Climate change plus human pressure caused large mammal extinctions in late Pleistocene
...and warming that concluded only about 10,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. In previous stud... of the last ice age, starting around 45,000 years ago and persisting up to the height of the glacial period 20,000 years ago. "This is a very clear case ...Pack-MULEs are toting a new look at plant evolution
... understand my article," says Jiang, who one month ago left a post doc at the University of Georgia to take a faculty position at Michigan State University's horticulture department. "I'm looking at something people don't pay much attention to." But not only did Jiang find a new way to look at genomic s...Cancer vaccine based on pathogenic listeria bacteria shows promise targeting metastases
...een 20 and 30 percent. It made headlines two years ago when 20 people, including several children, died of listeriosis from tainted hamburger, forcing the largest meat recall in history. Several thousand people come down with listeriosis each year, and several hundred die from it. But the disease kills ...'Most recent common ancestor' of all living humans surprisingly recent
...nt," the most recent time -- less than 2,000 years ago in the simplified model -- when each person was an ancestor to all or ancestor to none of the people alive today. The current paper presents more realistic mathematical and computer models. It incorporates factors such as socially driven mating...DuPont scientist named one of the world's top young innovators by MIT's 'Technology Review' Magazine
...the same level that electronics reached some years ago -- the ability to monolithically integrate devices on a single chip. "Every year bandwidth increases, and it shot up tremendously with the advent of the Internet," she said. "It's caused us to take a 90-degree change in perspective in how we view t...Washington University in St. Louis leads group studying aging process
...ygen factory in plant cells. A half billion years ago cyanobacteria predated more complex organisms like multi-cellular plants and functioned in a world where the oxygen level of the biosphere was much less than it is today. Over its very long life span, cyanobacteria has evolved a system to survive a ...New fruitfly model of diabetes has future implications for pancreatic cell transplantation
... take up or release sugar, as needed. Two years ago Rulifson and Kim showed that a group of cells in the brain of the fly make insulin, which parallels the role of beta cells in humans. Now, in the September 16 issue of Nature, the researchers describe cells that produce a glucagon-like hormone, which...Hardy buoys: Texas A&M project predicts oil spill movements
...gers who have been lost overboard. Also, two years ago the buoys were instrumental in helping to retrieve the Ehime Maru, a Japanese vessel that was accidentally sunk by a U.S. submarine practicing quick-surfacing drills off the coast of Hawaii. Norman Guinasso Jr., who serves as project manager of the T...Peering inside the body, with a new spinliterally
...eld. NMR pioneers noticed more than a half-century ago that they could get better spectral resolution if they spun a sample at a 54.74-degree angle to the magnetic field. The faster they spun a sample oriented in this so-called magic angle, the more structural detail they obtained. "This was very fast sp...Research on carbohydrate metabolism receives historical recognition
...banquet in 1947: "Our collaboration began 30 years ago when we were still medical students at the University of Prague and has continued ever since. Our efforts have been largely complementary, and one without the other would not have gone as far as in combination." Gerty Cori died in 1957. In 196...Genetic analysis rewrites salamander's evolutionary history
...e Linnaeus started classifying organisms 270 years ago - are basically correct. New genetic studies, the thinking goes, will only prune the twigs, perhaps shuffling around a few species here and there. Hence the surprise when a new University of California, Berkeley, study of the largest family of salama...Proteins show promise for mosquito control
...ors for widespread mosquito control. "Four years ago (when Lan joined the faculty of UW-Madison) I couldn't imagine having five viable compounds in hand," Lan says. "This is the first example of looking at target proteins for pest management. No one has done this with insects."...New dye directly reveals activated proteins in living cells
...olecules in live cells was pioneered over a decade ago here at UNC," Hahn said. "My work with these new dyes is an extension of that work, it grew out of that."...Hunting illusive signs of natural selection
...cted in Northern Europeans since about 9,000 years ago when dairy-producing animals were domesticated. The researchers suggest that perhaps a need for more calcium because of changes in TRPV6 and TRPV5 pushed the selection of milk tolerance. Tracking natural selection does not just illuminate adaptatio...Men from early middle ages were nearly as tall as modern people
... that people were so well-off 1,000 to 1,200 years ago was surprising," he said. Northern European men had lost an average 2.5 inches of height by the 1700s, a loss that was not fully recovered until the first half of the 20th century. Steckel believes a variety of factors contributed to the drop and s...One-hundred-fifty year old lessons of John Snow still relevant today
EAST LANSING, Mich. It was 150 years ago this September that a London physician named John Snow urged officials in his city to shut down a well-used water pump in the heart of the Soho district, a move that may have helped to hasten the end of a deadly cholera epidemic that had killed hundr...Study in Science reveals recreational fishing takes big bite of ocean catch
...l fishing is where commercial fishing was 20 years ago with very weak controls and rapidly increasing numbers of fishermen," says Federal Ocean Commissioner Andrew Rosenberg, of the University of New Hampshire and former Deputy Director of NMFS. "The challenge is to come up with new ways to balance the i...Washington University in St. Louis plays key role in sequencing moss genome
...between Washington University and Leeds five years ago that resulted in the sequencing of certain expressed genes of the moss by the Genome Sequencing Center (GSC) at Washington University. The GSC will be "closely integrated with the sequencing effort at the JGI for help in assembling, annotating and f...Unicellular organisms contribute more nitrogen to ocean that reported earlier
...NSF), Montoya first began this research five years ago with colleague Jonathan Zehr, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and one of the authors on this Nature paper. The other authors are Georgia Tech graduate student Carolyn Holl, University of Hawaii graduate......f the human genome sequence was hailed a few years ago as biology's equivalent to landing a man on the moon -- a mammoth milestone of monumental importance. However, unlike the first moon shot, the real milestone of the human genome project is not a singular event. The genome project's giant leap for m...