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To sea or not to sea: When it comes to salmon sex, size sometimes doesn't matter

The ones that stay and the ones that stray are biological puzzles among Pacific salmon, of whom the vast majority ?but not all ?travel thousands of miles to sea and back to the streams where they hatched. There are chinook salmon populations in Idaho in which an occasional male stays put and matures when only 6 inches long ?that is, he's able to fertilize eggs at even that diminutive size,...

Bugs expose underground carbon traffic system 10 times more important than fossil fuel burning

The flow of carbon through soil is ten times greater than the amount of carbon moved around by the burning of fossil fuel but until now how this happens was at best poorly understood. Soil was almost literally a black box to scientists interested in carbon. Now researchers at the University of Warwick have been able to shed light in that black box by getting a particular class of insects to expos...

Data published in PNAS show antibodies can be made 10 times more toxic to cancer cells

Engineering the "Fc" region of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) increases their toxicity to cancer cells, potentially improving the utility of targeted cancer therapies, according to research conducted at Xencor, which will be published in the March 14 print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Monoclonal antibodies have important advantages over chemotherapy a...

Tyrannosaur survivorship -- tough times for teens

A massive dinosaur death bed in Alberta has helped map out the animal's life span and thrown doubt on long-held theories about how one species lived, says new research conducted in part at the University of Alberta. "One of the surprises to me was that the overall pattern of survivorship fits closer to an attritional model rather than the catastrophic model we were expecting," said world-...

Immune system police learn early and sometimes badly

Regulatory T cells, which function like immune system police, learn early in life what to protect, and that may include viruses, bacteria and tumors, researchers have shown. Using genetically manipulated mice and technology that enables a snapshot of the repertoire of antigen receptors that determine what cells recognize, Medical College of Georgia researchers followed T cells as they spe...

Good times ahead for dinosaur hunters, according to U of Penn scientist's dinosaur census

The golden age of dinosaur discovery is yet upon us, according to Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania. In a forthcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dodson revises his groundbreaking 1990 census on the diversity of discoverable dinosaurs upward by 50%, offering a brighter outlook about the number of dinosaurs waiting to be found. His findings also add...

New approach could lower antibiotic requirements by 50 times

Antibiotic doses could be reduced by up to 50 times using a new approach based on bacteriophages. It is the phages' abili...

Children of smokers have more than 5 times higher levels of a nicotine toxin

Having a mother that smokes was found to have the bigg...