were in Biological News

CT scans reveal that dinosaurs were airheads

ATHENS, Ohio (Dec. 8, 2008) Paleontologists have long known that dinosaurs had tiny brains, but they had no idea the beasts were such airheads. A new study by Ohio University researchers Lawrence Witmer and Ryan Ridgely found that dinosaurs had more air cavities in their heads than expected. ...

Study of polar dinosaur migration questions whether dinosaurs were truly the first great migrators

EdmontonContrary to popular belief, polar dinosaurs may not have traveled nearly as far as originally thought when making their bi-annual migration. University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively have suggested that while some dinosaurs may have migrated during the winter season, ...

Britain's last Neanderthals were more sophisticated than we thought

An archaeological excavation at a site near Pulborough, West Sussex, has thrown remarkable new light on the life of northern Europe's last Neanderthals. It provides a snapshot of a thriving, developing population rather than communities on the verge of extinction. "The tools we've found at the...

Extra gene copies were enough to make early humans' mouths water

SANTA CRUZ, CA--To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks. That's one interpretation of a discovery, published online September 9 in Nature Genetics, which indicates that humans carry extra copies of the salivary amylase gene. Humans have many more copies of this gene than a...

Egyptians, not Greeks were true fathers of medicine

Scientists examining documents dating back 3,500 years say they have found proof that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks. The research team from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester discovered the evidenc...

Study finds antibiotic resistance in poultry even when antibiotics were not used

A surprising finding by a team of University of Georgia scientists suggests that curbing the use of antibiotics on poultry farms will do little ?if anything ?to reduce rates of antibiotic resistant bacteria that have the potential to threaten human health. Dr. Margie Lee, professor in the UGA Co...

Like salty food? Chances are you had low blood sodium when you were born

A new study concludes that low birthweight babies born with low sodium (salt) in their blood serum will likely consume large quantities of dietary sodium later in life. In the study, researchers also found that newborns with the most severe cases of low sodium blood serum consumed ~1700 mg more so...

Tamed 11,400 years ago, figs were likely first domesticated crop

Archaeobotanists have found evidence that the dawn of agriculture may have come with the domestication of fig trees in the Near East some 11,400 years ago, roughly a thousand years before such staples as wheat, barley, and legumes were domesticated in the region. The discovery dates domesticated fi...

Large dinosaurs were extremely hot in their day, UF study finds

If you think dinosaurs are hot today, just think back to about 110 million years ago when they really ran hot and heavy. One of the larger animals, a behemoth called Sauroposeidon proteles, weighed close to 120,000 pounds as an adult. Now, a new study led by the University of Florida suggests it...

Small molecule interactions were central to the origin of life

In an important new paper forthcoming in the June issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Robert Shapiro (New York University) argues against the widely held theory that the origin of life began with the spontaneous appearance of a large, replicating molecule such as RNA. Instead, Shapiro raises...

Research: Snails were overlooked contributors to marsh destruction

Buoyed by the effects of an intense drought, otherwise harmless snails likely killed off thousands of acres of salt marsh in the Southeast in recent years. Periwinkle snails, known to science as Littoraria irrorata, normally coexist happily with salt marsh. But the drought, which lasted from 1999...

Researchers know what you were about to say; fMRI used to detect memory storage and retrieval

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University have provided evidence that the act of recalling a memory is a bit like mental time travel. Their study, presented in the Dec. 23 edition of the journal Science, demonstrate...

Life's origins were easier than was thought

In the primordial soup that produced life on earth, there were organic molecules that combined to produce the first nucleic acid chains, which were the first elements able to self-replicate. According to one of the more accepted theories, these molecules were ribonucleic acid (RNA) chains, a molecu...

Why were the HIV prevention trials in commercial sex workers abandoned?

One promising approach to help stem the global HIV epidemic is to give commercial sex workers an HIV medication (such as the drug tenofovir) before they have high risk sex in the hope of reducing their chances of becoming infected, an approach called "pre-exposure prophylaxis" (PREP). But activist ...

EMBO pioneers pension plan for internationally mobile postdoctoral researchers

...llowships have supported thousands of talented young researchers since they were first introduced in the 1960s. More than 200 long-term fellowships are awar...r cent of fellows contributed to a pension scheme, while nearly all of them were insured against health risks and accidents. The European Charter for Resear...

Highest ever winter water temperatures recorded

...xecutive of the Tasmanian Rock Lobster Association, Rodney Treloggen, said he was not aware of any reports of Indian Ocean species but he said fishers were concerned at what he described as a "bad year" for the industry in the south-east and east coast. "We know the warmer waters have an impact but we...

Carbon nanoparticles toxic to adult fruit flies but benign to young

...lution. "The point is these same compounds that were not toxic to the (fruit fly) larvae were toxic to the adults in some cases, so there may be...udent and lead author Xinyuan Liu showed the flies were affected physically. In some, the carbon nanoparti...

Bladder cells feel stretch

...tion, robust Ca2+ influx and following ATP release were observed in urothelial cells. These phenomena were almost completely attributed to TRPV4 activation, since such responses were eliminated by a TRPV4 inhibitor and reduced in TRP...

Carnegie donates landmark clones to biology

...pores off with their C-terminus to see how they work in yeast and immature eggs of the frog Xenopus in the presence of ammonium. The researchers were totally surprised that the mechanism in which three subunits regulate each other was found in the primitive archaebacteria. It means that it evolved b...

AGU journal highlights -- Aug. 6, 2009

...es are about 3 times less. The authors' estimate for methane is similar to basin-wide studies of the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that IPCC overestimates were likely generated by an overly coarse sampling method. Title: Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the ocean: A reassessment using basin-wide ...

