ago in Biological News

Coralline algae in the Mediterranean lost their tropical element between 5 and 7 million years ago

An international team of researchers has studied the coralline algae fossils that lived on the last coral reefs of the Mediterranean Sea between 7.24 and 5.3 million years ago. Mediterranean algae and coral reefs began to resemble present day reefs following the isolation of the Mediterranean from...

New discovery suggests mammoths survived in Britain until 14,000 years ago

Research which finally proves that bones found in Shropshire, England provide the most geologically recent evidence of woolly mammoths in North Western Europe publishes today in the Geological Journal . Analysis of both the bones and the surrounding environment suggests that some mammoths remaine...

CU-Boulder study shows Maya intensively cultivated manioc 1,400 years ago

A University of Colorado at Boulder team has uncovered an ancient and previously unknown Maya agricultural system -- a large manioc field intensively cultivated as a staple crop that was buried and exquisitely preserved under a blanket of ash by a volcanic eruption in present-day El Salvador 1,400...

Study unravels why certain fishes went extinct 65 million years ago

Large size and a fast bite spelled doom for bony fishes during the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, according to a new study to be published March 31, 2009, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Today, those same features characterize large predatory bony fishes, ...

MUHC and McGill scientists explain genetic disease first discovered in Quebec 24 years ago

This release is available in French . Scientists at the MUHC and McGill University have identified a gene essential for the uptake of vitamin B12 in human cells. The discovery of this gene finally completes a 24 year-old hunt for the cause of an incredibly rare genetic disorder called, cbl...

A fossilized giant rhino bone questions the isolation of Anatolia, 25 million years ago

Contrary to generally accepted belief, Anatolia was not geographically isolated 25 million years ago (during the Oligocene epoch): this has just been demonstrated by researchers from the Laboratoire des Mcanismes et Transferts en Gologie (LMTG) (CNRS/ University of Toulouse 3/IRD) and the Palobiod...

Rodent fossils allows to determine climate of the Iberian Peninsula 6 million years ago

This release is available in Spanish . How did the rodents which inhabited the south of the Iberian Peninsula live six million years ago" The researcher of the UGR Raef Minwer-Barakat has attempted to answer this question through his doctoral thesis "Rodents and insectivorous of Upper T...

Researchers find origin of 'breathable' atmosphere half a billion years ago

COLUMBUS , Ohio -- Ohio State University geologists and their colleagues have uncovered evidence of when Earth may have first supported an oxygen-rich atmosphere similar to the one we breathe today. The study suggests that upheavals in the earth's crust initiated a kind of reverse-greenhouse ef...

Climate-caused biodiversity booms and busts in ancient plants and mammals

...BOR, Mich.---A period of global warming from 53 million to 47 million years ago strongly influenced plants and animals, spurring a biodiversity boom in wes...rising and falling temperatures. The Eocene began about 56 million years ago with a short period of increased warming, when many modern groups of mammal...

Understanding how weeds are resistant to herbicides

...udy herbicide resistance in waterhemp. Ten years ago genomics was reserved for what Tranel refers to as... able to start generating data now that five years ago would have been cost-prohibitive." Tranel believes... are expressed? "These are questions that 10 years ago we couldn't address because we didn't know the gen...

Scary ancient spiders revealed in 3-D models, thanks to new imaging technique

... Early relatives of spiders that lived around 300 million years ago are revealed in new three-dimensional models, in research published today in the journal Biology Letters . Scientists at Imperial College London ...

Lead-based consumer paint remains a global public health threat

...ard for lead in consumer paint is grossly overdue," adds Clark. "The previous limit of 600 ppm for lead in new pant was established more than 30 years ago when the blood-lead level of concern was much higher than at present. Modern research has shown that children are affected at very low exposure levels...

Restoring a natural root signal helps to fight a major corn pest

... in the group of Jonathan Gershenzon at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena he had already contributed to a key discovery four years ago by Sergio Rasmann in the group of Ted Turlings at the University of Neuchtel. They found that maize roots attacked by rootworm attract nematodes by re...

