bodies in Biological News

Egg P bodies protect maternal gene messages

A cell decides what proteins to make based on the messages it receives from its genome. Sometimes messages are held back to be read later, and in most cell types these delayed messages are stored and eventually marked for destruction in P bodies (processing bodies). P bodies in worm egg cells, how...

New research shows sharks use their noses and bodies to locate smells

Sharks are known to have a keen sense of smell, which in many species is critical for finding food. However, according to new research from Boston University marine biologists, sharks can not use just their noses to locate prey; they also need their skin – specifically a location called the latera...

Carbon nanoparticles toxic to adult fruit flies but benign to young

...ent led by Daniel Vinson, an undergraduate student in engineering, adult Drosophila coated in multiwalled carbon nanotubes carried the carbon on their bodies from one test tube into another and deposited some of the particles in the clean tube. That test showed how insects could be vectors for transporting ...

New insights into health and environmental effects of carbon nanoparticles

... effects on fruit fly larvae that ate food containing high concentrations of nanoparticles. However, adult flies died or were incapacitated when their bodies were exposed to large amounts of certain nanoparticles. During the experiments, the researchers noted that contaminated flies transferred nanoparticl...

August 2009 Geology and GSA Today media highlights

...ides are disseminated along small veins and fractures associated with small bodies of porphyritic-textured granitic rock. These are emplaced above larger bodies of granitic magma, which are the sources of both mineralizing fluids and th...

Jet-propelled imaging for an ultrafast light source

...r science. Among the promises of superbright, ultrafast x-ray pulses is the ability to solve the structure of the complicated molecules from which our bodies are made. All living things are made of proteins and nucleic acids, but relatively few of the atomic structures of the thousands, perhaps millions, of...

ISU researchers find possible treatment for spinal muscular atrophy

...N2 to produce the working SMN protein. When SMN2 makes enough SMN, it compensates for the mutated or malfunctioning SMN1 gene. All proteins in human bodies are made by copying genes. This copy is called pre-mRNA. Pre-mRNA then becomes mRNA by splicing out certain parts of the sequence that are non-codin...

High-tech vehicle design boosts emergency rescue capacity

...erstructures for fire engines, mobile workshops, food delivery vehicles and military transport. It has a particular expertise in the adaptation of box bodies to Unimog off-road vehicle subframes. Different approach The high capacity model developed in the EUREKA project demanded a different approach f...

UH team analyzes Hurricane Ike's effects on waterways, fish contamination

...gineering professor Hanadi Rifai, who has studied pollution in Houston-area bodies of water in partnership with both state and federal authorities since 2001,...t, water and tissue. "The EPA has asked the states to come up with water bodies that do not meet Clean Water Act standards and with ways to address the pro...

1-finger exercise reveals unexpected limits to dexterity

...rties of muscles influence their everyday function, and how "redundant" our bodies are. According to Valero-Cuevas, who holds a joint appointment in the U...s that could have driven the evolutionary specializations of our brains and bodies that make our hands so dexterous. "These apparently esoteric results hav...

Dietary supplements manufacturers gain new tool to help ensure quality products

...tary Supplements Compendium, USP is seeking to partner with ingredient suppliers, dietary supplements manufacturers, contract laboratories, regulatory bodies and independent consultants to raise the quality of supplements and to fulfill the need for public standards in the dietary supplement community," sai...

Two dietary oils, two sets of benefits for older women with diabetes

...ry, commonly known as DXA and usually used to measure bone density, to determine the women's baseline and follow-up lean mass and fat throughout their bodies and specifically in their trunk region. Researchers asked the participants to keep diet and activity records for three consecutive days at four po...

Can a new implant coating technique create a new six million dollar man?

...ial," explains Prof. Eliaz. "We've been able to enhance the integration of the coating with the mineralized tissue of the body, allowing more peoples' bodies to accept implants." His new coating resulted in a 33% decrease in the level of materials failure, or delamination, in these implants. Prof. Elia...

