Multinational research: protecting ecology means understanding people, too
...za, a cultural anthropologist who has for 15 years studied ecotourism and indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Fitzgerald and Stronza now will lead 20 other professors at Texas A&M University on a $3 million National Science Foundation grant aimed at cutting down barriers between biological and social science ...Clones on task serve greater good, evolutionary study shows
... too much sun. It keeps you in the zone. The group studied different cloned offspring of the Arabadopsis, a plant of the mustard family commonly used to test genetic questions. Arabadopsis can have many offspring that are genetically identical. Yet, just like human twins, these identical plants still have su...Unravelling new complexity in the genome
...s in cells and tissues. Until recently researchers studied splicing regulation on a gene by gene basis. Now we can obtain a picture of what is happening on a global scale, which provides a fascinating new perspective on how genes are regulated, Blencowe explains. A challenge now is to figure out how the...Which came first, the moth or the cactus?
...enita moth-senita cactus mutualism in 1995 and has studied it ever since. The problem is that the moths lay...okes that his "real" lab is 1,500 miles away. He's studied senita at several locations in the Sonoran Desert, including the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument...Interaction of just 2 genes governs coloration patterns in mice
...thia C. Steiner at UCSD and Jesse Weber at Harvard studied Peromyscus, a mouse that is the most widespread mammal in North America. Within the last several thousand years, these mice have migrated from mainland Florida to barrier islands and dunes along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where they now live on wh...Bursts of waves drive immune system 'soldiers' toward invaders
...co-author on the paper. The cycle the scientists studied is very similar in concept to the circuit that generates neuronal conduction, the beating of the heart, and many other waves in biology, according to Weiner. "All of these use a self-activating signal that plants the seeds for its own destruction...MIT creates 3-D images of living cell
...e the functional activities of living cells can be studied in their native state. Using the new technique, his team has created three-dimensional images of cervical cancer cells, showing internal cell structures. They've also imaged C. elegans, a small worm, as well as several other cell types. The rese...X-ray images help explain limits to insect body size
...n insects. It's the legs that count in the beetles studied here, but what matters for the other hundreds of thousands of beetle species and millions of insect species overall is still an open question, said Jake Socha, Argonne biologist....Smokeless tobacco more effective than cigarettes for delivering dangerous carcinogens into the body
...U.S. brands of smokeless tobacco. The researchers studied nitrosamine exposure by analyzing the urine of participants for NNAL, a biomarker for NNK exposure, as well as cotinine, a biomarker for nicotine. Hecht and his colleagues found that both cotinine and NNAL levels were higher in the urine of snuff use...No evidence that widely prescribed statins protect against prostate cancer
...o outcomes seen in a clinical trial. Halls team studied the medical histories of 1,812 men, including 237 statin users, and analyzed their blood for free or unbound testosterone, for total testosterone, and for other associated compounds. The researchers found no relationship between statin use and free...Climate change and permafrost thaw alter greenhouse gas emissions in northern wetlands
...ults were surprising. Turetsky and her colleagues studied areas affected by permafrost degradation across a large region of Canada. They initially expected to find that the melting ice would (trigger a release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, as previously frozen plant and animal remains became sus...OHSU turns mouse into factory for human liver cells
...e cultures. In the last decade, scientists have studied whether mice could be genetically engineered and bred to grow human liver cells. Early results since 2004 showed it could be done, but the mice were difficult to breed, the time window for transplanting human liver cells into the mice was narrow, and...Brain blood flow gives clues to treating depression
...rch in psychiatry at Hadassah. Israeli researchers studied 33 depressed patients and 25 healthy control subjects with SPECT and the radiotracer 99mTc-HMPAO. Our findings may aid in elucidating the mechanism of depression and its treatment, said Bonne. There may be more than one mechanism responsible for th......s much older than previously thought in one widely studied species,leading biologists say. The findings show that at least in plant evolution, sex with others may bemore trouble than its worth. The mustard-like plant Arabidopsis thaliana lost interest in sex and startedself-pollinating at least a million...Other highlights in the Aug. 7 JNCI
...hns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues studied 59 Wilms tumor samples to determine whether this loss of imprinting is specific to the IGF2 gene or whether it is part of a more general disruption of the epigenome. These results may have important therapeutic implications. Because of their poten...Taking a supplement of glycine helps prevent degenerative diseases such as arthrosis or osteoporosis
...ism Institute (CMI) in Tenerife, where researchers studied the effect of the glycine supplement on the diet of a group of 600 volunteers affected by different diseases related to the mechanical structure of the organism such as arthrosis, physical injuries or osteoporosis. The patients analysed were aged 4-8...Teamwork between 2 key proteins necessary for normal development and regulation of red blood cells
...orresponding author for this study. Lloyds team studied gene expression and red blood cell development in the mouse embryo. They used mouse embryos missing both the KLF2 and EKLF genes to show that embryonic globin expression is severely reduced, and that the embryos therefore are anemic, compared to mice...MIT study: Maturity brings richer memories
... brain systems underlying it have been extensively studied in adults, but until now little was known about ho...showed higher activation at the time when subjects studied a scene they would later remember. No age-related differences showed up in the activation patterns o...A sensory organ, not the brain, differentiates male and female behavior in some mammals
... Dulac and co-authors Tali Kimchi and Jennings Xu studied female mice mutant in TRPC2, an ion channel whose absence disables the vomeronasal organ, which works along with the nose to detect pheromones. They found that these females, when placed in a cage with a sexually experienced male, would engage in t......or of microbiology at UC Davis, and his colleagues studied the equivalent protein in yeast, SGS1. They found that when SGS1 was defective, yeast chromosomes became more promiscuous in combining with each other as they attempt to repair breaks in the DNA. Normally, to repair broken DNA, matching chromosomes...