusive mechanisms underlying reprogramming. To demonstrate their point, they transformed human skin c...

Just in time for spring: Scientists find the cellular on and off switch for allergies and asthma

If you're one of the millions who dread the spring allergy season, things are looking up. A research study appearing in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology ( http://www.jleukbio.org ) shows how a team of American scientists have identified a previously unknown cellular switch ...

Gladstone scientists identify key factors in heart cell creation

Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease have identified for the first time key genetic factors that drive the process of generating new heart cells. The discovery, reported in the current issue of the journal Nature , provides important new directions on how stem cells may...

Caltech scientists show why anti-HIV antibodies are ineffective at blocking infection

PASADENA, Calif.--Some 25 years after the AIDS epidemic spawned a worldwide search for an effective vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), progress in the field seems to have effectively become stalled. The reason? According to new findings from a team of researchers from the Cali...

Marine scientists warn of potential for spring, summer red tide outbreak in Gulf of Maine

The potential for an outbreak of the phenomenon called "red tide" is expected to be moderately large this spring and summer, according to researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and North Carolina State University (NCSU). The finding is based in part on a regional seafloo...

Singapore scientists synthesize gold to shed light on cells' inner workings

Highly fluorescent gold nanoclusters for sub-cellular imaging have been synthesized by researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), one of the research institutes of Singapore's A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research). Measuring less than 1 nanometer in...

UNC study: Scientists identify chemical compound that may stop deadly brain tumors

CHAPEL HILL Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have identified a compound that could be modified to treat one of the most deadly types of cancer, and discovered how a particular gene mutation contributes to tumor growth. The findings and potential...

Caltech scientists control complex nucleation processes using DNA origami seeds

PASADENA, Calif.--The construction of complex man-made objects--a car, for example, or even a pizza--almost invariably entails what are known as "top-down" processes, in which the structure and order of the thing being built is imposed from the outside (say, by an automobile assembly line, or the ...

Weizmann Institute scientists develop a unique approach for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen

The design of efficient systems for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, driven by sunlight is among the most important challenges facing science today, underpinning the long term potential of hydrogen as a clean, sustainable fuel. But man-made systems that exist today are very inefficient an...

Going bananas for sustainable research -- scientists create fuel from African crop waste

Bananas are a staple crop of Rwanda. The fruit is eaten raw, fried and baked it even produces banana beer and wine. Around 2 million tons are grown each year but the fruit is only a small percentage of what the plant produces. The rest skins, leaves and stems is left to rot as waste. Now sci...

Scripps scientists help decode mysterious green glow of the sea

Many longtime sailors have been mesmerized by the dazzling displays of green light often seen below the ocean surface in tropical seas. Now researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have uncovered key clues about the bioluminescent worms that produce the green glow and the...

Scripps scientists find structure of a protein that makes cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy

A research team at the Scripps Research Institute has obtained the first glimpse of a protein that keeps certain substances, including many drugs, out of cells. The protein, called P-glycoprotein or P-gp for short, is one of the main reasons cancer cells are resistant to chemotherapy drugs. Unders...

Stanford scientists find new solutions for the arsenic-poisoning crisis in Asia

Every day, more than 140 million people in southern Asia drink groundwater contaminated with arsenic. Thousands of people in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar and Vietnam die of cancer each year from chronic exposure to arsenic, according to the World Health Organization. Some health experts ca...

Queen's scientists find new way to battle MRSA

Experts from Queen's University Belfast have developed new agents to fight MRSA and other hospital-acquired infections that are resistant to antibiotics. The fluids are a class of ionic liquids that not only kill colonies of these dangerous microbes, they also prevent their growth. The developm...

LabRoots Launches Social Networking Site for Scientists & Engineers

Yorba Linda, CA - March 23, 2009 / b3c newswire / -  LabRoots Inc. announced today the official launch of its website, a social networking site for the scientific community. Beginning today, scientists and engineers from around the world can go to LabRoots.com to begin building relation...

Hopkins scientists ID 10 genes associated with a risk factor for sudden cardiac death

One minute, he's a strapping 40-year-old with an enviable cholesterol level, working out on his treadmill. The next, he's dead. That an abnormality in his heart's electrical system had managed to stay on the Q.T. until it proved lethal is characteristic of sudden cardiac death, which an...

Scripps research scientists 'watch' as individual alpha-synuclein proteins change shape

In an Early Edition publication of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ) this week, the researchers demonstrate the "alpha-synuclein dance" the switching back and forth of the protein between a bent helix and an extended helix as the surface that it is binding to changes....