takes in Biological News

World's largest ocean observatory takes shape

Canada is taking the world on a 25-year non-stop research expeditioninto the deep ocean. Over the next two-and-a-half months, a team of scientists and marine engineers are completing the installation off the British Columbia coast of NEPTUNE Canada, the world's largest and most advanced cabled ...

SIRT1 takes down tumors

Yuan et al. have identified another anti-cancer effect of the "longevity" protein SIRT1. By speeding the destruction of the tumor promoter c-Myc, SIRT1 curbs cell division. The study will be published online April 13 ( www.jcb.org ) and will appear in the April 20 print issue of the Journal of Ce...

University of Kansas graduate student researcher takes aim at deadly brain tumors

LAWRENCE, Kansas Natalie Ciaccio, a fourth-year graduate student researcher in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Kansas, is investigating what might be an ideal target for anti-cancer drug therapy, and she is focusing her work on brain tumors specifically. The Na...

RNA research strategy for Europe takes shape

Research into RNA, a molecule found in every cell of our bodies, could lead to remarkable advances in the treatment of diseases such as cancer and diabetes, a meeting organised by the European Science Foundation was told. The conference, held the institute of Parasitologa y Biomedicina "Lpez-Ne...

'It takes a genome: How a clash between our genes and modern life is making us sick'

It's not just the climate that is struggling with what humans have done to the modern world, our genes are feeling the pressure as well, according to Professor Greg Gibson's recently published book. In It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick , Profess...

New models question old assumptions about how many molecules it takes to control cell division

Blacksburg, Va. -- A single cell whether a yeast cell or one of your cells is exquisitely sensitive to its surroundings. It receives input signals, processes the information, makes decisions, and issues commands for making the proper response. As with any control system, noise errors, slip-ups,...

It takes 2 to tango

This release is available in German . Where would we be without our ability to remember important information or, for that matter, to forget irrelevant details? Thanks to the flexibility of the nerve cell's communication units, called synapses, we are good at both. Up to now, only the r...

Small satellite takes on large thunderstorms

Firefly, it's called, this new small satellite mission sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's designed to help solve the mystery of the most powerful natural particle accelerator in Earth's atmosphere: TGFs, or terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. TGFs likely result from thunderstorms....

Forgotten but not gone -- how the brain takes care of things

This release is available in German . Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. What ...

NC State takes research lead in protecting Puerto Rico's unique freshwater fisheries

A team of researchers led by North Carolina State University has made an enormous advance in the understanding of some of Puerto Rico's most remarkable ecosystems by conducting the first comprehensive study of the island's freshwater fish species. NC State's Dr. Thomas Kwak, who led the study, say...

Geologist who linked cosmic strike to dinosaurs' extinction takes top prize

Walter Alvarez, the maverick geologist who convinced a skeptical world that dinosaurs and many other living things on Earth were wiped out by a huge fireball from space, has won the highly esteemed Vetlesen Prize. Considered by many the earth sciences' equivalent of a Nobel, the $250,000 awar...

NC State takes lead in crime scene investigation training

North Carolina State University researchers are launching a new project that will standardize forensic crime scene investigation training throughout the state, decrease the cost of providing the training to law enforcement personnel and forensic scientists, and hopefully contribute to the establis...

UW science photo takes second in national contest

With a photograph that embodies the unexpected and sometimes breathtaking outcomes of science, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Jenna Eun has won second place in the 2008 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science mag...

High blood pressure takes big toll on small filtering units of the kidney

Take a kidney out of the body and it still knows how to filter toxins from the blood. But all bets are off in the face of high blood pressure. "How does the kidney know how to do it and why does it break in hypertension?" says Dr. Edward W. Inscho, physiologist in the Medical College of Geor...

Catalysis takes center stage at chemistry conference

RICHLAND, Wash. Scientists can learn how advances in catalysis are addressing real-world energy problems and expanding research horizons at an upcoming symposium at the 236th American Chemical Society national meeting in Philadelphia, Penn. The scientific community is honoring the contributions o...

NOAA takes first broad look at soot from ships

Tugboats puff out more soot for the amount of fuel used than other commercial vessels, and large cargo ships emit more than twice as much soot as previously estimated, according to the first extensive study of commercial vessel soot emissions. Scientists from NOAA and the University of Colorado co...

Buckminster Fuller takes on big coal

In the quest for coal, over a million and a half acres of Appalachia have been strip-mined, whole mountains removed, trillions of gallons of toxic slurry left behind, and communities devastated. Not exactly a promising place for a new green economy to arise. Or maybe it is. For his startling...

EuroDYNA takes lid off the genome

European researchers have made significant progress unravelling how genes are governed and why this sometimes goes wrong in disease. The key lies in the dynamic ever-changing structure of the chromatin, which is the underlying complex of protein and DNA making up the chromosomes in which almost al...

Frog study takes leaf out of nature's book

A brightly coloured tropical frog under threat of extinction is the focus of a new research project hoping to better understand how environment and diet influence its development and behaviour. Biologists from The University of Manchester have teamed up with experts at Chester Zoo in the hope t...

Hepatitis E takes a piggyback

Pigs carry hepatitis E virus (HEV), which they can pass on to humans. But now research from Japan published in Online Open Access journal BMC Veterinary Research says that pigs get HEV early enough to minimise the risk of human infection. The scenario humans need to worry about would occur if the i...

