New mouse marks latest stride in muscular dystrophy research
... M.D., spends some time away from his patients and heads for the laboratory, where he works with mice. It might seem an unlikely action for a doctor ultimately concerned with human health. But his forays in the laboratory have helped Thornton and his team develop a new kind of mouse that may someday help d...Vanderbilt archaeological team unearths buried Maya royal palace
..., the archaeologist from Vanderbilt University who heads the expedition with Tomas Barrientos from the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala. "But what is most incredible about this site is that most of the palace is buried virtually intact. No one has found anything like this since the turn of the century." ...Major new initiative to resolve structure of protein families
...year, including one to Sung-Hou Kim, a chemist who heads the Structural Biology Department of the Physical Biosciences Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). "This project can be viewed as an inventory of all the protein structure families that exi...Dinosaurs: New study counters age-old theory
...t appears unlikely that these animals lifted their heads high as commonly depicted."...Prepare now for next El Nino, says UN/NCAR study
...ollowing actions, among many others: Involve the heads of states early in climate disaster policy and action Create regional organizations focused strictly on El Nino impacts Designate funding to map the world's most vulnerable populations Improve forecasting of the impacts and onset of El Nino Educa...Birds of prey spiralling to a kill
...in front of them most clearly when they turn their heads about 40 degrees to one side. But turning their heads in mid-flight might increase the birds' aerodynamic drag, slowing them down. To test this idea, Tuc...Scientists reveal details of brain cell communication: implications for learning & memory
...ty of channel opening, "like tossing a coin, where heads is open and tails is closed," says Svoboda, enabled him and Sabatini to determine the number of calcium channels per spine. The scientists discovered that depending on their size, spines contain from one to twenty, and typically three, calcium channe...Presence of only two genes makes the difference between an ordinary and headless embryo
... found that the embryos developed not only without heads but also without trunks. Instead most of the cells formed an enlarged tail. Furthermore, the head and trunk magically reappear when BMP and the two genes are all inactivated. According to Solnica-Krezel, This indicates that the main function of the t...Brain damage in autism: not what scientists once thought
...them in a chair as they sat upright, tilting their heads forward just after the chair became still. If the cerebellum is functioning normally, the reflexive eye movements, which typically occur in the direction opposite to that in which the child spins, are diminished once the head is pitched forward. Res......rvae to develop quickly and gain direct fitness as heads of the colony, says Evans. Developing queens that emerge first, even if only by a matter of hours, almost always beat rival queens in gaining control of colony reproduction. Such polyphenic studies are useful because they reflect the effects of ext...University of Illinois at Chicago expert tinkers with evolution to create human 'Built-to-Last'
..., varicose veins and worn-out joints. Where our heads are concerned, the authors cite the weak link between the optic nerve and retina, which is prone to detaching after decades of use, fragile hair cells in our ears leading to hearing loss, and a common passageway for food and air, raising the risk of ...Rockefeller University Centennial Symposium to explore biology of drug abuse and addiction
...es former colleagues, Mary Jeanne Kreek, M.D., who heads the Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases and directs a major interdisciplinary center at Rockefeller funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. John D. Rockefeller founded Rockefeller University in 1901 as The Rockefeller Institute fo...Nanopore detector shows discriminating taste in DNA molecules
...ter science; and research chemist Mark Akeson, who heads the nanopore project in Deamer's lab. The mouth of the pore in the alpha-hemolysin ion channel is about 2.5 nanometers wide. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter--roughly 10 times the size of a single atom.) Double-stranded DNA can enter the mout...Major fossil find reveals Asian origins of salamanders
... said Shubin. At the same time, their limbs and heads have served as a model of how variation arises during evolution. One of the great puzzles of evolution is how different types of salamanders evolved the same features independently. This phenomenon is called parallel evolution. These fossils may prov...Saline solution a serious threat to wetlands
...water. They shed their pollen there, so the flower heads must be kept above the Coorong's water, which may form waves 30 cm high. Each flower head has a spiral like a loose spring. As the waves come and go, it rises and falls, remaining on the surface. The plants produce pollen and then seeds, but more i...New Zealand aircraft to fly mission to USA McMurdo Station
... for undertaking this mission," said Karl Erb, who heads NSF Office of Polar Programs. "This action exemplifies the spirit of partnership that characterizes the relationship between the U.S. and New Zealand Antarctic programs." The flight is unrelated to the evacuation of Dr. Ronald S. Shemenski from ...Key mechanics of cell membrane fusion revealed
...biochemistry and biophysics at UNC. Lentz, who heads UNC's Program in Molecular and Cellular Biophysics, and his collaborators approached the question by looking at a highly "fusagenic" membrane, one that's central to nervous system functioning: the synaptic vesicle membrane. Synaptic vesicles fuse wit...In gene therapy first, scientists restore vision to dogs born blind
...the dogs could see because they kept turning their heads to the right to use the eye that had been treated," said Hauswirth, who also holds an appointment in the department of ophthalmology and is affiliated with UF's Genetics Institute and Powell Gene Therapy Center. "But then when the official tests were......umans -- said emeritus professor Peter Marler, who heads the Animal Communication Laboratory at UC Davis. Yamaguchi's research has opened up the whole area of gender-specific song learning, he said....