Cardiac arrest may hinder ability to learn certain tasks
...injured," she continued. "The long-term goal is to figure out how to alter the brain's environment to bring those damaged neurons back to full function. We can start by looking at the cells' immediate environment to see what causes that alteration, and possibly reverse that." DeVries and her col...New fossil sheds light on old mystery
...lion years ago. Scientists have never been able to figure out the function of the extremely long neck that characterizes some species of this group, including Tanystropheus longobardicus, which was discovered in the 1850s. About twice as long as its trunk, Tanystropheus' neck has 12 vertebrae along which ex......s studying motor control have been hard pressed to figure out exactly why we move the way we do. To help solve this recalcitrant problem, Konrad Krding and colleagues, as reported in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, took a page from economists, who have long used equations called utility functions that...Binocular rivalry: Fulfilling visual expectations
...ing impression of a walking person. When a walking figure was presented to each of the two eyes, perception alternated between first one figure and then the other. When the same moving dots, corresponding to the two walking figures, were scramb...Study reveals why eyes in some paintings seem to follow viewers
... of the torso. In a second task, they used a gauge figure (a circle with a needle sticking out) that had to be placed on the torso so it looked to be flat against the surface (The needle had to appear like it was perpendicular to the surface of the torso). This allowed the researchers to determine how viewe...Prion propagation: Avoiding the toxic oligomer
...s question, along with the issues of how oligomers figure into the process and how they cause disease. Weissman and colleagues raise the possibility that creating conditions that favor fiber growth while inhibiting oligomer formation might limit the toxic effects of amyloid plaques. The approaches outlined ...Spontaneous mutation produces new MAO A/B knockout mouse
...tremely hyper-reactive when approached. Wanting to figure out why the mouse was different, the scientists decided to breed the mouse and examine its offspring. The scientists discovered that the mice not only had high levels of neurotransmitters broken down by MAO B, as would be expected in mice lacking M...Study reveals first genetic step necessary for prostate cancer growth
...Rb is like seeing smoke," he said. "We now need to figure out the genetic predictors for fire." To identify genetic events that cause early-stage prostate cancer, Greenberg and colleagues focused on the Rb gene. The gene is known to be defective in a variety of cancer types, including up to 60 percent of h...Probing the surface of white blood cells to enhance immune system medicine
...s process then there is the potential to basically figure out what chemical you could jam into a site on this protein--sort of like wedging a door open so it doesn't shut," explained Higgs. "And we want to make sure that wedge doesn't prop any other doors open that should stay closed."...One-hundred-fifty year old lessons of John Snow still relevant today
...entific biography" of the man who was a pioneering figure in the fields of epidemiology, anesthesiology, and medical geography. "We came together because of his legacy," said co-author Michael Rip, an assistant professor in MSU's James Madison College. "He brilliantly integrated insights from different type...Researchers uncover secrets of immune system's munitions factory
...h recombination processes, said Alt. "We'd like to figure out how those downstream steps in these two different situations lead in one case to mutation and in the other case to recombination," he said. "Now that we know more about how AID links to the next steps through RPA, we can begin to address this pro...Tiny molecules have big potential as cancer drugs, Stanford researcher believes
...degrade them into little bits, and so it's hard to figure out what those proteins were doing," he said. "We're beginning by focusing on individual proteases, seeing what happens when you shut down a specific member of that family. And I think we're going to find that some of those proteases are more importa...Researchers find clues about how antibodies specialize
...might lead to tumors." The next step, then, is to figure out what sometimes goes wrong and allows the AID-RPA complex to go to the wrong regions, potentially leading to activation of cancer genes. "Now that we've learned how AID gets access to the variable regions, we can ask how the process goes awry ...Genetic clues found for common congenital brain disorder
... genes involved and have a mouse model to study to figure this out." This work may also have broader implications. Understanding what goes wrong in Dandy-Walker malformation could provide clues about autism, in which similar but much milder cerebellar abnormalities are common.The hunt for the Dandy-Walke...Counting foxes before the last tally-ho
...population, using far less precise methods, gave a figure of 252,000 adult foxes in 1981 and 240,000 in 1995, compared to the new figure of 258,000 in 1999/2000. This suggests that, contrary to claims made by the hunting lobby, there has...Study narrows search for genes placing men at increased risk for prostate cancer
...as been much confusion and difficulty in trying to figure out where we should be looking for these genes." Today's paper reports on data from approximately 2,000 individuals from over 400 families. "The large number of prostate cancer families utilized in this study allowed us to overcome the challenges ...Last of known genes identified in complex obesity syndrome
...nals in that part of the cell. The next step is to figure out exactly what those signals might be. "We don't know what its message is, but because we know that it binds GTP, we have some ideas of where to start looking," says Katsanis....Scientist who discovered Sly syndrome finds new research path to explore for treating the disease
... enzyme across the blood-brain barrier, we need to figure out how to get the stop light to switch back to green. In other words, how do we get the blood-brain barrier's truck to start delivery service again." Added Sly, "Most lysosomal storage diseases are much more common than Sly Syndrome. And most of the...Fundamental change to Immunology 101
...tand where T cells actually come from." To figure out which type of cell reaches the thymus, Schwarz and Bhandoola analyzed the blood of adult mice for early progenitor cell populations. The only way to resolve the exact cell type was to correctly identify progenitors present in the blood, which is ...Protein vaccine fully protects mice from lethal aerosol challenge with ricin toxin
...of the same family," Olson explained. "We tried to figure out where the protein molecules are diverging within the family--to see what changes were made by nature so we could make the changes we needed to make." To improve upon its stability--in effect, to make it go against its natural tendencies--Olso...