New, less invasive genetic test greatly improves pregnancy rates in older women with poor prognosis

...oduct of egg development. The chromosomes of polar bodies provide an indication of whether the corresponding egg is normal or abnormal; if the polar bodies have the wrong number of chromosomes, so does the egg. Looking at polar bodies is a less invasive way of obtaining information ab...

ESHRE launches international study of polar body screening

...eer patients who have given consent for their use in this study. There will be no age restrictions on those donating their eggs. By biopsying polar bodies at an early stage of egg development, the researchers believe that not only are they using a less invasive method of chromosome analysis, but also a m...

High carbon dioxide levels cause abnormally large fish ear bones

...e big one," said Checkley. "If fish can do just fine or better with larger otoliths then there's no great concern. But fish have evolved to have their bodies the way they are. The assumption is that if you tweak them in a certain way it's going to change the dynamics of how the otolith helps the fish stay u...

Engineering innovative solutions for 21st century medicine

...eople are living longer thanks to modern medicine. But as we get older, our bodies need more help to support us. Medical engineering will play an important ro...ing how to help the skeleton, muscles and cardiovascular system support our bodies as we get older, through improved prosthetic implants and technologies to h...

New research shows dinosaurs may have been smaller than we thought

...een thought. It also changes many of the factors scientists have already determined about dinosaurs such as the amount of muscle required to use their bodies and how much they ate and breathed. ...

'Canadian excellence' strengthened by extensive adoption of open access

...nals and also encourages dual submission into an institutional repository. Complying with this mandate and also heeding wider position statements from bodies such as the Canadian Library Association (CLA) necessitated Wilfrid Laurier University to establish Laurier IR. Laurier IR embraces the 'open acces...

NYU Langone Medical Center awarded NIH grants totaling $1,560,000

... Since 2007, the HMP has awarded more than $70 million to expand its exploration of how the trillions of microscopic organisms that live in and on our bodies affect our health. The human microbiome is all the microorganisms that reside in or on the human body, as well as all their DNA, or genomes. In t...

NIH expands Human Microbiome Project; funds sequencing centers and disease projects

...ns of microscopic organisms that live in or on our bodies affect our health, the National Institutes of Heal...ffort will accelerate our understanding of how our bodies and microorganisms interact to influence health an...nding of how microorganisms that live in or on our bodies affect our health. In addition, the Broad Ins...

Molecular typesetting -- proofreading without a proofreader

...t to see a hundred-fold more errors than we actually do, so we know that some error correction must be happening. Otherwise, many more proteins in our bodies would malfunction," says Dr Cohen. Biological experiments have shown that the RNA polymerase slides both forwards and backwards along the RNA seque...

Toxic molecule may help birds 'see' north and south

...plain why humans, who also have cryptochrome in their eyes, do not have the same ability to see Earth's electromagnetic field, Schulten said. "Our bodies try to play it safe," he said. "It might be that human evolution chose longevity over orientational ability." ...

Cancer: The cost of being smarter than chimps?

...operates, suggesting that humans do not "self-destroy" cells as effectively as chimpanzees do. Apoptosis is one of the primary mechanisms by which our bodies destroy cancer cells. "The results from our analysis suggest that humans aren't as efficient as chimpanzees in carrying out programmed cell death. ...

Work of Field Museum scientist addresses question of chance in evolution

...k by the British journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B . Dr. Lidgard's research focuses on cheilostome bryozoans, marine animal colonies whose bodies are made up of many genetically identical box-like individuals (zooids). In the simplest, most primitive cheilostomes, the soft feeding organ is squee...

The secret of a snake's slither

...es aren't lying completely flat against the ground as they slither. They redistribute their weight as they move, concentrating it in areas where their bodies can get the most friction with the ground and therefore maximize thrust. In this way, snake slithering is not unlike human walking--we, too, shift our...

