American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- Aug. 8, 2007
...y only a scientist or quality control expert would want to have, the article concludes. ARTICLE #5 EMBARGOED FOR 9 A.M., EASTERN TIME, August 15, 2007In hot pursuit: Instrument makers harness technology to pursue budding applications for their tools This story will be available on August 15 at http...NIH gives $8M to University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine for myositis research
...h is not associated with a rash. The study doctors want to know whether rituximab improves symptoms of these diseases. Rituximab is a monoclonal antibody used and approved since 1997 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It was approved in February...Multinational research: protecting ecology means understanding people, too
...esearch from a variety of academic disciplines. We want to produce a social scientist who can talk effectively with a biologist about whats going on in that system and vice versa, Stronza said. We hope that the PhD.s who emerge from the program will be effective in working in teams to conserve biodiversi...Clones on task serve greater good, evolutionary study shows
...ion, there are optimal traits to have, a place you want to be. Canalization prevents you from the minor screw ups along the way eating wrong, getting 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 tes...Which came first, the moth or the cactus?
...to his earlier interests in community ecology. "We want to understand how the structure of mutualistic communities influences their stability and dynamics, both of individual species and of whole networks of species." The results suggest that the structures of mutualistic communities compliment those of p...Bursts of waves drive immune system 'soldiers' toward invaders
... space and time -- encouraging for those of us who want to uncover general organizing principles in biolog... this wave generator to guide the cells. They also want to learn if the wave action they have discovered in neutrophils also controls movement and shapes ch...Tropical insects 'go the distance' to inform rainforest conservation
...iland to confirm the New Guinea findings. If we want the stability of these forests, especially given how much they are threatened now, we need to understand how to best set up conservation areas, said Cognato said. And its not just about the flashy species; its about the whole thing. Hulcr agrees. ...OHSU turns mouse into factory for human liver cells
...fferent humans metabolize drugs differently. So we want to create a library of cells from different humans to capture some of that variability," Grompe said....Smithsonian scientists show differing patterns of rainforest biodiversity
...a single plant, but theyve got wings. They may not want to fly, but they can if they need to, said Smithsonian scientist Scott Miller, an author of the Nature paper. The insects also showed limited specialization in the plant species they feed upon, in contrast to the common assumption that tropical speci...Innovative tagging technique may help researchers better protect fish stocks
...sh and butterflyfish. Now, Thorrold and colleagues want to attempt one of the first large-scale, empirical tests of the effectiveness of marine protected areas. The scientists will attempt to assess how far and how effectively the larvae spawned within protected areas are contributing to populations outsi...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...rman, Mikio Hoshino, and Margareta Nikolic If you want to make axons, you will need some activated p21-activated kinase (Pak1), according to Jacobs et al. The authors found this CdC42 and cofilin effector in all neurites, but it was activated locally in nascent axons. In cultured hippocampal and cortical......ging and close in on its fundamental causes. We want to determine what limits the life span of the fly, or any other animal, Tower said. Towers team eliminated bacteria as a factor by comparing normal fruit flies to specimens born from eggs washed in antibiotic, raised in an axenic environment, and g...Argonne wins three R&D 100 awards for innovative technologies
...ower, and by groups of doctors and specialists who want to examine patient scans simultaneously at multiple sites, enriching diagnostics. For example, a modified version of the Access Grid enabled epidemiologists and immunologists to treat patients without exposing others to infection during the SARS epi...Computer graphics spills from milk to medicine
...mputer graphics model how much fat and protein you want in your milk, the model will spit out the information you need to create a life-like milk image by determining how light will interact with your specified ratio of milk fats and proteins. Similarly, if you specify the concentration of algae and diffe...Not all embryonic stem cell lines are created equal
...e, you need those types of neurons; whereas if you want to treat a forebrain disease like Huntingtons, you need ES cells that differentiate into that type of neuron, he said. The differences in neurons produced by cell lines may offer both advantages and disadvantages for treatment, he said. On the one h...Satellite tracking will help answer questions about penguin travels
...ton doctoral student in biology. "We want to model the energy requirements for these birds s... and weigh less than 3.5 ounces. "We want to put the transmitters on healthy, robust birds that we think are likely to get back and start bree...Biologists at Tufts University discover 1 reason why chromosomes break, often leading to cancer
...e deletions and deletions can cause cancer, so you want to understand the fragility because that might be what's causing cancer," she continued. DNA structure leads to fragility Past research had predicted the flexibility of the DNA helix in this particular common fragile site by calculating the twi...Altering a protein makes mice less fearful
...d other types of side effects that make people not want to take them," Wemmie explained. "If we could find something that was more specific, or even had a different set of side effects, that could be an advantage." Although this study examined the effect of disrupting the ion channel in mice, the mouse ...Orangutans' communication resembles a game of 'charades'
...s' analogy, he continued. In playing the game, you want primarily to convey your meaning non-verbally--as does the orangutan--but secondarily to help the team get your meaning by giving them hints as to how well they are doing. To find out whether orangutans intentionally communicate with people through...U-M researchers find family of 'on switches' that cause prostate cancer
...usion can affect the treatment given. We would not want to give androgen to someone whose prostate cancer gene fusion is not regulated by androgen, says Chinnaiyan, who is the S.P. Hicks Collegiate Professor of Pathology at the U-M Medical School. Rearrangements in chromosomes and fused genes are known ...