Beagle 2 fails to call Mars express
...lanitia at an altitude of just 220 miles (350 km), giving it an ideal listening position, but it was the first time that the primary communication link with the orbiter had been used during the Beagle 2 mission. Speaking from the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, the ESA Science Direc...Cells' ability to open blood's floodgates hinges on unexpected factors
...sted for a century has come a major step closer to giving up its secrets. Teams of scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a mechanism that triggers increased blood flow to brain cells actively engaged in work. The findings appear in two papers in the Jan. 13 issu...Key appetite regulator may be identified, scientists report
...vious work, Lane and his colleagues had shown that giving mice C75, which blocks conversion of malonyl-CoA into fatty acids, dramatically reduced animals' appetites. Subsequently, they found that C75 triggers levels of several known appetite signals (NPY, AgRP, POMC and others) to register "full" even when ...Ohio State creates first gene chip for horse
...Gene chips can help uncover these key differences, giving us critical information before we launch into an experiment," Bertone said. "The scientific community has invested a lot of money in animal models that don't truly represent the human situation, so having this kind of information is extremely benefic...... other genetic characteristics of embryos. PGD is giving parents profound new power to identify and select the genetic characteristics of their children. Is this a power parents should have? Should there be limits to its uses? Are current regulations and oversight sufficient? The John Hopkins Unive...Expedition will retrace legendary Steinbeck-Ricketts voyage to the Sea of Cortez
...tags successfully provided a week's worth of data, giving researchers a rare glimpse of the life of a Humboldt squid. "The tagging data showed us that, during the day, squid dive to depths of about 1,000 feet and stay there all day," Gilly says. "The amazing thing is that there is virtually no oxygen at tha...First phylogeographic study of a rainforest tree
...pear to have been genetically isolated ever since, giving Symphonia globulifera the status of "living fossil". Panama contained the largest number of genetically distinctive populations, in contrast to Amazon basin Symphonia, which displayed no genetic differentiation across 2500 km of lowland forest...Growth hormone activates gene involved in healing damaged tissue
...jections occurred only over short periods of time, giving us no information about any long-term consequences," Costa said. While several studies have shown that prolonged growth hormone therapy has dangerous side effects ranging from diabetes to carpal tunnel syndrome, Costa believes that short-term treatme......w into thick masses of branching, misshapen stems, giving rise to a popular name of witches' brooms, or the apt Navajo name of "basket on high." The plant's common name - mistletoe - is derived from early observations that mistletoe would often appear in places where birds had left their droppings. "Mistel"...Brain study shows some animals crave exercise
...d half the mice in each group from the wheel while giving free access to the other half. Five hours later, when the mice usually reach their running peak, the researchers compared brain activity in each mouse by measuring levels of Fos, a gene that's expressed in response to neuronal excitement. "We though...New standard for voice saving care of larynx cancer patients
...surgery. This new study of 547 patients shows that giving chemotherapy and radiation together instead of sequentially is more effective in preserving the voice box. 88 percent of patients receiving chemotherapy and radiation together still had their voice box after two years as compared to 75 percent receiv...Effects of maternal myasthenia gravis on pregnancy and birth examined
... the study shouldn't discourage women with MG from giving birth, but that they should plan to have access to good medical care should complications arise. Neonatal deaths did not rise significantly among MG mothers, nor was there a higher rate of prematurity. A related Neurology Patient Page on the study, w...Does shade coffee help or hinder conservation?
...rams stronger, Philpott and Dietsch also recommend giving coffee farmers financial incentives to maintain biodiversity-rich shade farms and to preserve adjacent forest fragments. Finally, to help keep farmers from converting more forest to shade coffee, they recommend only certifying farms that are 10 or mo...Stop to smell the flowers - But do it before they're pollinated
...nto the flower and makes fertilization possible by giving the pollen access to the flower's ovary. "Production of scent is an expensive process from an energy point of view, so the question was, why do flowers continue to produce floral scent if they're already pollinated? We found that in snapdragons it ta......f you would like to attend kindly send us an email giving your full contact details (media company, name, address, telephone and fax numbers) to pr_embo@embo.org by November 12th. Background : With the sequencing of the complete human genome and the development of gene banks, scientists and medics have ...Wanted: Innovations to feed the hungry
...opment, proposes a new way of fighting hunger: by giving cash prizes to innovators who develop sustainable techniques that the world's poor can use to feed themselves. Prizes have been used to solve many seemingly-intractable problems, from an 18th-century prize for determining longitude at sea, to the 2...Computer model offers new tool to probe Woburn toxic waste site
...mputer model developed at Ohio State University is giving researchers a new understanding of how municipal wells at a famous toxic waste site in Woburn, Massachusetts, came to be contaminated, and how much contamination was delivered to residents. As dramatized in the book and movie A Civil Action, a cluste...US crackdown on bioterror backfiring
...zed labs. Institutions that cannot afford this are giving up research involving select agents. One researcher, again afraid to be quoted, had to drop a proposal for work on ricin because it required a collaborator with particular equipment. "None would work on a select agent without millions of dollars of ...JCI Table of Contents, November 3, 2003
...that at least one population of stem cells - those giving rise to intestinal colonic crypts do indeed harbor somatic mtDNA mutations, which, even more surprisingly, arise at a relatively high frequency. The colonic crypt provides an ideal system for study as crypt cells are all derived from one or two sing...UB researchers show first evidence of pharmacogenomic differences in patients' responses to MS drug
...eight MS patients. They drew blood samples before giving the drug and at 1, 2, 4, 8, 24, 48, 120 and 168 hours after the first injection. Standard IFN-beta-1a treatment is a weekly intramuscular injection. The immune cells in blood were separated and their gene-expression profile processed and amplified u...