Scientists discover new genetic immune disorder in children

...to the same cell receptors as the inflammatory protein interleukin-1, and acts as a brake on this inflammatory protein. Without IL-1Ra, the children's bodies cannot control systemic inflammation that can be caused by interleukin-1. The scientists identified nine patients from six families with DIRA in th...

Harvard scientist says we are what we eat -- and what we cook

... about 800,000 years. Wrangham looked to biological evidence, which shows that around 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus arose with larger brains and bodies and smaller guts, jaws, and teeth -- changes consistent with the switch to a more tender and energetically rich diet of cooked food. "Cooking is wh...

Studies shed light on collapse of coral reefs

...systems, which can harbor more than 4,000 species of fish and many other marine life forms. But corals are not really self sufficient. Within their bodies they harbor highly productive algae a form of marine plant life that can "fix" carbon, use the energy of the sun to conduct photosynthesis and produ...

100 reasons to change the way we think about genetics

...ght. Biologists have suspected for years that some kind of epigenetic inheritance occurs at the cellular level. The different kinds of cells in our bodies provide an example. Skin cells and brain cells have different forms and functions, despite having exactly the same DNA. There must be mechanismsother ...

Progress toward artificial tissue?

...th of artificial tissue and organs, it is important to generate materials with characteristics that closely emulate nature. However, the tissue in our bodies has a combination of traits that are very hard to recreate in synthetic materials: It is both soft and very tough. A team of Australian and Korean res...

UAB professor receives HudsonAlpha Innovation Prize

...salutes Weaver's achievements in advancing understanding of immune protection and immune disease through T cell research. According to Weaver, our bodies use T cells to protect against infections and cancer, but when T cells overreact and turn on the body, we see immune-mediated diseases such as rheumat...

Meet DNA's personal assistants

...them with various pathologies. This gives them volumes of new information about the diseases they are studying." How It Works Each cell in our bodies has the instructions needed for building cells identical to it encoded in its DNA. RNA is "photocopied" from DNA in the cells, and from these instruct...

Songs raise awareness about aquatic invasive species

...future generations," says Shaw. These songs communicate a number of messages, such as the importance of cleaning boats when moving them between bodies of water and not moving bait minnows from one lake to another if water has already been added from the first lake to the minnow bucket, which prevents...

True grit

... their secrets, which might give engineers insights into creating ever-sharp tools or mechanical parts. The urchins dig holes to fit their globular bodies using their five teeth, which, like those of rodents, are ground down at the tip but continue to grow on the other end throughout the animals' lives. ...

Mites on hissing coackroach may benefit humans with allergies

.... Benoit said they tend to slobber on themselves when they eat, leaving saliva and organic debris in crevices along the lower middle portions of their bodies for the mites to eat. The mites are in particular need of the moisture in the food meaning they eat up water and nutrients that molds need to establi...

Study finds blood cells can be reprogrammed to act as embryonic stem cells

...apacity to differentiate into a variety of specialized cell types. In vitro, the iPS cells readily developed into clusters of cells called embryoid bodies from which cells of virtually any type can develop. These differentiated cells expressed genes for all three embryonic germ layers (the tissues from w...

Researchers use brain interface to post to Twitter

...dical engineering doctoral student, Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally. Among those are people who have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brain-stem stroke or high spinal...

'First aid' for brain cells comes from blood

...irst Aid" produce much more inflammatory transmitters in the brain and blood. In addition, immune cells, whose task is to recognize and digest foreign bodies or dead cell material e.g. microglial cells or neutrophils are activated more strongly in the absence of Treg. Treg cells protect cells by suppr...

Changing climate will lead to devastating loss of phosphorus from soil

...at which a dried soil is rewetted affects the concentration and forms of phosphorus lost in leachate which could potentially contaminate surface water bodies (e.g. rivers and lakes). The current research looked at only one soil type so it is not yet known whether other soil types would react in the same ...