Historical coral reef declines featured in this week's Science
...due to disease and bleaching is a much more recent phenomenon and reflects additional stress on an already highly impacted system. The study also found that reefs in the Western Atlantic (Jamaica, Panama), where exploitation by shoreline inhabitants has been extensive since human colonization began, have suffer...Popular Science announces second annual 'Brilliant 10:' the country's top young scientists
...eir own and successfully compressed a billion-year phenomenon into an hour. Recently, Manga and a student disproved a long-held notion that when magma rises quickly and breaks into pieces, it causes an explosive volcanic eruption. He's advancing dozens of areas of geology. Betty Pace, 49, University of Texas, ......-term potentiation" (LTP), an electrophysiological phenomenon indicating neuronal plasticity was lower in hippocampal brain tissue of aged mice when compared to LTP in hippocampus of young mice. Moreover, using specific antibodies, the researchers found highly elevated levels of a calcium-activated potassium ch...Rutgers geneticists redefine the nature of hybrid corn
...fined the nature of heterosis or hybrid vigor, the phenomenon underlying corn's remarkable success. Heterosis is the robustness seen in hybrids when different lines are crossed and result in higher yields than either of the parental lines would produce themselves. Maize (corn) dominates agriculture in the Un...Plant genes imported from unrelated species more often than previously thought, IU biologists find
...transposable elements. Our results now extend this phenomenon to the thousands of ordinary genes in a genome." It has been common knowledge for years that horizontal gene transfer among bacteria is extremely common. Some scientists believe that as much as 25 percent of certain bacterial species' chromosomal DNA...IUB researchers to investigate genetic recombination's causes and consequences
...U Bloomington. Genetic recombination is a critical phenomenon in the life cycles of all sexual organisms, and it is also the main reason why every human being looks different. Lynch and his team will focus primarily on genetic recombination in Daphnia, a genus of tiny animals also known as water fleas. Daphnia ...Tufts researchers find new cost-effective catalyst for hydrogen production for fuel cells
...r some reactions, such as the water-gas shift. The phenomenon may be more general, since we show that it also holds for platinum and may also hold true for other metals and metal oxide supports, such as titanium and iron oxide." She adds, "It opens the way for new catalyst designs so more hydrogen can be produc......oteins, or antibodies, responsible for immunity a phenomenon known as somatic hypermutation. This process enables the body to fight off a wide range of diseases. Their findings are detailed in the July 3 issue of the journal Nature. "When performing laboratory or in vitro experiments you always hope to get r...NIH awards $1 million to Virginia Bioinformatics Institute to study biochemical network modeling
...rvisiae. Oxidative stress is a general biological phenomenon common to all aerobically grown organisms, from bacteria to humans, that essentially causes aging and degeneration. According to a report by Laubenbacher and colleagues, "Yeast cells have evolved a variety of mechanisms to protect themselves from t...Cooperation between unrelated male lizards adds a new wrinkle to evolutionary theory
...it is so conspicuous in them," Sinervo said. This phenomenon of runaway social selection centered on the throat-color locus has led to the evolution of cooperation in the blue males, Sinervo said. This represents a new idea for how social cooperation evolves, which he and Clobert call "morphotypic" selection, ...Researchers discover use of novel mechanism preserves Y chromosome genes
...orillas. The comparison demonstrated that the same phenomenon of gene conversion appeared to be at work more than 5 million years ago, when humans and the non-human primates diverged from each other. "The comparison between human and non-human primate chromosomes confirming the finding shows the power of comp...Hebrew University researcher studies 'reorganization' of brain in blind people
... Jerusalem provides a better understanding of this phenomenon through closer examination of how and where information is processed in the brains of blind people. An article on his work appears in the current online edition of Nature Neuroscience magazine. It is believed that this work could open a window toward...Gene defect produces lupus-like disorder
...oantibodies are an epiphenomenon -- an interesting phenomenon but not directly related to the cause of lupus," said Wolin. The normal role of Ro was not well understood although it was known that the protein is normally found bound to small RNA molecules called Y RNAs, whose function remains somewhat mysterious...Automated imaging of brain tissue, high-quality glimpses inside arteries
...tually encompasses the entire cluster of ions. The phenomenon may lead to unusual crystal-like formations at the shock wave surface and potentially even to nuclear reactions inside the shocked cluster. Alexander Kaplan will describe the shockwaves in paper CWN4, Shock-shells in coulomb explosion of nano-cluster...Nature designs hard and tough materials at the nanoscale
...o a perfect crystal despite inherent defects. This phenomenon also suggests that the engineering concept of stress concentration at flaws is no longer valid for nanoscale design. (Gao et al., PNAS, 2003, Vol. 100, No. 10, pp. 5597-5600.) The science and technology of materials have set milestones of human civil...Secrets of drug resistance in bacteria
...onth of a meter) provide the closest look yet of a phenomenon common to all living cells: the ability to expel a diverse flotilla of toxins using one pump. In healthy people, these so-called multidrug efflux pumps play important roles. A complex called P-glycoprotein, for example, prevents the entry of toxic mo...Controlling cell adhesion: Researchers report first evidence of 'catch bonds'
...nteractions in the circulation." Understanding the phenomenon is important, McEver noted, because the lifetimes ... confirmed in selectin molecules, Zhu believes the phenomenon applies other instances in which adhesive molecules interact in the presence of mechanical stress ca...UC Riverside scientists contribute to study that unveils genome sequence of bread mold
...e size. "This likely results from the action of a phenomenon termed Repeat-Induced Point mutation or RIP," she explained. RIP is a process that mutates duplicated genes during the sexual cycle in Neurospora , and is thought to provide a defense mechanism to destroy foreign DNA, such as that from invading vir...Virgin birth method could found stem cells
The phenomenon that leads to "virgin births" in some species looks like a promising source of embryonic stem cells. Researchers are on the brink of obtaining human stem cells this way for the first time, and animal experiments suggest such cells are indistinguishab......versity of Georgia, co-authored an article on this phenomenon that appeared as the cover story of a recent issue of the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters. "The water appeared black in satellite imagery because the concentration of the microscopic plants and other dissolved matters were ...