solve in Biological News

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...

Biologists solve mystery of black wolves

Why do nearly half of North American wolves have black coats while European wolves are overwhelmingly gray or white? The surprising answer, according to teams of biologists and molecular geneticists from Stanford University, UCLA, Sweden, Canada and Italy, is that the black coats are the result of...

Peering inside the skull of a mouse to solve meningitis mystery

NEW YORK, Dec. 22, 2008 NYU Langone Medical Center scientists and their collaborators at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., have discovered an unexpected cause for the fatal seizures seen in mice with viral meningitis, an infection of the central nervous system, according to a st...

Researchers solve piece of large-scale gene silencing mystery

A team led by Craig Pikaard, Ph.D., WUSTL professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has made a breakthrough in understanding the phenomenon of nucleolar dominance, the silencing of an entire parental set of ribosomal RNA genes in a hybrid plant or animal. Since the machinery involved in nucleo...

Barrow scientists solve 200-year-old scientific debate involving visual illusions

Neuroscientists at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center have discovered a direct link between eye motions and the perception of illusory motion that solves a 200-year-old debate. Stephen Macknik, PhD, director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiolog...

Egg whites solve the 3-D problem

The real world is three-dimensional. That's true even in the laboratory, where scientists have to grow cells to study how they develop and what happens when their growth is abnormal. More and more laboratories are seeking to develop three-dimensional cell culture systems that allow them to tes...

Replacing the coach doesn't solve problems

Bringing in a new coach rarely solves problems, regardless of when it is done. This is the conclusion of a study from Mid Sweden University about hiring and firing coaches in the Swedish Elite Series ice-hockey league during the period 1975/76-2005/06. Despite this fact, coaches are nevertheless...

Stem cells may solve mystery of early pregnancy breast cancer protection

The answer to why an early pregnancy seems to protect against breast cancer could rest with a decrease in stem cells found after animals have given birth, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in a report that appears in the current issue of the journal Stem Cell. Women who have chil...

Guilt on their hands: tiny 'tags' could help to solve and deter gun crime

Criminals who use firearms may find it much harder to evade justice in future, thanks to an ingenious new bullet tagging technology developed in the UK. The tiny tags just 30 microns* in diameter and invisible to the naked eye are designed to be coated onto gun cartridges. They then attach th...

Worldwide mission to solve iron deficiency

A University of Adelaide researcher will lead an Australian project to help address the world's biggest nutritional deficiency lack of iron. Dr Alex Johnson has been awarded nearly $300,000 to work with the Bill Gates-funded HarvestPlus Challenge Program to increase iron content in rice and ot...

UCLA researchers solve decade-old mystery

Environmentally friendly hydrogen gas fueled vehicles can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lessen the countrys dependence on sources of fossil fuel. Though several hydrogen vehicles exist on the market today, there is still much room for improvement in the way that hydrogen is stor...

ASU professor helps solve mystery of glassy water

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Water has some amazing properties. It is the only natural substance found in all three states solid, liquid and gas within the range of natural Earth temperatures. Its solid form is less dense than its liquid form, which is why ice floats. It can absorb a great deal of heat witho...

UA-led research team awarded $50 million to solve plant biology's grand challenge questions

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a University of Arizonaled team $50 million dollars to create a global center and computer cyberinfrastructure within which to answer plant biology's grand challenge questions, which no single research entity in the world currently has the capacity...

Danish researches solve virus puzzle

How is virus as for example HIV and bird flu able to make the cells within a human body work for the purpose of the virus? Researchers at the University of Copenhagen shed new light on this question. The research is a collaboration between molecular biologists and physicists. ”The molecular biolo...

MIT biologists solve vitamin puzzle

Solving a mystery that has puzzled scientists for decades, MIT and Harvard researchers have discovered the final piece of the synthesis pathway of vitamin B12-the only vitamin synthesized exclusively by microorganisms. B12, the most chemically complex of all vitamins, is essential for human healt...

Microfluidic chip helps solve cellular mating puzzle

Using a biochemical version of a computer chip, a team led by Johns Hopkins researchers has solved a long-standing mystery related to the mating habits of yeast cells. The findings, described in the Feb. 18 Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature, shed new light on the way cells send a...

Coated nanoparticles solve sticky drug-delivery problem

The layers of mucus that protect sensitive tissue throughout the body have an undesirable side effect: they can also keep helpful medications away. To overcome this hurdle, Johns Hopkins researchers have found a way to coat nanoparticles with a chemical that helps them slip through this sticky barr...

UNC scientists solve mystery of how largest cellular motor protein powers movement

Scientists now understand how an important protein converts chemical energy to mechanical force, thus powering the process of cell division, thanks to a new structural model by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers. The structural model helps solve a scientific mystery: how the...

Radiologists attempt to solve mystery of Tut's demise

Egyptian radiologists who performed the first-ever computed tomography (CT) evaluation of King Tutankhamun’s mummy believe they have solved the mystery of how the ancient pharaoh died. The CT images and results of their study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of...

Scientists solve 30-year-old mystery of mutant mouse's kidney woes

Researchers seeking insights into kidney failure in human infants have located the source of a 30-year-old mystery mutation that causes similar problems in a mouse line. Scientists have known of the mouse line's naturally occurring mutation since the early 1970s. Researchers at Washington Univer...

