Fruit fly gene from 'out of nowhere' is discovered
...hat when a transposon sits next to a gene and then jumps to a new location, it carries part of the gene sequence it was next to and inserts it in the new location. Often, transposable elements appear to have no function or may be harmful and are eliminated by natural selection, but researchers are beginnin...Pendulum love, science class gender gaps, musical mind mirrors, and unparticle physics
...ompositions by regions of similarity punctuated by jumps where a significant change occurred. The data illustrated the similarity between patterns of electrical signals in the brain and of musical compositions. In addition, the team determined a complexity index for the compositions and brain function, ...Protein averts cell suicide but might contribute to cancer
...ill self-destruct. It's at this point when Dpo4 jumps in. It adds a base opposite the gap and then leaves, allowing the DNA-making machinery to bypass the damage and continue construction. The action averts cell suicide, but the gap and the stop-gap base might become a mutation that, in conjunction...Trap-jaw ants have fastest recorded strike in animal kingdom
...s, but just 3.1 centimeters horizontally. Escape jumps also yield a faster initial spin rate, 63 revoluti...er second to visualize the mandible movements. The jumps were detailed at a relatively slower 3,000 frames per second. Motion pictures, by comparison, are ty...Rapid-fire jaws propel ants to safety
...ally, the horizontal ranges of the bouncer defense jumps averaged seven times greater than escape jumps. "These propulsive behaviors may be especially important given that O. bauri builds nests in leaf litter, rather than below ground," the researchers write. "Without the subterranean strongholds typical...NSLS student-researcher talks at the March APS Meeting
...evels. The hole then is filled by an electron that jumps down from a higher electron orbital, which in turn causes an electron (the Auger electron) to be ejected from the solid. An Auger decay often results in a cascade of additional decays, leaving the atom ionized. At the NSLS, Sundaramoorthy has closely...Missing steps of jumping-gene replication discovered
...nvestigators. The researchers characterized 51 new jumps of L1, finding that insertions landed in random ge...he possibility that reverse transcriptase actually jumps onto the second DNA strand and continues the synthesis," she explains. "We think that this is how th...Genetic defenders protect crops from fungal disease
...ding on the mildew species), a second set of genes jumps into the fray. These genes, called EDS1, PAD4, and SAG101, work together in a complex inside the cell, and can signal infected cells to die. By sacrificing these fallen cells, the defense genes can spare healthy ones from infection. Somerville, Stein...Researchers develop new method to help find deadly malaria parasite's Achilles heel
...n and prior to replication," he said. "What really jumps out of our paper is the large number of membrane protein interactions in Plasmodium that are absent in other organisms. While this is potentially good news for fighting malaria, we need to know much more before we start talking about which membrane-p...New book explains how evolution really works, rebuts intelligent design
...proponents of intelligent design: where do the big jumps come from in evolution? Kirschner, HMS professor and chair of the Dept. of SystemsBiology, and Gerhart show that newly discovered molecular properties of organisms facilitate evolution. The origin of novelty, the development of new arrangements of i...Learning how SARS spikes its quarry
...is complex has to do with the fact that this virus jumps from animals to humans, laterally among humans, and in some cases from animals to humans but without subsequent human-to-human transmission," said Harrison. "And we know that those modes of transmission depend on specific mutations in the spike prote...'Jumping genes' contribute to the uniqueness of individual brains
...ormation in single brain cells. If enough of these jumps occur, they could allow individual brains to develop in distinctly different ways. "This mobility adds an element of variety and flexibility to neurons in a real Darwinian sense of randomness and selection," says Fred H. Gage, Professor and co-head ......he income of poor families resulted in the largest jumps in bushmeat consumption. The rural poor are only 16 percent of the Gabonese population, but as they rely on wildlife for food, they eat 51 percent of all bushmeat consumed. Given this, even a small step out of poverty for the rural poor might have ......ds to stick only to one species of host and rarely jumps to other hosts. Scientists already knew that early ancestors of our species, Homo sapiens, diverged from other archaic humans about 1.2 million years ago. (There is semantic debate over whether those archaic humans should be called Homo erectu...