New cancer drug delivery system is effective and reversible

...searcher in the laboratory of chemistry professor Yi Lu, who led the study. Materials science and engineering professors Gerard Wong and Jianjun Cheng were co-principal investigators on the study with Lu. Graduate students Rong Tong (who is co-first author on the paper with Cao), Abhijit Mishra and Weiche...

Climate-caused biodiversity booms and busts in ancient plants and mammals

...zona. "But 50 million years ago, when temperatures were at their highest, that area was a tropical rainfor...l forest rodents and other mammals. In fact, there were more species of mammals living in the western part...lete loss of many mammalian groups that previously were well represented. Lower temperatures and a dryer c...

University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers reveal ocean acidification at Station ALOHA

...ioxide (CO 2 ) into the atmosphere, significantly impacting global climate. were it not for the absorption of CO 2 by the oceans, the alarming growth of at...ents. The authors also found distinct layers at depth in which pH declines were actually faster than at the surface. Dore and colleagues attribute these s...

'Green' energy from algae

...es, grapes, apples, sugar beets, and terrestrial energy plants in cooperation with partners from research and industry. Partly, large-scale facilities were constructed. "It is our objective to develop new economically efficient and sustainable extraction methods to obtain a maximum amount of cell constitu...

More than half of Texas physicians do not always recommend HPV vaccine to girls

...d the HPV vaccine to girls, 68.4 percent said they were likely to recommend the vaccine to boys and 41.7 p...hat those in an academic vs. non-academic practice were more than twice as likely to recommend the vaccine...nal conferences an important source of information were almost twice as likely to recommend the vaccine th...

Women often opt to surgically remove their breasts, ovaries to reduce cancer risk

... who had a biopsy after undergoing risk evaluation were twice as likely to choose a risk-reducing mastectomy. Forty percent of the women who were mutation carriers underwent bilateral risk-reducin...salpingo-oophorectomy was more common in women who were BRCA1 gene carriers 52 percent had the surgery co...

Venomous sea snakes play heads or tails with their predators

...yellow horseshoe marking on the tip of the head and the tail. The yellow was deeper than the colours on the rest of the body and the black colorations were much longer than the dark bands on the rest of the body, highlighting the similarity between the head and the tail. The reason for this mixture o...

Abnormal brain circuits may prevent movement disorder

... to study those with and without symptoms who carry the disease gene. There were 20 people in the study; 12 with symptoms and eight without. They also had a...aging allowed them to see something for the first time. They saw that there were two places along the motor pathway that seemed to stop the flow of neural s...

Understanding how weeds are resistant to herbicides

... 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 started crossing a resistant plant with a sensitive plant. We look at its progeny to see if the resistance is inherited to under...

New insights into health and environmental effects of carbon nanoparticles

... other animals in certain kinds of research. There were no apparent ill effects on fruit fly larvae that a...ons of nanoparticles. However, adult flies died or were incapacitated when their bodies were exposed to large amounts of certain nanoparticles....

Growing evidence of marijuana smoke's potential dangers

... toxicity to cells and to DNA. Scientists exposed cultured animal cells and bacteria to condensed smoke samples from both marijuana and tobacco. There were distinct differences in the degree and type of toxicity elicited by marijuana and cigarette smoke. Marijuana smoke caused significantly more damage to...

Scary ancient spiders revealed in 3-D models, thanks to new imaging technique

... to take 3,000 x-rays of each fossil. These x-rays were then compiled into precise 3D models, using custom...oth Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestivicii were around the size of a 50 pence piece and they roame...n land. During this period, the world's continents were merging together near the equator to form one supe...

Pitt researchers find promising candidate protein for cancer prevention vaccines

...alignancies in high-risk individuals. Mice that were vaccinated to boost their immune response against this cell cycle protein, called cyclin B1, were able to reject a tumor challenge in which they were exposed to a cancer cell line that overproduced it...

Hybrid vehicle rebates produce scant environmental benefits, high cost

... The study also finds that the majority of consumers who purchase hybrids were not motivated to do so by government rebates, says Chandra, whose co-author...earch. "Our estimates indicate that two-thirds of people who buy hybrids were going to buy them anyway," says Chandra. "So for the majority, rebates are ...

Brain difference in psychopaths identified

...cated in psychopathy. Earlier studies had suggested that dysfunction of specific brain regions might underpin psychopathy. Such areas of the brain were identified as the amygdale, ie the area associated with emotions, fear and aggression, and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the region which deals with...

New stem cell research could reduce number of animal experiments

... precursor cells that are able to develop into more specialised cells and tissues such as neurones or skin cells. Whilst previously most stem cells were derived from embryos, this new research project will instead use Induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS cells) which are made from skin cells from adults...

Sustainable agriculture at the ESA Annual Meeting

...ugh to maintain high levels of organic nutrients. In addition to being more ecologically sustainable, Glover's team found that the perennial fields were more energy-efficient in providing productive harvests. Although only the annual fields received yearly fertilizer inputs, the perennial fields yielde...

Animal and plant communication at the ESA Annual Meeting

...te with one another, she also wondered if the bugs were mimicking the scent of the ants. When she and her...e number of ants the pitchers' primary prey that were captured. These results are not surprising, sa...tly. These results suggest that the bird predators were preferentially targeting generalists. The diff...

The way you eat may affect your risk for breast cancer

...rol mice who ate the amount of food they wanted, 35 percent among those who were chronically restricted and only nine percent in those who intermittently restricted calories. The researchers were initially surprised by these findings for several reasons. First, the preva...

Holding breath for several minutes elevates marker for brain damage

... 10% of the contestants in the static apnea events were disqualified after they lost either motor control ...eir breath for as long as possible. The conditions were dry, but mimicked a static apnea dive in which the...evels rose. The S100B levels, while elevated, were well below levels associated with brain injury. In...