Failure of critical protein connection at heart of cardiomyopathy
...e support of the pump. However, Towbin and Bowles wonder if their finding indicates that the dilated cardiomyopathy will recur. If you take patients out of the heart failure state now, will they develop dilated cardiomyopathy again in the future? said Towbin....First discovery of an immune system counter attack in the virus wars
... get rid of this protein? Thats when we started to wonder if the receptor was an adaptation of the immune system to the arms war a counter attack to the virus ability to exploit the inhibitory response, he said. In their research, the scientists used a panel of mutant viruses to identify a single gene resp...Microbiology team probes bacterium's surprising survival tactics
... seen Geobacter swim, leading UMass researchers to wonder how it is that metals serve as its energy source. Clues to the puzzles were found as Geobacter's genome was sequenced in collaboration with The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland. The Geobacter's genetic code revealed a startlin...UMass microbiology team probes bacterium's surprising survival tactics
... seen geobacter swim, leading UMass researchers to wonder how it found that metals that serve as its energy source. Clues to the puzzles were found as Geobacters genome was sequenced in collaboration with the Institute for Genomic Research. The Geobacters genetic code revealed a startling discrepancy: W...Strange signals from breastfeeding
...their own chances of having children, she says. "I wonder if these cultures have tapped into something." She is eager to find out if the breastfeeding smell has any impact on fertility. Richard Brown, a psychologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, notes that these are only preliminary fin...Decision making at the cellular level
It's a wonder cells make it through the day with the barrage of cues and messages they receive and transmit to direct the most basic and necessary functions of life. Such cell communication, or signal transduction, was at least thought to be an "automatic" cascad...Bacterial quorum-sensing structure solved
...quorum sensing in Pseudomonas bacteria "makes us wonder if something else also is going on," Winans says. Whatever the mechanism, it appears to be a vital pathway in a single, free-floating bacterium's attempt to collaborate with others of its kind. Thanks to techniques developed by the Cornell-Argonne t...Historic U.S.-Peru debt-for-nature swap
...es for helping protect these places of exceptional wonder and beauty." Located within the Peruvian Amazon, the ten areas that will benefit from the $10.6 million are home to some of the world's richest biodiversity. Within the country of Peru are 20,000 species of vascular plants, and nearly 1,800 bird sp...Fluid forces within the body help invasive bacteria
...rom the cell membrane," Thomas says. "It makes you wonder how many more proteins exist that are switched mechanically that is a fascinating area for research." "We need to know how bacterial adhesion is altered by shear. FimH is the second adhesion protein, after fibronectin, for which we have establishe...Computational geneticists revisit a mystery in evolution
...ime scales like that,'' Siegal says, ''you have to wonder whether any evolutionary force can be consistent over that amount of time to actually cause the outcome that you see.'' And third, what's ''optimal'' today may not be optimal tomorrow. Says Bergman: ''As [scientist Stephen Jay] Gould said, as the env...Evolution of language: FOXP2 and human uniqueness in religious perspective
...over, at a still deeper level, we may legitimately wonder why the universe is configured in such a way as to sponsor evolutionary processes that can lead to such remarkable outcomes as language." Q: What are we to make of the apparent fact that we are so close to other species (including mice) in the pres...A thermodynamic history traces temperature's effect on Universe, Earth and humans
... billionths of a degree above absolute zero." Ever wonder what's so special about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or why we consider room temperature to be around 70 degrees? Segr explains that people feel most comfortable in settings some 20 to 30 degrees below body temperature because that differential produces...Gene profiling reveals the essence of 'stemness'
...ther such conclusions were correct. This led us to wonder if we could figure out whether stem cells were, in fact, all similar. And a related and critical scientific question is what genes or genetic programs are important for stem cells to have their special properties, or 'stemness.'" To get at the answer...When it comes to sperm competition, size can matterits the female who holds the aces
...ted exceptions to the rule. That finding led us to wonder why some species take the time to produce a few gigantic sperm when the majority seem content to spew out millions of tiny sperm." Contrary to popular belief, females in most species are promiscuous, mating with more than one male during a single mat...Large-scale climate change linked to simultaneous population fluctuations in arctic mammals
..." Post asks. "At the very least it should make us wonder whether climate trends might bring into synchrony the ups and downs of populations of species that currently are fluctuating independently," he says. This research was sponsored by the U. S. National Science Foundation, the Penn State Environmental...Six reporters named to receive 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Awards
...yself--to go beyond 'shovelware' and tell tales of wonder that are made for the Web." History The AAAS Science Journalism Awards program, established in 1945, "helps to foster the public's understanding and appreciation of science, by promoting best practices in journalism," noted Alan I. Leshner, chief ...New role for tamoxifen as fertility drug for breast cancer patients?
...perts have discovered a potential new role for the wonder drug tamoxifen helping breast cancer patients to have babies by IVF. In a study published in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction[1], researchers from New York's Cornell University report the first IVF pregnancy to resu...Radiation-resistant organism reveals its defense strategies
...The finding of a tightly packed ring made the team wonder how the bacterium could live and function under normal conditions. DNA strands must unfurl to perform their job of protein production. How can they do that if they can barely budge? This question led to the uncovering of another of the microbe's surv...Field Museum uncovers evidence behind man-eating; revises legend of its infamous man-eating lions
... how so many humans could have been dispatched, we wonder why there weren't more." The two authors state "the same human-carnivore conflict drama, first depicted in France 20,000 years ago by Paleolithic artists, is currently at play in Africa. Competition for the same limited but fast diminishing resource...