Bumblebee house warming -- it takes a village

All bumblebees always aren't as busy as, well, a bee. It all depends on what their job is. Researchers have known that a key to the insects' success in adapting to cooler climates is their ability to maintain fairly stable body temperatures when flying to flowers. Whether and how they maintaine...

Smashing the time it takes to repair our bones

New research by Queensland University of Technology is helping scientists better understand how bone cells work and may one day lead to the development of technology that can speed up the time it takes to heal fractured and broken bones. QUT recent graduate Dr Gwynne Hannay has built a gadget cap...

Tuberculosis: The bacillus takes refuge in adipose cells

A team from the Institut Pasteur has recently shown that the tuberculosis bacillus hides from the immune system in its host's fat cells. This formidable pathogen is protected against even the most powerful antibiotics in these cells, in which it may remain dormant for years. This discovery, publish...

Gene therapy study takes aim at prostate cancer

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) are hoping a new gene therapy that takes a gene called RTVP-1 directly into the prostate tumor will prove effective in preventing recurrence of the disease. The first phase of the study is designed to test the safety of the treatment and determine ...

P(acman) takes a bite out of deciphering Drosophila DNA

P(acman) ?a new method of introducing DNA into the genome of fruit flies or Drosophila ?promises to transform the ability of scientists to study the structure and function of virtually all the fly’s genes, and the method may be applicable to other frequently studied organisms such as mice, said its...

Diabetes research takes wing thanks to long-lived fruit fly

The creation of an extraordinarily long-lived fruit fly by genetics researchers at the University of Rochester has led scientists down an unexpected new path in the fight against diabetes. The mutant fly is serving as a portal for understanding the factors that determine how nutrition and stress se...

The brain, traffic and nano-circuits -- e-Science takes on major challenges

Research into three major scientific and technological challenges is to receive a major boost from the application of e-Science and grid computing. The challenges are, understanding the brain, mapping the detailed environmental impact of traffic and designing future generation nano-scale electronic...

Pitt phage hunter takes on tuberculosis

One third of the world's people are infected with tuberculosis, and someone new is infected every second. TB is notoriously hard to treat, requiring a course of multiple antibiotics over six to nine months. Many people don't complete the full course of treatment, which leads to increasing antibioti...

For Stanford scientists, RNAi gene therapy takes two steps forward, one step back

Three years ago Mark Kay, MD, PhD, published the first results showing that a hot new biological phenomenon called RNA interference was an effective gene-therapy technique in mice. That finding kicked off an RNAi gene therapy research flurry amongst both academic and industry research groups. Now...

Taking evolution's temperature: Researchers pinpoint the energy it takes to make a species

Comfortable living is not why so many different life forms seem to converge at the warmer areas of the planet. Writing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say higher temperatures near the equator speed up the metabolisms of the inhabitants, fueling genetic...

HIV vaccine takes different tack to boosting immune response

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston have reason to believe their unorthodox vaccine could one day help to prevent or control HIV infection, according to a study published in today's edition of Public Library of Science Medicine. The study in mice boosted the immune response...

Blood flow in brain takes a twist, affecting views of Alzheimer's

New findings that long-overlooked brain cells play an important role in regulating blood flow in the brain call into question one of the basic assumptions underlying today's most sophisticated brain imaging techniques and could open a new frontier when it comes to understanding Alzheimer's disease....

New influenza vaccine takes weeks to mass produce

Using cell-based methods researchers have developed a commercially viable method for mass producing effective vaccines against potential pandemic influenza strains in weeks instead of the months required for traditional egg-based vaccines. They report their results today at the 2006 ASM Biodefense ...

Unique library of plant genes germinates, takes root at UNC

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's newest "library" is not the kind that will entice an average book lover, but it eventually will please thousands of plant scientists around the world. Through such researchers' work, it will undoubtedly contribute to improving crops that humans arou...

Whole-body MRI Takes Less Than 20 Min To Scan A Patient's Entire Body For Cancer Spread To Bone

Whole-body MRI with an automatic moving table is effective for evaluating the entire skeleton in patients with suspected bone metastasis (cancer that has spread to the bone from other parts of the body) in a single imaging scan-and it only takes between 15 and 18 minutes, say two different European...

NJIT Presidential Award winner takes stem cell research another step

Treena Arinzeh, a young professor who last year won a Presidential Award, the nation's highest scientific honor, is bringing the promise of stem cell research one step closer to reality. Arinzeh, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at NJIT, is researching the use of stem cells to i...

Wastewater produces electricity and desalinates water

...nate water," the researchers report in a recent online issue of Environmental Science and Technology . "The big selling point is that it currently takes a lot of electricity to desalinate water and using the microbial desalination cells, we could actually desalinate water and produce electricity while ...

Symposium to discuss geoengineering to fight climate change at the ESA Annual Meeting

...t research should continue on safer ways to use geoengineering at a smaller scale. Geologic sequestration, sometimes known as CO2 capture and storage, takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and stores it in underground reservoirs. Jackson says that this solution has the potential to store more than a century's wo...

Understanding how weeds are resistant to herbicides

...nd so in one seven and a half hour run you generate a million reads." Tranel explained that although more traditional herbicide resistance research takes years, it's more gene-specific. "We sampled plants, brought them back to the green house, grew them up, confirmed that they were resistant and then we...

Sustainable agriculture at the ESA Annual Meeting

...-term solution, because pests can build up resistance, and new pesticides are constantly being developed," she says. "Building up predator communities takes time, but the systems are more stable and will provide more ecosystem services in the long term." Reduced tilling improves soil microbe biodiversi...