Fossil plants bring Wilf distinguished speaker honor

...logical processes and biogeography. His work is based on field studies of the latest Cretaceous through the middle Eocene -- 66 to 45 million years ago -- fossil sites in Patagonia, Argentina and the western interior U.S. This time interval shaped the modern world and included the latest Cretaceous cl...

DNA computation gets logical at the Weizmann Institute of Science

...to 'think' logically. The train of deduction used by this futuristic device is remarkably familiar. It was first proposed by Aristotle over 2000 years ago as a simple ifthen proposition: 'All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.' When fed a rule (All men are mortal) and a fac...

Little-known protein found to be key player

...ws that the protein, called "atlastin," does its work by fusing intracellular membranes in a previously undocumented way. "If you'd asked me a year ago whether this was possible, I would have said, 'No,'" said study co-author James McNew, associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice Un...

Bizarre walking bat has ancient heritage

...zarre New Zealand bat that is as much at home walking four-legged on the ground as winging through the air had an Australian ancestor 20 million years ago with the same rare ability, a new study has found. The discovery overturns a long-held held view that the agile walking and climbing skills of the l...

First genetically-engineered malaria vaccine to enter human trials

...tle Biomedical Research Institute, the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research and the University of Maryland, had used knowledge from several decades ago when scientists proved that irradiated malaria parasites provide protection against subsequent malaria infection in animal models and humans in deve...

Freshwater fish at the top of the food chain evolve more slowly

...marily on fish have remained relatively unchanged over time. Once they evolved the optimal size and shape for catching fish roughly 20 million years ago natural selection seems to have kept them in an evolutionary holding pattern, the researchers say. "At some point in the history of this group, so...

Cancer's distinctive pattern of gene expression could aid early screening and prevention

...he proteins around which DNA is wrapped, can leave a gene susceptible to methylation. Additionally, Dr. Shi, who as a postdoctoral fellow 10 years ago worked alongside Dr. Tim H.M. Huang at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, to develop some of the first technology to examine genome-sca...

High-tech vehicle design boosts emergency rescue capacity

...en building ergonomic rescue, ambulance and emergency response vehicles for more than 20 years. It started as a vehicle body repair shop some 60 years ago but became involved in adapting standard vans to emergency use and improving the interior design of ambulances at the request of its local St John Amb...

When children have breathing problems

...ering from respiratory problems coughing, wheezing and asthma attacks. Although the key external causes of these diseases were identified a long time ago (traffic and industrial air pollution), it had not previously been possible to distinguish clearly between these two factors so as to have a targeted ...

Munich researchers discover new target for tailored antibiotics

...ine of attack for custom-tailored antibiotics. Research into the bacterial synthesis of isoprene building blocks was initiated as early as 12 years ago by Professor Adelbert Bacher in collaboration with Drs. Wolfgang Eisenreich and Felix Rohdich in Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry. Over the years, t...

Arctic climate under greenhouse conditions in the Late Cretaceous

... of past environmental change in the Arctic should help predict its future behaviour. The Late Cretaceous, the period between 100 and 65 million years ago leading up to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is crucial in this regard because levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) were high, driving greenhouse conditio...

Explosive growth of life on Earth fueled by early greening of planet

...was a massive greening of the planet by non-vascular plants, or primitive ground huggers, as Knauth calls them. This period, roughly 700 million years ago virtually set the table for the later explosion of life through the development of early soil that sequestered carbon, led to the build up of oxygen a...

Mystery of bat with an extraordinary nose solved

...convey a wealth of information on objects in the bat's environment. This bat from the remote rainforests of South East Asia received its name 58 years ago because of its mysterious trait. Much like a flashlight with an adjuster that can create an intense but small beam of light, the bat's nose can cr...

