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Plants respond similarly to signals from friends, enemies

Two soil-dwelling strangers ?a friend and a foe ?approach a plant and communicate with it in order to enter a partnership. The friend wants to trade nitrogen for food. The foe is a parasite that wants to burrow in and harm the plant. In a new finding published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at North Carolina State University have found that the two strange...

Man-made wetland's effectiveness similar to natural marsh

Researchers who studied a man-made wetland in Ohio for two years concluded that the created wetland filtered and cleaned water as well as or better than would a natural marsh. The wetland, which was built in an agricultural area, reduced levels of phosphorus by nearly 60 percent and nitrates by 40 percent. Phosphorus and nitrates are prime ingredients in both fertilizers and in water poll...

A slight difference and significant similarities

There is little difference between the composition of the genetically produced potatoes known as fructan potatoes and that of conventionally bred varieties. They only differ in the new substances intentionally incorporated with gene technology. This conclusion has been reached by scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology and their colleagues from the University of Wales...

When in danger humans are similar to a deer in the headlights

Standing still when a threat is detected is a defensive, protective reaction. This ancestral and automatic behavior allows the prey to stay unnoticed by a potential predator. A new study published in Psychophysiology finds that humans, like many other complex animals, freeze when encountering a threat. The mere picture of an injured or mutilated human induces this reaction. When viewing these unp...

Discarded placentas deliver researchers promising cells similar to embryonic stem cells

Routinely discarded as medical waste, placental tissue could feasibly provide an abundant source of cells with the same potential to treat diseases and regenerate tissues as their more controversial counterparts, embryonic stem cells, suggests a University of Pittsburgh study to be published in the journal Stem Cells and available now as an early online publication in Stem Cells Express. A...

Brain activity related to processing faces is similar in people with, without autism

New brain imaging research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill indicates that when people with autism look at a face, activity in the brain area that responds is similar to that of people without autism. The finding is surprising, as it is widely known that autistic individuals tend to avoid looking directly at faces. The research also counters previous published reports tha...

Similar Stem Cells In Insect And Human Gut

Looking through his handmade microscope in 1702, it was Anton van Leeuwenhoek who first described the workings of a nano machine. He observed the rapid contraction of a stalk tethering the cell body of a tiny protozoan, Vorticella convallaria, to the surface of a leaf. Little did van Leeuwenhoek imagine that more than 300 years later, the biological spring that drives Vorticella would set records...

Breast stem cells have features similar to 'basal' tumors

The most aggressive form of breast cancer may originate from breast stem cells that have undergone genetic mishaps. Victorian Breast Cancer Research Consortium scientists from The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, using mouse models, have discovered that breast stem cells do not express receptors for the female hormones oestrogen or progesterone. These and otherfeatures of the stem cell re...

New study finds similarities between monkey business and human business

Little attention has been paid to whether systematic economic biases such as risk-aversion are learned behaviors ?and thus easily ameliorated through market incentives ?or biologically based, arising in novel situations and in spite of experience. In a groundbreaking new study from the Journal of Political Economy, Yale researchers extend this question across species, exploring how a colony of ca...

Recurrence of a flu pandemic similar to infamous 1918 flu could kill 62 million

In recent years, health professionals and the general public alike have been acutely aware of the potential ravages that could result from a flu pandemic. Although many people might still recall the pandemics of 1968 and 1957, it is the infamous 1918-1920 pandemic--and the possibility of a recurrence on that scale--that causes the most trepidation. Strangely, researchers still don't kno...

Perceived facial similarity in children is an estimate of kin recognition

Perceived facial similarity of children is effectively an estimate of the probability that two children are close genetic relatives according to a new study recently published in Journal of Vision, an online, free access publication of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO). Participants in the study judged pairs of pictures of children, half of which portrayed ac...

Sea urchin genome suprisingly similar to man and may hold key to cures

Sea urchins are small and spiny, they have no eyes and they eat kelp and algae. Still, the sea creature’s genome is remarkably similar to humans?and may hold the key to preventing and curing several human diseases, according to a University of Central Florida researcher and several colleagues. UCF Professor Cristina Calestani was part of the Sea Urchin Genome Sequencing Group, which recent...

The kapok connection -- Study explains rainforest similarities

Research by University of Michigan evolutionary ecologist Christopher Dick and colleagues shows that...

Cancer stem cells similar to normal stem cells can thwart anti-cancer agents

Current cancer therapies often succeed at initially eliminating the bulk of the disease, including all rapidly proliferating cells, but are eventually thwarted because they cannot eliminate a small reservoir of multiple-drug-resistant tumor cells, called cancer stem cells, which ultimately become the source of disease recurrence and eventual metastasis. Now, research by scientists at the Unive...