High blood pressure, low energy -- a recipe for heart failure
...ology. ERR alpha sits in the nucleus of cells and senses how much energy is needed. When a heart cell finds itself short on energy, say because it's being called on to contract harder or faster, its ERR is activated by an inducible co-activator called PGC-1, turning on genes that increase the heart's capac...Disabling a sensory organ prompts female mice to act like male mice
...e gender-based behavior in animals by bringing the senses and an animal's ability to process what it sees, hears, and smells into the equation. What occurs in humans and other animals may be quite different, Dulac noted, because the mouse depends largely on pheromones and its sense of smell, while humans a...Researchers find pathway that controls cell size and division
...ize is controlled in large part by a molecule that senses the blood sugar dependent hormone insulin. Petra Levin, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and her laboratory have recently identified a trio of enzymes that act in concert to link nutrient availability to...Chickens also orient themselves by the Earth's magnetic field
...rtherly direction. To demonstrate that the chicken senses this compass point by means of its magnetic sense of direction, the researchers set up an artificial magnetic field in an easterly direction and the chickens did actually seek their mother behind the screen that lay to the east. Further experimen...JCI table of contents: June 14, 2007
...OLOGY You've got that painful feeling: How TRPA1 senses pain Researchers have identified an interaction between the molecules transient receptor potential A1 (TRPA1) and proteinase-activated receptor 2 (PAR2) that may explain how we sense the pain caused by inflammation. TRPA1 is present on a popula...Hypothyroidism clearly linked to mood swings
... the brain that helps process information from the senses and transmit it to other parts of the brain" she said. "In other words, hypothyroid patientscompared to healthy individualshave decreased metabolism in special parts of the brain that are responsible for processing information, " said Eichhorn. "Rema...New research shows sharks use their noses and bodies to locate smells
...ional properties, so animals must use a variety of senses to get the directional information for a smell," s... cause hearing and equilibrium problems in humans, senses that are also based on hair cells. Sharks with their lateral lines intact demonstrated a preferen...... ability to migrate, an inner compass that somehow senses the presence of chemokines. But in metastasis, the cells inner compass goes awry allowing cells to leave the primary tumor, crawl through tissues and enter blood vessels spreading the cancer throughout the body. Richard Klemke, Ph.D., professor ...New findings in smell and taste
...y essential roles in our daily lives. The chemical senses serve as important warning systems, alerting us to the presence of potentially harmful situations or substances, including gas leaks, smoke, and spoiled food. Flavors and fragrances are also important in determining what foods we eat and the commerci...Carnegie Mellon University research shows how sensory-deprived brain compensates
...plasticity in response to changes in how an animal senses its environment. Ultimately, we want to understand at the molecular level the dynamic between sensory use and neural plasticity," Barth said....JCI table of contents: April 12, 2007
...to a cell is controlled by the protein AMPK, which senses when a cell has low levels of energy and triggers the cell to generate more. Mutations in one of the AMPK subunits (gamma-2) leading to increased AMPK activity are associated with heart failure characterized by the accumulation of high levels of the ...Deflecting damage: Flexible electronics aid brain injury research
...ample, could be coated with electronic "skin" that senses touch and temperature and sends that information back to the brain like any natural human limb. "A basic problem with the interface between electronics and living tissue is that electronics are hard and tissues are soft," he said, noting that nerv...Picky-eater flies losing smell genes
...trategies, because smell and taste are the primary senses that insects use to assess potential host plants. "My work suggests that changes in these receptors help insects adapt to novel host plants," McBride said. "These genes may therefore be a good place to start looking for genetic changes that underli...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...er when it comes to combining information from our senses is usually attributed to "higher" centers in association cortex, yet recent studies suggest that multisensory integration can also occur in primary sensory cortex. This week, Kayser et al. used functional magnetic resonance imaging in macaques to exa...Instruction manual for creating a molecular nose
..., International Edition, January 15, 2007). The senses of living organisms function using various mechanisms, among other things utilizing membrane proteins as receptors. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry have now succeeded in creati......te sex through the glass, they could not use other senses to respond to one another. Dr Walling continues: 'It's well established that sexual maturation in swordtails is highly variable, occurring anywhere between four and 20 months of age even though they rarely live longer than two years. We were really...'Electric' fish shed light on ways the brain directs movement
...tion coming into their brains and bodies via their senses could eventually spark developments in areas as far reaching as medicine and robotics. "That animals unconsciously know that they have mass seems obvious enough, but it took a complex analysis of a very specialized fish to demonstrate this," Fortu...Sniffers show that humans can track scents, and that two nostrils are better than one
...campus. They then garbed volunteers to block their senses of sight, hearing and touch, eliminating all clues other than smell to guide them along the trail. Sniffing like bloodhounds, two-thirds of 32 subjects were able to follow the chocolate scent to the end of the trail within three attempts. All volunte...Mixing exploitation and conservation: A recipe for disaster
...ifestyle. They have a pressure-sensitive bill that senses hard objects buried in the sand and a shell-crushing gizzard to accommodate the birds' penchant for swallowing their catch whole. They even have a flexible digestive system that minimizes the energy costs of flying up to 16,000 kilometers between the......ds a five-minute acute phase, when the body first senses and reacts to pain, followed by a 5- to 15-minute period of relative stillness, as the body uses its own mechanisms to try to inhibit the pain, and ending with a 15- to 30-minute period called the tonic phase, during which a mouse starts to again vig...