what in Biological News

Harvard scientist says we are what we eat -- and what we cook

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 1, 2009 -- "You are what you eat." Can these pithy words explain the evolution of the human species? Yes, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, who argues in a new book that the invention of cooking -- even more than agriculture, the eating of meat, or the advent o...

Swine flu: What does it do to pigs?

The effects of H1N1 swine flu have been investigated in a group of piglets. Scientists writing in BioMed Central's open access Virology Journal studied the pathology of the virus, finding that all infected animals showed flu-like symptoms between one and four days after infection and were sheddi...

Redefining what it means to be a prion

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (April 2, 2009) Whitehead Institute researchers have quintupled the number of identifiable prion proteins in yeast and have further clarified the role prions play in the inheritance of both beneficial and detrimental traits. "The big debate in the field is are the prions funct...

Circadian clock may be critical for remembering what you learn, Stanford researchers say

The circadian rhythm that quietly pulses inside us all, guiding our daily cycle from sleep to wakefulness and back to sleep again, may be doing much more than just that simple metronomic task, according to Stanford researchers. Working with Siberian hamsters, biologist Norman Ruby has shown tha...

Johns Hopkins scientists discover what drives the development of a fatal form of malaria

Platelets those tiny, unassuming cells that cause blood to clot and scabs to form when you cut yourself play an important early role in promoting cerebral malaria, an often lethal complication that occurs mostly in children. Affecting as many as half a billion people in tropical and subtropical ...

If a street tree falls... what does it take to make sound policy?

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- There's little debate that, when a tree falls near a city street, it makes a sound. But other questions are more difficult to answer: Who is affected by the falling tree and how? Who is liable for the damage? And who is responsible for deciding how to replace the tree? A p...

Summer heat too hot for you? What is comfortable?

Extreme heat or cold is not only uncomfortable, it can be deadlycausing proteins to unravel and malfunction. For many years now, scientists have understood the molecular mechanisms that enable animals to sense dangerous temperatures; such as extremely high temperatures that directly trigger he...

Get smart about what you eat and you might actually improve your intelligence

New research findings published online in The FASEB Journal provide more evidence that if we get smart about what we eat, our intelligence can improve. According to MIT scientists, dietary nutrients found in a wide range of foods from infant formula to eggs increase brain synapses and improve co...

Finding out what the Big Bang and ink jets have in common

It often turns out there is more to commonplace everyday events than meets the eye. The folding of paper, or fall of water droplets from a tap, are two such events, both of which involve the creation of singularities requiring sophisticated mathematical techniques to describe, analyse and predict....

Fat: Its not what you think!

As heart disease and obesity continue to plague the US, many people believe that the recent proliferation of high-fat diets is the major culprit. As a consequence, many people aim to significantly reduce the amount of saturated fats they consume with the hope that they will be slimmer, healthier, ...

How what and how much we eat (and drink) affects our risk of cancer

SAN DIEGO A healthy diet and lifestyle protect against a wide range of diseases, and new research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 2008 Annual Meeting, April 12-16, shows that cancer is no exception. Researchers demonstrate how excessive alcohol drinking could lead to an ...

Evolution of the sexes: What a fungus can tell us

DURHAM, N.C. -- Fungi don't exactly come in boy and girl varieties, but they do have sex differences. In fact, a new finding from Duke University Medical Center shows that some of the earliest evolved forms of fungus contain clues to how the sexes evolved in higher animals, including that distant ...

Cranberry sauce: good for what ails you

WORCESTER, Mass. Cranberry sauce is not the star of the traditional Thanksgiving Day meal, but when it comes to health benefits, the lowly condiment takes center stage. In fact, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have found that compounds in cranberries are able to alter E. coli...

Biological warfare: What do you need to know?

HOUSTON, Nov. 5, 2007 Highly infectious biological agents have been used to spread death and despair for centuries. A speaker coming to the University of Houston will address what we might confront if these agents were used today. Manuel Guerrero, a medical analyst with the Civil Support Re...

Gene regulation, not just genes, is what sets humans apart

DURHAM, N.C. -- The striking differences between humans and chimps arent so much in the genes we have, which are 99 percent the same, but in the way those genes are used, according to new research from a Duke University team. Its rather like the same set of notes being played in very differen...

Researchers learn what sparks plant growth

A secret long held by plants has been revealed by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers. The new discovery, which builds on more than a decade of painstaking surveillance of cellular communication between different types of plant tissues, shows clearly for the first time how plants "decide" t...

What recognizes what in plant disease resistance?

Plants have an immune system that resists infection, yet 10% of the world's agricultural production is lost annually to diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Understanding how disease resistance works may help combat this scourge. In a new study published online this week in the open-...

Scientists unlock secret of what makes plants flower

The study reveals the likely mechanism by which the Arabidopsis plant flowers in response to changes in day length. Earlier research had shown that plants' leaves perceived seasonal changes in day length, which triggers a long-distance signal to travel through the plant's vascular system from the l...

Termites get the vibe on what tastes good

Researchers from CSIRO and UNSW@ADFA have shown that termites can tell what sort of material their food is made of, without having to actually touch it. The findings may lead to improvements in the control of feeding termites. By offering them a choice between normal wooden blocks and specially d...

Do you hear what i see?

