The first engineering of cell surfaces in living animals
BERKELEY, CA -- Four years ago Carolyn Bertozzi, a member of the Materials Sciences Division at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, introduced a new way of engineering the surfac...Growing pains: T. Rex was teenage giant
...dinosaurs to roam the Earth some 225 million years ago were about a yard long and weighed between 50 to 1... to this dilemma came to Erickson about four years ago while examining Sue. He noticed that Sue's rib bones were solid. Further investigation revealed that...Scientist who discovered Sly syndrome finds new research path to explore for treating the disease
...the scientist who discovered Sly Syndrome 32 years ago point to a new direction for research into the rare genetic disorder that can cause bone deformities, vision and hearing loss, mental retardation and death in children. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...Size does matter when choosing a mate
...explanation for a rule identified over forty years ago by German scientist Bernhard Rensch. Rensch's rule, as it has become known, says that the ratio between the sizes of the sexes is related to body size with very few exceptions throughout the animal kingdom - for example, male gorillas are much bigge...Transcriptional gene silencing in nucleus shown by UCSD/VA medical researchers
...teins. Technology developed about four years ago introduced synthetic siRNA into the cytoplasm of cells to silence specific genes. This technique was called post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS). However, PTGS is transient, with siRNA lasting only a few days in the cytoplasm. Although this is...Oldest evidence for processing of wild cereals: starch grains from barley, wheat, on grinding stone
...perno and Weiss met for the first time a few years ago at a conference luncheon, they discussed the possibilities of applying starch grain analysis to artifacts from this Old World site. Starch grain analysis is painstaking work. First, a fine needle is used to dislodge minute particles from the face o...Dispute over life in Antarctic lake
...ly contained life. Between 15 and 30 million years ago it started to freeze over, then gases accumulated in the lake and finally it sterilised itself," he says. This hypothesis has provoked scorn from John Priscu of Montana State University in Bozeman, author of one of the original papers on microbes in ...Droughts like 1930s Dust Bowl may have been unexceptional in prehistoric times, new study suggests
...om the mid-Holocene period of 5,000 to 8,000 years ago in parts of the Dakotas, Montana and western Minnesota, "nothing seemed to make any sense." "The question was: Could we look at the sediments for charcoal evidence of the amount of fire, for pollen evidence of the kinds of grasses that were growing ...Misfiring proteins tied to inflammation and sick feeling of type 2 diabetics
... -- followed similar findings, presented two years ago in the same journal, based on experiments in cell lines. "In our first paper, we treated cells with insulin in a test tube," Freund said. "In our new paper, we took the macrophages from diabetic animals and looked at the signaling abilities of the i...Bone, enamel, dentine, milk & saliva share gene family
...aki. "Birds probably lost the enamel gene so long ago that there would be no trace of it." The researchers have traced the development of these calcium-binding genes to a gene, SPARC, that existed before the split occurred between invertebrates and vertebrates during the Precambrian, 500 to 600 million...Geologists discover water cuts through rock at surprising speed
...ont have determined that it was about 35,000 years ago that the Susquehanna and Potomac rivers, respectively, began carving out the Great Falls of the Potomac and Holtwood Gorge. Great Falls, located about 15 miles outside of Washington, D.C., hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year; Holtwood G...Gene defects found in age-related macular degeneration
...ly two percent of the total. And so, fifteen years ago if we had done an experiment with 100 people and had seen a change in one only person, it wouldn't have fit our concept of the disease, and we would have probably ignored it completely." Stone emphasized that future searches for causative mutations ...Songbirds escaped from Australasia, conquered rest of world
...by islands) and New Guinea--about 45 million years ago and went on to populate every other continent save Antarctica. The study, led by Keith Barker of the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History, will be published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of S...LSU vet school professor uses gene therapy to destroy cancerous tumors
...Nevertheless, Li, who came to LSU more than a year ago after research stints at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Arkansas Medical Center, said that the opportunity to apply the treatments to larger animals is one of the reasons he was attracted to the Vet School. Trying th...90 million year old dino tracks found on resort island
...se animals were firstfound more than hundred years ago on the island of Hvar and were studiedby D. Gorjanovi-Kramberger of the Croatian National Museum and Kornhuber from Vienna. The goal of the project was to find more lizard fossils and to study the 90 million year old rocks of Hvar to learn more about...Chipmunks descended from ancestors that survived last ice age, scientists say
...e Wisconsin glaciation occurred about 18,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene, with the Laurentide Ice Sheet gradually receding from its southern reaches. Researchers had long thought that the driftless region near the ice sheets were all tundra, but emerging geological evidence now suggests that s...UCSD biologists discover cell's defense mechanism against class of disease-causing bacterial toxins
...rs in Aroian's laboratory discovered several years ago that the roundworm C. elegans and other nematodes can be killed or made seriously ill by a pore-forming toxin known as Cry5B. That toxin is produced by Bacillus thuringiensis, the bacterium commonly known as Bt, which is used by organic farmers as a ...Warren Pharmaceuticals publishes results of preclinical evaluation
...e injuries. The surprising discovery several years ago by Warren scientists that EPO crosses the blood brain barrier opened the way for development of protective compounds that can safely be administered by injection. Despite a positive early clinical trial in human stroke, long-term use of EPO will be l...University of Chicago scientists pinpoint cellular cause of SIDS
...udy follows a paper published in Nature four years ago in which Ramirez and colleagues showed that the same network of respiratory cells in the brainstem controls different forms of breathing: the sigh, the gasp and normal rhythm. Shortly after the groundbreaking paper, scientists overturned conventional...Structure solved at Scripps shows how one human protein reduces potency of chemotherapy
...Daniels and Tainer teamed up with Pegg a few years ago to solve the structure of AGT. Twist and Grab Now Daniels and Tainer have solved the structure of AGT bound to DNA. The structure gives a view of how the protein binds to damaged DNA, says Pegg, and this information is useful for designing inhib...