Years of research, thought lead geologist to propose new supercontinent Columbia
... pieces of a puzzle, drifting together and pulling apart to form oceans, he said. Part of the eventual fascination with his idea came from globe-gazers observation that continents such as Africa and South America look like they could fit together snugly. Following up on Wegener and others work, a Universit......tension wave, which stretches the liquid and pulls apart a space for bubbles to form when the liquid is bombarded by energetic particles like neutrons. A second compression wave follows close behind, squeezing and bursting the bubbles, which then emit a brilliant but extremely brief flash of light called s...Electrodes and nanoprobes signal new DNA detection method
...centration of a salt solution can be used to break apart any mismatches. Only the perfect matches remain, allowing the silver-coated gold nanoprobes to carry a measurable electrical signal across the gap between electrodes. The researchers made the important observation that these nanoparticle probes are v...Mating molds provide new insights into speciation and human reproduction
... - in which parental chromosomes pair up and split apart to form offspring or sex cells (sperm and eggs) - is called meiosis and occurs in all organisms that reproduce sexually, from people to plants to fungi. In their recent Cell study, Shiu and his colleagues took a closer look at meiosis in mold and mad...... one site to the next. Forests just 50 kilometers apart in Panama are less alike than forests 1,400 kilometers apart in the western Amazon. As a result of such high landscape variation, parts of Panama have as many o...Potato technology may help move mail
... Discharge Ozone Generator. The electricity breaks apart oxygen molecules and releases one atom. Some of these single atoms attach themselves to a standard oxygen molecule. This creates an unstable and temporary form of oxygen - ozone - that carries three oxygen atoms instead of the standard two. The high...Other highlights in the Jan. 16 issue of JNCI
...onal Cancer Institute . Their analysis found that, apart from lymph node status, high levels of uPA and PAI-1 were the strongest predictors of poor relapse-free survival and poor overall survival. The authors conclude that, for patients with lymph node-negative breast cancer, uPA and PAI-1 measurements in ...Introducing the biology of the future
... researchers suddenly had an efficient way to take apart such machines and identify the individual proteins... some machines are probably put together and taken apart so quickly that they may be hard to capture with the present methods. This initial project focuses o......tic beasts. But it isn't as easy as merely taking apart an animal or plant and copying what you see. "Evolution doesn't always come up with the best solution from an engineer's perspective," says Professor Macmillan. Despite these evolutionary pitfalls, biomimetics has already produced swimming robots t...Monitoring epithelial plasticity, one cell at a time
...cells in real time, it should be possible to tease apart the changes in mRNA and protein expression, cellular morphology, and adhesive interactions that drive this dramatic shift in cellular phenotyp...Fossil teeth reveal recent origin of human growth pattern
...tate. "One of the things that sets modern humans apart from the living great apes is our long period of growth and development," Dean explains. "While humans take a good 18 to 20 years to grow up, other primate species like chimpanzees and gorillas take just 11 or 12 years." A supporting article, writt...New clues to how RNA exits the nucleus
...We were puzzling about how could we begin to tease apart this proteins function and demonstrate that there were two alternative pathways, said Steitz. The researchers realized that they could draw on the discovery by other scientists of short pieces of protein, called Trojan peptides or penetratins, that c...Ancient Chinese folk remedy may hold key to non-toxic cancer treatment
...free radicals attack cell membranes, breaking them apart and killing the single-cell parasite. About seven years ago, Lai began to hypothesize that the process might work with cancer, too. Cancer cells need a lot of iron to replicate DNA when they divide, Lai explained. As a result, cancer cells have mu...NIH funds synchrotron beamlines to advance studies of molecular structures
...oduce powerful X-rays used by researchers to tease apart the three-dimensional structures of molecules. The scientists must schedule their data-collection visits to synchrotrons months in advance. They must then work feverishly before and during these few days to make the best use of their scarce synchro...Breast cancer is multi-step, multi-cell type process
...rodissection technology which enables them to take apart tumors one cell at a time. Scientists know cancer develops over a period of years through a series of genetic changes or mutations. Scientists have also long accepted that these genetic mutations occur in a single cell type for any given cancer. But......s bind to these antibodies, they elbow one another apart and force the lever to bend downward. The cantilevers can also be coated with single-strand DNA for binding to complementary DNA. The higher the concentration of the protein or DNA being measured, the greater the deflection of the cantilever, so that...Laser technique examines movement in nucleus of living cell
... interact, Bardeen said. If we try to take a cell apart and examine its constituents, we find they no longer behave as they do in intact, living cells.To non-invasively measure chromatin movement in a live frog skin cell, Bardeen and graduate students Sara Davis and Andrew Stout combine a two-photon laser...The skin's acid coating: SFVAMC researchers explain its origin and how it maintains skin integrity
...s to one another. "The protease enzymes that break apart these desmosomes are sensitive to the pH, or acidi... more acidic, these enzymes are activated to break apart the desmosomes, allowing skin cells to be shed more easily," said Elias. The findings in the study c...Science, engineering and technology news tips
...and streptavidin, that stick together but can pull apart again. Instead, graduate student Albert Chmura, research assistant Molly Orton and Meares made an antibody that recognized and stuck to the radioactive carrier. Then they engineered the binding region of the antibody protein, so that when it meets t...DNA analysis of salamanders turns up new species under almost every log, UC Berkeley zoologists find
...n, if you can't tell members of different lineages apart by eye, then you shouldn't treat them as different species. But if we lump them all together, that under-represents biodiversity, and evolutionarily distinctive populations will not receive the protection afforded to other groups." Wake, a recognized...