A window on the environment from Tahoe to the ocean
...nterconnectedness. Air, water, land and the living things on or in them are connected in ways obvious and subtle. But actually seeing and understanding all those connections in context is very hard. That is why environmental and computer scientists at UC Davis are working together to get a "God's-eye view" ......re than 20 years ago. Yet tumor cells have so many things wrong with them, including methylation abnormalities, that a precise cause-and-effect relationship between cancer and epigenetic alterations has been difficult to pin down, says Andrew Feinberg of the John Hopkins School of Medicine, who has been a p...Living things are resourceful, which is a comforting thought unless the living thing in question is a pathogen or a cancer cell. Noxious cells excel at developing drug resistance, outwitting immune systems, and evading cellular controls. They even show an unhealth...Geneticists discover genes that make fruit fly hybrids sterile
...her in hybrids. "This tells us there must be other things involved in the hybrid" that impacts the incompatible pairing of these genes, said Barbash. In future work the researchers hope to determine whether the hybrids die because of additional genes like Hmr and Lhr, or because of more subtle differences b...From hot springs to rice farms, scientists reveal new insights into the secret lives of archaea
... cycling the global supply of nitrogen. All living things need nitrogen to make proteins, DNA and other biomolecules. Nearly 80 percent of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen gas, which, unlike oxygen, cannot be absorbed by most organisms. Getting usable nitrogen turns out to be a complicated biological pro...First molecular simulation of a long DNA strand shows unexpected flexibility
...robe biology on timescales very relevant to living things such as DNA packing. Virginia Tech's System X supercomputer was critical to this research, he said. It was the combination of its sheer compute power with the algorithmic advantages that made it possible to run molecular simulations on that scale....Brown and OTS will jointly manage new ILTER network secretariat
...that change. Just within our own lifetimes, we see things differently. We perceive a change or we perceive s...n in annual research funding. Such sites have some things to teach and some things to learn from networks in developing countries, which are often more closel...Genetic archaeology offers clues to backstory of male pregnancy
... you the overall family tree and can tell you when things took place during the evolution of a new structure. From this family tree we can make educated guesses about the structure and function of these proteins. We're looking at the endpoint and trying to reconstruct its origin. It's like doing genetic ar...Sodium, prostaglandin may be keys to successful treatment for some bedwetters
...most, Rittig said. When asked to imagine the worst things that could happen to them, children rated bedwetting in the top 10, he said. Rittig published a study in 1989 showing that the hormone vasopressin plays a role in enuresis. This research helped lead to the use of desmopressin to stop bedwetting in ...Invasive ants territorial when neighbors are not kin
...hting with each other, they were glad to know that things were moving in the right direction," quipped Holway....Have yourself a merry 'nano' Christmas! Nanotechnology holiday gifts
...bility to measure, see, manipulate and manufacture things usually between 1 and 100 nanometers (nm). A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. A human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers wide. The limit of the human eyes capacity to see without a microscope is about 10,000 nm....News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
... electron microscopy (EM). The authors report that things dont add up: they found many more functionally determined release sites than anatomically defined active zones as defined by three- dimensional EM reconstructions. Using kinetic modeling, the authors estimated that an approximately fivefold increase ...Study suggests morning pollution pall for Manchester commuters
...lso microscopic particles. These particles can be things like fine oily mists from vehicle exhausts and flecks of dust from tyres and brakes. Studies have shown that they have the greatest effect on our health. Analysis of the data is at an early stage and its going to be at least another year before we c...Fragmentation rapidly erodes Amazonian biodiversity
...n millennia, said Laurance, so none of us expected things to change too fast. But in just two decadesa wink of time for a thousand year-old treethe ecosystem has been seriously degraded. The main driver of these changes, say the authors, is ecological changes near the margins of forest fragments. When y...Getting to the heart of the heart
...t chambers. "If you understand the process of how things develop from very primitive embryonic stem cells to fully differentiated tissue, you have the potential to duplicate that process in the lab and make a tissue that a patient might need," says John Mayer, MD, a cardiovascular surgeon at Children's who...Proteins anchor memories in our brain
...ules all the time. Yet we have stable memories and things we learn. So what is it that encodes a memory to the synapse if proteins are being changed all the time? Certain proteins act as anchors that keep other proteins in place."...NIH launches 'Health Info Rx Program' on newborn screening and related genetic disorders
...red and I did a lot of hunting and pecking to find things that would help us. It's so gratifying to see a resource like Genetics Home Reference, which has collected and organized a wealth of helpful materials into a one-stop shopping experience. I know that it is of great relief to parents I work with throu...Does natural selection drive the evolution of cancer?
...vival and reproduction of cells in a tumor are the things that drive it towards malignancy. "Evolution is also driving therapeutic resistance," Maley adds. "When you apply chemotherapy to a population of tumor cells, you're quite likely to have a resistant mutant somewhere in that population of billions ......flicting views of our role in the larger scheme of things that remain deeply ingrained in American culture and, perhaps more deeply, in the human psyche." Bill Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society, describes Kaye's work as "an authoritative history, documenting the power of wilderness values and t......great research platform for assessing the taste of things to come."...