Massive duplication of genes may solve Darwin's 'abominable mystery' about flowering plants

Researchers from the Floral Genome Project at Penn State University, with an international team of collaborators, have proposed an answer to Charles Darwin's "abominable mystery:" the inexplicably rapid evolution of flowering plants immediately after their first appearance some 140 million years ag...

Scientists solve sour taste proteins

A team led by Duke University Medical Center researchers has discovered two proteins in the taste buds on the surface of the tongue that are responsible for detecting sour tastes. While the scientific basis of other primary types of flavors, such as bitter and sweet, is known, this is the first s...

Researchers seek to solve mystery of natural HIV control

An international, multi-institutional research consortium is seeking to discover how a few HIV-infected individuals are naturally able to suppress replication of the virus. The Elite Controller Collaborative Study ( http://www.mgh.harvard.edu/aids/hiv_elite_controllers.asp ), the first large-scale...

UC San Diego biologists solve plant growth hormone enigma

Gardeners and farmers have used the plant hormone auxin for decades, but how plants produce and distribute auxin has been a long-standing mystery. Now researchers at the University of California, San Diego have found the solution, which has valuable applications in agriculture. The study, publ...

Researchers solve mystery of how nuclear pores duplicate before cell division

Researchers have long wondered how nuclear pores ?the all-important channels that control the flow of information in and out of a cell's nucleus ?double in number to prepare for the split to come when a cell divides. Now, for the first time, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies w...

Bees solve complex colour puzzles

Bees have a much more sophisticated visual system than previously thought, according to a new UCL (University College London) study in which bees were able to solve complicated colour puzzles. The findings shed light on how brains resolve one of the most difficult challenges of vision - namely, rec...

Unweaving amyloid fibers to solve prion puzzles

Amyloid fibers are best known as the plaque that gunks up neurons in people with neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease--the human analog of mad cow disease. But even though amyloids are common and implicated in a host of conditions, researchers haven't been a...

Stem Cells to Solve the Blood Shortage Problem?

Accounts of the tsunami that killed over a quarter of a million people in Southeast Asia on the 26th of December, 2004, slowly disappear from the media, but the event is nevertheless heavily burned into the memories of those who are directly involved. In the aftermath of the disaster, academics and...

Scripps research scientists solve structure of a critical innate immune system protein

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have solved the structure of a crucial human immune system molecule called TLR3, an acronym for Toll-like receptor three. In an upcoming issue of the journal Science, the protein is described as a large horseshoe-shaped coil composed of 23 leucine-rich r...

Could microbes solve Russia's chemical weapons conundrum?

One of nature's most versatile microorganisms ?a bacterium called Pseudomonas putida ?could help mop up the toxic by-products caused by the destruction of the chemical weapon mustard, write Russian researchers in Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/jc...

Scientists solve structure of key protein in innate immune response

When bacteria invade the body, a molecule called CD14 binds to substances liberated from the bacteria and initiates the cellular defense mechanisms. In a report published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, scientists in Korea announced their elucidation of three-dimensional structure of CD14 a...

Tiny particles could solve billion-dollar problem

New research from Rice University's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology finds that nanoparticles of gold and palladium are the most effective catalysts yet identified for remediation of one of the nation's most pervasive and troublesome groundwater pollutants, trichloroethene or ...

Marine microbes creating green waves in industry

...e going to be an increasingly important part of the manufacturing landscape. Looking to biological systems that have been finely tuned by evolution to solve problems, rather than starting from scratch every time, might seem an obvious thing to do. It does however, in many cases, require the bringing togeth...

New cancer drug delivery system is effective and reversible

...uch folate, a vitamin, also work as cancer cell targeting agents, but those now in use are not as good as antibodies at binding to cancer cells. To solve the cell-targeting problem, the U. of I. team turned its attention to small molecules called aptamers. "Aptamers are short strands of DNA or RNA; t...

Argonne to showcase science and technology at community open house

...e, engineering and technology." This rare opportunity will allow visitors to see how Argonne, the nation's first national laboratory, is helping to solve some of the world's toughest challenges in energy, environment and national security and learn more about science and technology. Argonne conducts ...

Jet-propelled imaging for an ultrafast light source

...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. ... cripple the organism of which it is a part. Until now, the best way to solve the structure of a protein or virus has been with x-ray crystallography. Th...

Key OSU water research receives national funding

..., said the study is a great example of the division's commitment to its land-grant mission. "We have a state and federal mandate to help Oklahomans solve concerns and issues of importance to them, their families and communities," he said. "Water-use efficiency and availability is certainly one of the fo...

Iowa State University researchers develop process for 'surgical' genetic changes

...at you have three meters of DNA in a cell if you unwound it. Putting the break where you want it has always been the problem." Zinc finger nucleases solve the problem and allows scientists to take greater advantage of homologous recombination, according to Wright and Townsend. The research, published i...

New biomarker method could increase the number of diagnostic tests for cancer

...es in the biomarker discovery and validation process, and this research may solve that dilemma." The collaborative and multi-institute nature of this wor...al Proteomic Technologies for Cancer (CPTC) program was established to help solve this problem. The five institutes that participated in this research as par...

Computers aid in cracking deception in plants

.... "Students from the life sciences will be working closely with students from computer science, and vice versa, to apply their individual expertise to solve a common research problem." ...