Drought limits tropical plant distributions, scientists at the Smithsonian report
...bbean slope to the drier Pacific slope. "It was a surprise that even in humid tropical forests, traditionally viewed as water saturated, plants growing at dry sites were more drought-tolerant than plants growing at wet sites," Engelbrecht said. The team also evaluated the local distributions of both seedlin...The stem cells that weren't there
... supplies itself with insulin, discovered to their surprise that adult stem cells, which they expected to play a crucial role in the process, were nowhere to be found. Many researchers had proposed that adult stem cells develop into insulin-producing cells, called beta cells, in the pancreas. Instead, the b...Scientists: As rainfall changes, tropical plants may acclimate
...form for their nutrition," Schuur said. That's a surprise partly because of the uniformity of response, he said. Such uniformity sharply contrasts the conventional notion that tropical plant species coexist by adopting widely different strategies to getting what they need. At least with regard to nitrogen u...Study revises dynamin's role in nerve cell function
...itially appeared healthy. "That was the really big surprise here," Dr. Ryan says. "Pups lacking dynamin 1 moved and suckled just like normal pups at birth." Lab study revealed that synaptic activity in these mice was functioning at a low level -- enough to keep the mice alive over the short term -- without ...Immune antibodies penetrate neurons to clear Alzheimer's-linked amyloid
...activity of the antibody within the cell was a big surprise and something we really haven't appreciated in neurological medicine. It gives us new hope for the use of immunotherapy against Alzheimer's, while casting intriguing new light on other disease processes," says senior author Dr. Gunnar Gouras, associa...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
..., Andreas Lthi, and Erich Seifritz The element of surprise is crucial to a good horror movie. Now Herry et al... as more unpleasant than predictable sounds. Thus, surprise and fear share some common elements and pathways in mouse and humans. 4. The Limits of Neuronal G...Origins of nervous system found in genes of sea sponge
...es were present in the sponge. That was when the surprise hit, said Kosik. We found a lot of genes to make a nervous system present in the sponge. The research team also found evidence to show that these genes were working together in the sponge. The way two of the proteins interact, and their atomic struct...Stray penguins probably reached northern waters by fishing boat
Guy Demmert got quite a surprise when he hauled a fishing net into his boat off the coast of southeast Alaska in July 2002. There among the salmon, in living black and white, was a Humboldt penguin, thousands of miles from where any of its kind should have been. The flightless bi...Origins of nervous system found in genes of sea sponge, report scientists at UC Santa Barbara
...s were present in the sponge. That was when the surprise hit, said Kosik. We found a lot of genes to make a nervous system present in the sponge. The research team also found evidence to show that these genes were working together in the sponge. The way two of the proteins interact, and their atomic struct...Neuronal activity gives clues to working memory
... firing that working memory requires. "The real surprise came when we turned off many of the inhibitory pathways," Dr. Aksay says. In that case, persistent firing remained, but was often present at inappropriate times. "It appears that the inhibitory cells are not key or even required to generate persis...The wider view from a detailed focus
...iously thought to be gene deserts'. "A major surprise was that many of the novel control regions are not shared with other species, but restricted to our human genome," continued Dr Dermitzakis. "We appear to have a reservoir of active elements that seem to provide no specific or direct benefit...A faster way to recover from chemotherapy and marrow transplant
...ber of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. This was a surprise finding. A variety of experiments confirmed that prostaglandins, particularly dmPGE2, promote blood stem cell formation, while chemicals that block prostaglandin synthesis (such as aspirin or ibuprofen), suppress blood stem cell formation. Finally,...TU Delft tracks the influence of a cancer inhibitor on a single DNA molecule
...the Delft researchers have now discovered to their surprise that adding topotecan also dramatically impedes the unwinding and that DNA loops accumulate as a result. The accumulation of these DNA loops forms the basis for an alternative mechanism, and could help in the development of better cancer medicine. ...Support for chromosomal theory of cancer found in cancers' development of drug resistance
...ffectiveness and eventual resistance. This is no surprise to University of California, Berkeley, genetics researcher Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology. According to his novel yet controversial "chromosomal" theory of cancer, which is receiving increased attention among cancer researche...Early fire risk for mountains near Los Angeles
... Southern California. I dont think it will be a surprise that things are dry this year throughout the West, Dennison says. But if you can pin it to a short time period of a few weeks within a four-month time frame, then you are providing a useful prediction. "You can focus your efforts on the period of ...Pediatric ritalin use may affect developing brain, new study suggests
...ompared to untreated rodents. "That was a bit of a surprise because we thought a stimulant might cause the rats to behave in a more anxious manner," Dr. Milner says. The researchers also used high-tech methods to track changes in both the chemical neuroanatomy and structure of the treated rats' brains at po...Call for EU to launch major project to map out all our proteins
...redicted through analysis of the genome. This is a surprise because each gene had been understood to code for a protein on a one-to-one basis. As Aebersold pointed out, there are several possible explanations for this apparent anomaly. The simplest explanation is simply a lack of sensitivity of proteomics met...Reading a face is tricky business
...f sensory input. Volunteers evaluated 70 different surprise faces. Half of the faces were primed by fearful ex...hown for 30 milliseconds immediately prior to each surprise face. The expressions of surprise could be interpreted as positive (the sudden arrival of a frien...Progesterone injections do not prevent preterm birth in twin pregnancies
...hapel Hill study has found. The result came as a surprise to the researchers, who previously discovered that weekly injections of the naturally occurring hormone, called 17 alpha-hydroxyprogesterone or 17-OHPC, reduced additional preterm births by one-third in women whose previous babies were born premature......t cell adhesion protein called Talin, and to their surprise found that cells without Talin moved nearly as fast as wild-type cells. The finding suggests that the rate at which a cell can tighten and relax its cytoskeleton is more important in controlling its speed than how firmly it attaches to the substrate....