gets in Biological News

First human gets new antibody aimed at hepatitis C virus

Boston, Mass. Building upon a series of successful preclinical studies, researchers at MassBiologics of the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) today announced the beginning of a Phase 1 clinical trial, testing the safety and activity of a human monoclonal antibody they developed ...

DNA computation gets logical at the Weizmann Institute of Science

Biomolecular computers, made of DNA and other biological molecules, only exist today in a few specialized labs, remote from the regular computer user. Nonetheless, Tom Ran and Shai Kaplan, research students in the lab of Prof. Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute's Biological Chemistry, and Comp...

Midget plant gets makeover

Palo Alto, CAA tiny plant with a long name ( Arabidopsis thaliana ) helps researchers from over 120 countries learn how to design new crops to help meet increasing demands for food, biofuels, industrial materials, and new medicines. The genes, proteins, and other traits of this fast-growing, tiny ...

Regional partnership to develop algal biofuels gets backing of San Diego leaders

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders today joined UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, local scientists and industry leaders to announce their support for a regional partnership designed to develop innovative ways to turn algae into biofuels. Speaking at a news conference on the UC San Diego campus...

Gorilla gets MRI at Bronx Zoo

Talk about house calls! The Wildlife Conservation Society thanks The Brain Tumor Foundation and its "Road To Early Detection" campaign for their assistance in performing a brain scan on a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo. The on-site procedureperformed by dozens of wildlife veterinarians, zookeepers, ...

Therapeutic cloning gets a boost with new research findings

San Antonio Germ cells, the cells which give rise to a mammal's sperm or eggs, exhibit a five to ten-fold lower rate of spontaneous point mutations than adult somatic cells, which give rise to the body's remaining cell types, tissues and organs. Despite their comparatively higher mutation rates,...

Genomatix gets patent for comparative genomics method

Genomatix Software, a company with an outstanding track record in the analysis of genomic data generated by high throughput technologies, announced today that it was issued patent No. EP 1 800 232 B1, "Identification and assignment of functionally corresponding regulatory sequences for orthologous...

How Toxoplasma gondii gets noticed

Researchers provide insight into how Toxoplasma gondii , a common parasite of people and other animals, triggers an immune response in its host. The report will appear online on January 19th in The Journal of Experimental Medicine . A strong immune response spares T. gondii -infected hosts ...

New rainforest mapping technology gets huge support

Stanford, CAA lack of technology needed to explore and monitor vast regions of tropical rain forest has been a critical bottleneck for Earth scientists, conservationists, and forest managers. As a result, we have limited understanding of the composition and function of these forests and how they a...

Tropical forest carbon monitoring gets big boost

Stanford, CAA new and improved tool to monitor deforestation and degradation in tropical forests has just gotten a huge boost. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology with a $1.6-million grant to expand and improve CLASLite (The Car...

Favorite Thanksgiving dish gets 'upscale' breeding

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. Families gathering around the Thanksgiving table this year will enjoy a traditional side dish that's been given some "upscale" breeding cranberries. While this year's version of the age-old staple will look or taste no different than servings of yore, a new cranberry hybri...

Conservation International gets support from Dreamworks Animation to protect giant pandas

Arlington, Virginia (November 10, 2008) Conservation International (CI) today announced that it has received a contribution from DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (NYSE: DWA) in support of its conservation efforts to protect the endangered giant panda. Yesterday in Los Angeles at an event launch ...

World's rarest big cat gets a check-up

NEW YORK (October 30, 2008) The world's rarest big cat is alive and well. At least one of them, that is, according to researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) who captured and released a female Far Eastern leopard in Russia last week. The capture was made in Primors...

Diabetes researcher gets $5M boost

A respected Queensland University of Technology researcher and his team have received $5 million from the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International, the third-biggest grant they have ever given to an Australian research team. Professor Nathan Efron of QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical ...

Multiple disease-related research gets green light from the NIH

Saranac Lake, N.Y. - Stephen Smiley, Ph.D., a member of the scientific faculty at the Trudeau Institute, whose research could lead to new treatments for several common diseases, has been awarded a research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for nearly $2 million. Dr. Smiley and...

Cornell gets $10 million NSF grant to establish new sustainability institute

Could a computer model help stabilize the tuna population? Can we compute how to transition to ethanol fuel without jeopardizing food production? Those and other questions will be tackled by computer scientists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists and environmental scientists affilia...

UGA gets $2.5 million in grants to study plants to make biofuels

University of Georgia researchers were recently awarded two grants totaling $2.5 million to help find better ways to produce biofuels from switchgrass and sunflowers. UGA was one of eight universities to receive grants from a program jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the ...

Integrated Fuel Technologies gets worldwide license for Argonne-developed Diesel DeNOx Catalyst

ARGONNE, Ill. (July 1, 2008) A new, patented catalyst developed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory that can reliably and economically reduce between 95 and 100 percent of the nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from diesel-fueled engines has been license...

'Early bird' project really gets the worm

BATON ROUGE Scientists from the LSU Museum of Natural Science, or MNS, recently participated in a project joining together the most prominent ornithological research programs in the world. This study the largest study of bird genetics ever completed has not only shaken up the avian evolutionary ...

World's only captive hairy-nosed otter gets new home

Arlington, Virginia (June 17, 2008) -- The world's only known hairy-nosed otter in captivity, one of the rarest and little known of otter species, got a new home and a Buddhist blessing today. Dara, a frisky young male rescued when his mother was killed by a fisherman, was released into a...

