A humble aquarium fish may be the key to new therapies for birth defects
...l Cell Metabolism. The paper describes a number of striking parallels between a rare but fatal human birth defect called Menkes disease and a lethal mutation in a small tropical fish called the zebrafish that has become an important animal model for studying early development. Zebrafish are easy and inexpe...How HIV 'exhausts' killer T cells
...estored helper T cell function. "This was the most striking finding, because the majority of patients we have studied had no detectable levels of these HIV-specific cells; but as soon as we blocked the PD-1 pathway, they had a ton of them," said Walker. The researchers' discoveries could lead to immediat...Rapid-fire jaws propel ants to safety
... first type, termed bouncer defense, involved ants striking a large intruding object, simultaneously attacking the intruder while bouncing away, up to 40 centimeters in some cases, and sometimes causing the intruder to bounce away as well. The second type of defensive propulsion was the escape jump. When a t...Single genetic assay could help physicians decide when to switch patients from Gleevec to Sutent
...ns in tumor samples from 74 patients, and found "a striking relationship," Heinrich said. "Patients with tumors that are wild type or have an exon 9 mutation have a longer survival when treated with Sutent than do patients with an exon 11 mutation." he said. "We are trying to figure out why that is so, but we...Cellular traffic backups implicated in skeletal malformations
...er, hatched and survived to nine days, albeit with striking skeletal abnormalities craniofacial defects, kinked fins and shortened body. The pathway affected by the crusher mutation is key to transporting proteins outside of the cell. All proteins are made in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a labyrinthine ...Red is for hummingbirds, yellow for moths
...eastern expansion of the red-flowered form." "The striking geographic pattern of flower color--where we never see a red-flowered plant in the east or a yellow-flowered plant along the coast--speaks wonders of the power of natural selection to maintain these differences," said Streisfeld....UW researchers link deadliness of 1918 flu to severe immune system response
... closely on the heels of the main influenza virus, striking people while their immune system was compromised from the flu. This new research indicates that there is something particular about the 1918 influenza strain that makes it especially deadly. The findings also show Kash and his colleagues an opening......eurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. "The striking thing is that moving your eyes can actually help resolve ambiguous visual inputs." Our eyes move all the time, whether to follow a moving object or to scan our surroundings. On average, our eyes move several times a second in fact, in a lifetime,...Asia's odd-ball antelope gets collared
...he shoulder and weighing about 50 pounds, the most striking feature of the saiga is its large nose, or proboscis, similar to a tapir. The function of this unusual nose is not clear, but it may serve to warm or filter air during Mongolia's frigid winters and notorious dust storms. Today saiga numbers have pl...Honey bee chemoreceptors found for smell and taste
...od and communicate its location to other bees." In striking contrast, the researchers found only 10 gustatory receptors in A. millifera, compared with 68 in D. melanogaster and 76 in A. gramblae. The low number of gustatory receptors for the sense of taste was unexpected, Robertson said, but can be explained....Scientists find lamprey a 'living fossil'
...tely larger than its descendents today. "The most striking feature of Priscomyzon is its large oral disc, edged with a soft outer lip, supported by an annular cartilage, and surrounding a circular mouth," the authors wrote. "This is the first clear evidence of a Palaeozoic lamprey with an oral disc." Accord...Ghost protein leaves fresh tracks in the cell
...ir test animal because its genetic makeup has many striking similarities to humans. "In our study, we showed spectrin doesn't have to bind to ankyrin to do its job," said Dubreuil. "This hints at a complexity we never had any idea about in trying to understand how these molecules work." Dubreuil and his col...HHMI awards $19 million to Latin American, Canadian scientists
...in the adult brain. His research has helped reveal striking similarities between the way the brain develops and the way it stores knowledge, and could enable scientists to find ways to rewire the brain to restore the function of neurons lost to injury or neurodegenerative disease. This is his first internatio...Teenagers know about condoms ... so why don't they use them?
A review of research has revealed striking similarities in the influences on young people's sexual behaviour across the world. The review of qualitative studies, published today in The Lancet, looked at 268 studies of the sexual behaviour of under-25-year-olds from South Africa to Sweden. ...Carnegie Mellon study reveals that odor discrimination is linked to the timing at which neurons fire
...borhood cat, timing could mean life or death. In a striking discovery, Carnegie Mellon University scientists h...of milliseconds. But, according to Urban, the most striking observation was that specific granule cells reliably fired with the same latency when they receive i...Decoded sea urchin genome shows surprising relationship to humans
...er. "Unraveling the sea urchin genome has yielded striking similarities and surprising differences between sea urchins and humans," said Judith Venuti, program director in NSF's Integrative Organismal Biology Division. "Expansion of sequencing beyond medically-relevant organisms is providing scientists with...UVa finds 'Alzheimer's gene' protects children from severe diarrhea
...titute of Child and Human Development to study the striking link. Guerrant and Dr. Aldo A. M. Lima, professor and director of the Clinical Research Unit & Institute of Biomedicine at Federal University of Cear have a 25-year collaboration addressing children's health and development issues. Dr. Lima and Dr. R...Ice-breaker Polarstern to explore uncharted seafloor
...hers assisted by 2 journalists on land, Through striking visuals obtained through state-of-the-art technology such as a remotely operated vehicle equipped with video camera and a high-resolution deep-sea still camera, Through regular contact with global media via satellite, A RUN UP TO THE INTERNATIO...Dartmouth researchers identify a gene that enhances muscle performance
...a normal mouse before exhaustion. One particularly striking feature of the finding was the accumulation of muscle glycogen, the stored form of carbohydrates, a condition that many athletes seek by "carbo-loading" before an event or game. The study appears in the Nov. 14 online issue of the American Journal of...Dramatic shift from simple to complex marine ecosystems occurred 250M years ago at mass extinction
..., 2006. An accompanying article suggests that this striking change escaped detection until now because previous research relied on single numbers--such as the number of species alive at one particular time or the distribution of species in a local community--to track the diversity of marine life. In the new r...