Humble Pocket Gophers Shed Light On The Genetic Fortitude Of Cheetahs
...rchers grafted skin from the Carmel Valley gophers onto a few of the Humboldt gophers; the animals rejected them. Soule notes that the range of genetic variation among different populations of pocket gophers, from extremely low to extremely high, makes Thomomys bottae an ideal model system for exploring t...Duke Ecologist Says Logging Is Creating 'Mahogany Deserts'
...well as in Mexico, Snook is dropping mahoganyseeds onto cornfields to see if the species can also be regenerated andmanaged in conjunction with shifting agriculture. "I'm sure that's what happened in the past," she said. "Notonly did mahoganies have the benefit of hurricanes and fires. They alsohad the b...PET Project Helps Reduce Pollution Threat From Heavy Metals
...a bedof oxide-coated sand which attracts and holds onto heavy metalsin the storm runoff. Lab-scale experiments demonstrated thespecial sand can dramatically reduce the concentrations ofpollutants such as lead, cadmium, copper and zinc. This componenttakes care of the dissolved metals. The second part of t...Optical Microscopy Shines Light On Biology
..."The cantilevered near-field tip brings less force onto the sample, making it much gentler," Dunn said. "The way we sense when the probe is near the sample is by vibrating the probe back and forth and watching the amplitude of that movement." When the probe gets close to the sample's surface, the movement...Robots, Virtual Reality & Other "Smart" Tools Soon Will Help Physicians Heal Patients
...surgical tools; three-dimensional images projected onto patients in the operating room; and physicians thousands of miles apart participating in live surgery -- these are among early 21st century technologies doctors and engineers are dreaming about and developing now. "We're encouraging close col...A Drug Pump On A Computer Chip
...hich sensors, actuators and electronics are merged onto a single silicon wafer. The next step will be to shrink the device so it can be mass produced like a computer chip. The research, in the laboratory of Whitaker Investigator Michael Huff at Case Western Reserve University, is driven partly by man...New Study Shows Steps Leading To Colon Cancer
...combines with another protein called dTCF, latches onto DNA and becomes the equivalent of a light switch. "Now that we understand what happens normally, we can imagine using fruit flies to search for and test potential drugs which might turn off or block the signaling pathway that leads to tumors," he s...Project Shows Native Bacteria Can Destroy Widespread Pollutant In Groundwater
...out volatile contaminants, which are then adsorbed onto activated charcoal filters. This approach wastes water, because the treated water is seldom reinjected into the aquifer. The contaminated charcoal also must be disposed. Energy costs can be high for pumping contaminated water from deep aquifers. The ...Research Team Discovers Key Gene For Telomerase Enzyme In Humans
... counteracts telomere shortening by addingDNA back onto the chromosome ends, he said. Normal cells do not containtelomerase, and their telomeres shorten with each cell division until theystop dividing. In cancer cells, however, telomerase is thought to grantthe cell immortality by maintaining telomere l...Pea Plant Stem Growth Gene Cloned
... hydroxyl (HO) group at a very particular location onto GA20, which is the is the immediate precursor of GA1. In the dwarf plants there is a change of one base in the DNA sequence, which leads to a change of one amino acid in the resulting protein. In turn, this results in an enzyme that is still active ...Trojan Horse Virus Controls Hiv Infection
...th late-stage disease, but the Yale team has moved onto develop VSV constructsthat incorporate other HIV coreceptors such as CCR5 and CCR3 in an attempt toaffect HIV strains that target macrophages and typicallypredominate in early HIV infection. The virus involved, VSV, causes vesicular stomatitis, a dis...Wonder Thread: UD Scientists Report First Protein With Collagen And Elastin-Like Domains
...n-like domains," byssal threads help mussels latch onto rocks, oil rigs, super-tankers and docks, the UD r...ratory animal injected with Col-P, quickly latched onto the protein precursor expressed by bacterial clones. Three Major Domains The preCol-P in byssal th...New Mechanism To Explain Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Identified
...he large number of physicians who tenaciously hold onto the classicexplanation for carbon-monoxide toxicity that there is more than one way toexplain this type of poisoning. Hopefully this will improve our generalunderstanding of what's going on in patients, and with that a greatersensitivity to the need ...Study Shows Hereditary Legacy Of Radiation Exposure
...children, and heritability, which means passing it onto all future generations," said Wiley, a professor of medicine withthe campus Institute of Toxicology and Environmental Health. "Heritabilitymeans that it has survived a complete round of DNA replication, and thatit is stable in the DNA of the sperm." ...Researcher Discovers Plant Genes For Phosphate Uptake
...n many molecules of iron and aluminum, which latch onto and tie up nearly all available phosphorus. "We also have problems in the Southeastern United States and on calcareous soils in the Great Plains of the American West," says Purdue agronomist Dave Mengel. "In alkaline soils of the West, calcium reacts...Cellular Engineers Design Custom Cell Surfaces Able To Adhere To Synthetic Materials
...ng intobiosensors, in which cells designed to lock onto specific compounds can becombined with an electronic, transducing substrate to signal changes in theenvironment" -- a sort of cyborg canary-in-a-coal-mine. Another possible use of reactive chemical groups on cells emerged whileBertozzi, Maha...Hurdle In Ulcer Vaccine Development Cleared
...peptic ulcers clingsto the stomach wall by locking onto specific receptors on cells in the gastriclining. Collaborators in Sweden and the United States now have identified andisolated a bacterial protein that allows the microbe to cling. "With this attachment protein in hand, it eventually should ...Memorial Sloan-Kettering Investigators
...sors may work by favoring the placement ofhistones onto specific genes, thus masking their genetic material and turningthem off. The scientists turned to a drug called Trichostatin A, one of a familyof drugs called histone deacetylase inhibitors. These drugs prevent histonesfrom doing their job, thus favo...Microsurgery Made More Accurate With Virtual Measuring Tool
...application of the VTM and simultaneously recorded onto a regular video recorder for subsequent analysis (See Fig. 1). To apply the VTM, the stereo-video image signal is sampled with the video board of a SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.) Indy workstation. The VTM is a three-dimensional computer generated point...... thelarval stage of the cabbage white butterfly -- onto one leaf of each plant insuch a way that the caterpillar could feed on the leaf. He also grew two sets of control plants: one group in which a leaf on eachplant was clipped off at the base of the leaf stem or petiole and another groupwhose plants re...