Europe gets together to harness quantum physics

The long cherished goal of applying the strange properties of quantum mechanics to the macroscopic world we inhabit has been brought closer by a series of recent developments. The exciting progress was made in the important field of quantum optics and discussed recently at a high level conference ...

Researchers discover how stealthy HIV protein gets into cells

Scientists have known for more than a decade that a protein associated with the HIV virus is good at crossing cell membranes, but they didnt know how it worked. A multidisciplinary team from the University of Illinois has solved the mystery, and their findings could improve the design of therapeut...

Futronic FS88 USB2.0 Fingerprint Reader Gets FIPS 201/PIV Certification from FBI

HONG KONG, March 6 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- Futronic Technology Company Limited, a global provider of biometric software and hardware products, announced that its new FS88 USB2.0 Fingerprint Scanner was certified by FBI to be compliant with PIV-071006 Image Quality Specification for Singer Finge...

Whirligig beetle gets rock 'n' roll legendary name

TEMPE, Ariz. An unusual new species of whirligig beetle from India is being named Orectochilus orbisonorum in honor of the late rock n roll legend Roy Orbison and his widow Barbara. Arizona State University entomologist Quentin Wheeler announced the description and discovery of the beetle spec...

In promiscuous antelopes, the 'battle of the sexes' gets flipped

In some promiscuous species, sexual conflict runs in reverse, reveals a new study published online on November 29th in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. Among African topi antelopes, females are the ones who aggressively pursue their mates, while males play hard to get. The classica...

UK research community gets extended access to ScienceDirect

Amsterdam, October 29, 2007 Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information and the National e-Journals Initiative 2 (NESLi2) have agreed to a four-year license for ScienceDirect, which contains over a quarter of the world's STM information. Key to the agre...

Study shows how the zebrafish gets his stripe

Scientists have discovered how the zebrafish (Danio rerio) develops one of its four stripes. Their findings add to the growing list of tasks carried out by an important molecule that is involved in the arrangement of everything from nerve cells to reproductive cells in the developing embryo. ...

Rutgers' high school outreach gets $3 million boost from NSF

New Brunswick, NJ The National Science Foundation has awarded Rutgers University scientists two grants totaling nearly $3 million to support outreach beyond the borders of the university to regional high schools. The two programs enabled by the new NSF funding build upon the Waksman Student Schol...

A steady, high-fat diet is bad, but the news gets worse

So much for the adage, ‘All things in moderation.?Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that people who consume a single, high-fat meal are more prone to suffer the physical consequences of stress than those who eat a low-fat meal. Published this month in the Journal of Nutrition, t...

Swimming 'to the left' gets bacteria upstream, and may promote infection

Yale engineers who study both flow hydrodynamics and how bacteria propel themselves report that one reason for the high incidence of infections associated with catheters in hospital patients may be that some pathogenic bacteria swim "to the left," in a study published in Physical Review Letters. ...

Penn researcher shows that DNA gets kinky easily at the nanoscale

Scientists have answered a long-standing molecular stumper regarding DNA: How can parts of such a rigid molecule bend and coil without requiring large amounts of force? According to a team of researchers from the United States and the Netherlands, led by a physicist from the University of Pennsylv...

LSD treatment for alcoholism gets new look

For the past five years, Dr. Erika Dyck has been unearthing some intriguing facts related to a group of pioneering psychiatrists who worked in Saskatchewan, Canada in the '50s and '60s. Among other things, the University of Alberta history of medicine professor has found records of the psychiatr...

HIV gets a makeover

The slow pace of AIDS research can be pinned, in no small part, on something akin to the square-peg-round-hole conundrum. The HIV-1 virus won't replicate in monkey cells, so researchers use a monkey virus -- known as SIVmac, or the macaque version of simian immunodeficiency virus -- to test potenti...

Asia's odd-ball antelope gets collared

A group of scientists led by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) working in Mongolia's windswept Gobi Desert recently fitted high-tech GPS (Global Positioning System) collars on eight saiga antelope in an effort to help protect one of Asia's most bizarre-looking ?and endangered ?...

When the going gets tough, slime molds start synthesizing

In times of plenty, the uni-cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum leads a solitary life munching on bacteria littering the forest floor. But these simple creatures can perform heroic developmental acts: when the bacterial food supply dries up, Dictyostelium amebas band together with their ne...

Cholesterol gets 'thumbs up' for role in digit development

When a new mother counts her newborn's fingers and toes, she probably doesn't realize that cholesterol may be to thank for baby's complete set of 20 digits. Although cholesterol has a bad rap as the sticky, fatty substance responsible for clogging arteries, Vanderbilt University Medical Center r...

Pitt professor's theory of evolution gets boost from cell research

An article by University of Pittsburgh Professor of Anthropology Jeffrey H. Schwartz and University of Salerno Professor of Biochemistry Bruno Maresca, published Jan. 30 in the New Anatomist journal, shows that the emerging understanding of cell structure lends strong support to Schwartz's theory o...

Watch your step when the going gets rough

Placing your foot accurately is a complicated process. If something moves where you plan to place your foot then you can adjust your step while your foot is swinging through. Experts thought previously that if nothing changed in the path, or in your plans, then the place where your foot will land i...

Researcher gets NSF grant to create mutant maize lines

A Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) researcher at Cornell University has received a grant to help assemble a unique database of DNA mutations in maize (corn). The project not only will allow researchers to study the effects of knocking out the function of single genes, one at a time, but also will ...

Heart repair gets new muscle

Some organs in the human body deal with injury better than others. A flesh wound or muscle tear might hurt, but, assuming you are otherwise healthy, both will heal. The prognosis for a heart attack, on the other hand, is not so clear-cut. It has long been thought that cardiac cells (cardiomyocyte...