New research pinpoints specific areas in sound processing centers in the brains of macaque monkeys that shows enhanced activity when the animals watch a video. This study confirms a number of recent findings but contradicts classical thinking, in which hearing, taste, touch, sight, and smell are ...

Designer babies - what would you do for a 'healthy' baby?

The well-educated are significantly more open to the idea of "designing" babies than the poorly educated, according to a new study by psychologists at the University of East Anglia. The findings will be presented by Dr. Simon Hampton at the BA Festival of Science on Setpember 5. Dr. Hampton ...

Sex and the heart: It's not what you think

A surprising new study finds that women in their 60s have as many risk factors for heart disease as men, and by their 70s have more, according to research led by demographers at the University of Southern California. The findings, published in the current issue of the Journal of Women's Health, r...

Life and death in the hippocampus: what young neurons need to survive

Whether newborn nerve cells in adult brains live or die depends on whether they can muscle their way into networks occupied by mature neurons. Neuroscientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies pin-pointed the molecular survival gear required for a young neuron to successfully jump into t...

How does the brain know what the right hand is doing?

A new experiment has shed more light on the multi-decade debate about how the brain knows where limbs are without looking at them. You don't have to watch your legs and feet when you walk. Your brain knows where they are. For decades scientists have debated two options for how the brain achieves ...

The reason why antiviral therapy can't annihilate HIV infection, and what to do about it

Antiviral therapy has been used to suppress HIV replication and has dramatically improved the clinical course of disease in affected patients. But the existence of viral reservoirs precludes the complete elimination of HIV from treated patients. In a new study appearing on November 1 in The Journa...

Microbes under Greenland Ice may be preview of what scientists find under Mars' surface

A University of California, Berkeley, study of methane-producing bacteria frozen at the bottom of Greenland's two-mile thick ice sheet could help guide scientists searching for similar bacterial life on Mars. Methane is a greenhouse gas present in the atmospheres of both Earth and Mars. If a clas...

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...

Brains response to visual stimuli helps us to focus on what we should see, rather than all there is to see

Delving ever deeper into the intricate architecture of the brain, researchers at The Salk Institute have now described how two different types of nerve cells, called neurons, work together in tiny sub-networks to pass on just the right amount and the right kind of sensory information. Their study...

Biologist Discovers What May Be World’s ‘Pickiest?Mates

A study conducted by a biologist at the University of California, San Diego that appears in the August issue of the journal Animal Behaviour found that females of the species Uca crenulata may check out 100 or more male fiddler crabs and their burrows before finally deciding on a mate. “As far as...

Discovery that bacterium is phosphate gourmet key clue to what makes it most social of bacteria

New research into one of the world's most social bacteria - Myxococcus xanthus, has discovered that it has a gourmet style approach to its consumption of phosphates, which provides a key clue to what makes it the most "social" of bacteria. Myxococcus xanthus is amazingly social and co-operative f...

Researchers seek to discover what really happens when a virus enters the body

A well-respected researcher who is now a chief of an immunology laboratory of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has rocked the boat in the past few years for the experts in the understanding of the autoimmune system. NIH's Polly Matzinger has developed the "danger model," suggesting that th...

Arthritis: What Wnt wrong?

The cellular signaling protein Wnt, which is involved in embryonic development and cancer, contributes to disease progression of both rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. The article by Nakamura et al., "Expression profiles and functional analyses of Wnt-related genes in human joint disorders,"...

Cerebral navigation: How do nerve fibers know what direction to grow in?

Nervous system development requires billions of neurons to migrate to the appropriate locations in the brain and grow nerve fibers (axons) that connect to other nerve cells in an intricate network. Growth cones, structures in the tips of growing axons, are responsible for steering axons in the righ...

Protein Packages Found To Activate Genes; May Be What Regulates Development And Disease

It's all in the packaging. How nature wraps and tags genes determines if and when they become active, according to researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). They did the largest, most detailed study to date of the protein structure that surrounds the human gen...

Scientists seek answers on what activates deadly anthrax spores

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and three other institutions are setting out to find what activates the spores in anthrax, the deadly bacterial infection that is back in the news. "A key aspect of anthrax spore biology concerns the germination process through which the...

Highest ever winter water temperatures recorded

...smanian 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're not sure how m...

AGU journal highlights -- Aug. 6, 2009

...omine compounds can turn into active forms that can efficiently deplete ozone if they are transported from the troposphere to the stratosphere through what is known as the tropical tropopause layer (TTL). To better understand how compounds are transported through the TTL, Gettelman et al. develop a model ...

Climbing to new heights in the forest canopy

...tion where the plant grows by revolving in large arcs, known as circumnutation, giving them the greatest likelihood of encountering a support. Exactly what allows the plants to circumnutate is still poorly-understood and is a topic of much ongoing research involving biophysics. After contacting a support,...

Protein handlers should be effective treatment target for cancer and Alzheimer's

...ones or heat shock factors in targeted areas, such as liver or breast tissue, as well as mice in which these can be removed during cancer to determine what impact their loss has on active disease. They also are cross breeding the mice, to create one, for example, that also over expresses the molecule, Her...

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

...ate by releasing light-colored sulfur particles or other aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays back into space. This approach mimics what happens naturally when volcanoes erupt; in 1991, for instance, an eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines cooled the Earth by 0.9 degrees Fahren...