Pre-cancerous blood diseases can be products of their environment
...researchers. For instance, the findings provide an explanation for why normal blood-forming stem cells transplanted into patients with the myeloproliferative condition sometimes take on the characteristics of the disease they were meant to cure. At the moment, most doctors focus only on the blood cell as being...Physicist cracks women's random but always lucky choice of X chromosome
...etely random distribution of X chromosomes but the explanation may have much wider implications as at least 10% o...erspective of a physicist Dr Nicodemi has found an explanation for the random selection based on thermodynamics. Research has already shown that at the key moment ...Migration alert -- How tumor cells home in on the lymphatic system
...tdoctoral researcher Jacqueline Shields provide an explanation along with data to support it. Tumors produce excess fluid that continually percolates from the tumor towards nearby lymphatic vessels. The EPFL research shows how tumor cells use a clever chemical strategy to exploit this slow, one-way flow in ord...Agonized death throes probable cause of open-mouthed, head-back pose of many dino fossils
...mals, have been found exhibiting this posture. The explanation usually given by paleontologists is that the dinos...on of the places they died in," Padian said. "This explanation gives us clues to interpreting a great many fossil horizons we didn't understand before and tells us...Lack of sun does not explain low vitamin D in elderly who are overweight
... other possibilities, says Harris. The most likely explanation seems to be that vitamin D is sequestered in fat tissue, reducing its entry into the blood....Pesticides choke pathway for nature to produce nitrogen for crops
...all symbiotic nitrogen fixation. The most common explanation for the observations is an overuse of agrichemical...n soil is turned. "Our research provides another explanation for declining crop yields," Fox said. "We showed that by applying pesticides that interfere with sym...SNM advances professional definition for 'molecular imaging'
...ter dictionary says that a definition is a concise explanation of the meaning of a word or phrasea statement expr...itions Task Force attempted to provide just thatan explanation of the essential nature of a complex termfor this evolving field. They developed standard definition...Stray penguins probably reached northern waters by fishing boat
...escape from zoos" Not likely. The most probable explanation is that the creatures were hauled aboard boats probably fishing boats -- in southern waters and were kept by the crews as the vessels traveled far to the north, then were released, concludes a new research paper by Dee Boersma, a UW biology professo...Cells re-energize to come back from the brink of death
...use to survive and thrive. The finding offers an explanation of how abnormal cells that have cheated death once by disabling the main suicide pathway called apoptosis can also foil a backup self-destruct program, which allows them to survive and become cancerous. The St. Jude study also suggests that a drug...Research finds evidence tropical cyclones have climate-control role
...ses in the Pacific, and there has been no complete explanation for this. Cyclones and hurricanes appear to pump warm water down and bring cold water to the surface. Mixing down buoyant, warm water lessens the density of the cold water and allows it to rise " The study did not examine deep ocean mixing, but it ...Swabs not reliable for detecting lead dust in homes
... from dirt hiding a red chemical reaction. Another explanation is that household dirt could interfere with the reaction between the dye in the swabs and reactive lead in the dust, researchers noted. Yet even when results were interpreted conservatively that is, every swab that did not stay purely yellow was c...Evolution of animal personalities
..., and Olof Leimar (Stockholm University) offers an explanation for the evolution of animal personalities. Their findings are detailed in Life-history trade-offs favour the evolution of animal personalities in the May 31 issue of Nature. The evolutionary origins of animal personalitydefined as consistent behav...Nature surrenders flowery secrets to international team
...gon. "This is a unifying theory that provides an explanation for the diversity of inflorescences we see in nature," says Dr. Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, the papers lead author and a University of Calgary computer scientist. "It was thought that separate mechanisms explained the many differences in form and devel...Cannibalism of the young allows individual fish to specialize
...al's size on its relative competitiveness, a logic explanation is given. The effect of early cannibalism is twofold. First, it stabilizes the variation in the number of individuals over time, which in turn increases the benefit of specializing on any resource since the risk of being dependent on a vanishing reso...Latent memory of cells comes to life
...of Copenhagen have a possible clarification. The explanation for the sudden changes is that it is not the DNA itself that is altered - it is its immediate surroundings that change and thereby cause a cell to activate some of its dormant capacities says Kim Sneppen, professor in Biophysics at the Niels Bohr Ins...Sleepless for science: Flies show link between sleep, immune system in Stanford study
...re likely to get sick, but scientists have no real explanation for how sleep is related to the immune system. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine are finding that fruit flies can point to the answers. What they have learned thus far is that illness and sleep disruption may be a two-w...UCLA AIDS Institute researchers find a peptide that encourages HIV infection
...learn why it happens, but at the moment there's no explanation for this paradoxical result." Still, the findings seem to show promise in gene therapy. ...Survival of the rarest: Fruit flies shed light on the evolution of behavior
...this process is common in nature, it may offer one explanation for why individuals, in general, vary so much from one to another in almost all species. The researchers' next step is to show that this phenomenon is also taking place in the wild. In addition, since the foraging gene is found in many animals, in...Species thrive when sexual dimorphism broadens their niches
... to allow the birth of large offspring. "Another explanation is that sexual differences arise so that the sexes can utilize different resources and not compete with each other," Losos says. "In some hummingbirds, for example, the sexes differ in the length of their beaks, allowing each to drink nectar from dif...Fat screen delivers plant-derived chemical with antidiabetic effects
...ferator-activated receptor (PPAR). "The current explanation for this paradoxical mode of action is the idea that the body needs a place to store lipids," Tontonoz said. "If the body becomes less able to store lipids in fat, it may deposit in other tissues," where it can spur disease. Despite their efficacy,...