Ben-Gurion U. researchers reveal connection between cancer and human evolution

... blocks that changed during evolution. The team also found that the mitochondrial genome of humans who migrated out of Africa to Europe 100,000 years ago carried seven mutations found in almost all of today's Europeans. "The concept that the same principles that drive evolution toward the emergence o...

Evolution: Crabs go deep to avoid hot water

...rface though temperatures found around some parts of the Antarctic (below 1C) are too extreme for their survival. A paper, published 15 years ago in Nature is thought to show that king crabs evolved from shell-bound hermit crabs - similar to the familiar shoreline animals. Soft-bodied, but shel...

New guide to tropical seedlings: Essential to climate change research

... plant biology at the University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale, began the daunting task of describing seedling stages of tropical plants 25 years ago at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Garwood's guide greatly simplifies the process of identifying seedlings, which lack bright...

Genetic finding could lead to targeted therapy for neuroblastoma

...gene called BARD1, six single-nucleotide polymorphisms variations in tiny pieces of DNA were also associated with neuroblastoma. "Only two years ago we had very little idea of what causes neuroblastoma," said Maris, who led both studies. "Now we have unlocked a lot of the mystery of why neuroblasto...

Scripps Research scientists observe human neurodegenerative disorder in fruit flies

... homeostasis of the nervous system. Because the unknown function is common to both humans and flies, it probably evolved hundreds of millions of years ago before the ancient ancestors of humans and flies diverged. What exactly this function is for is still unknown. "That is a great mystery," says Sch...

Lack of happiness hormone serotonin in the brain causes impaired maternal behavior in mice

...ir pups, but their impaired maternal behavior led to poor survival of the offspring. The Tph2 gene was discovered by MDC researchers several years ago together with researchers of the Free University (FU) Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin (HUB). ...

A urine test for appendicitis?

...e in discovering diagnostic markers for a variety of pediatric diseases in the future. The hospital made a significant financial investment five years ago to launch the Center. ...

American Chemical Society's Weekly Presspac -- June 17, 2009

...icides Environmental Science & Technology Insecticides used in and around homes including products voluntarily removed from the market years ago were measured on the floors of U.S. residences, according to the first study large enough to generate national data on pesticide residues in homes. I...

UNH researcher receives presidential environmental award

... and finfish, says Short, a research professor of natural resources and marine science. In Ninigret Pond, construction of stone jetties half a century ago had created a natural funnel that deposited large amounts of ocean sand inside the ponds, burying formerly plentiful eelgrass beds. Short's contrib...

When palm trees gave way to spruce trees

...what happened during previous periods of global climate change. One long-standing climate puzzle relates to a sequence of events 33.5 million years ago in the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. Profound changes were underway. Globally, carbon dioxide levels were falling and the hothouse warmth of the di...

Stress puts double whammy on reproductive system, fertility

...research shows that stress also increases brain levels of a reproductive hormone named gonadotropin-inhibitory hormone, or GnIH, discovered nine years ago in birds and known to be present in humans and other mammals. This small protein hormone, a so-called RFamide-related peptide (RFRP), puts the brakes ...

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona researchers first to clone mice in Spain

...he somatic cell nucleus transferred to the oocyte cytoplasm. Its use in nuclear transfer processes however is very recent. It was first used two years ago and research until now has focused on trichostatin, an inhibitor which has significantly improved the efficiency of mouse cloning, raising it to 5%. ...

Cantabrian cornice has experienced seven cooling and warming phases over past 41,000 years

... be favourable to these kinds of organisms". The study has also shown that the majority of the Pleistocene taxa became extinct around 10,000 years ago while "some cold-adapted species, which had managed to survive, moved to the north of Europe, leaving our warmer latitudes behind", the scientist conc...

Enzyme involved in inflammatory bowel disease discovered at Penn State College of Medicine

...the genetic control of inflammation, and of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease in particular," Bond said. She discovered meprin more than 25 years ago while at the Medical College of Virginia Commonwealth University. Since then, she has studied the structure and activities of the meprins and has loca...