American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- Aug. 8, 2007
...icoder devices Chemical & Engineering News So you drop by the store tonight and buy the latest model of a Star Trek tricoder-type device a handheld instrument for scanning alien environments and use it to check your home air for indoor pollutants. As farfetched as that idea may seem, such devices ...Multinational research: protecting ecology means understanding people, too
.... The same was true in Stronzas field. I can tell you what people are saying and doing in their environm...tween Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. If you picture the three sides of a triangle conducting interdisciplinary research, partnering with local ...New study warns limited carbon market puts 20 percent of tropical forest at risk
...no credits for standing forests. The minute that you exclude those countries, their forests lose economic value in the global carbon market, leaving governments with little reason to protect them, said study co-author Gustavo Fonseca of CI and Brazils Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. The HFLD co...Clones on task serve greater good, evolutionary study shows
...olution, 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...Bursts of waves drive immune system 'soldiers' toward invaders
... Weiner likens it to a Lego tower on its side. "If you kept adding blocks to one end and removing them from the other, you would have a moving tower that was the same size but kept adding new material. This is very similar ...MIT creates 3-D images of living cell
...o provide detailed structural information. When you fix the cells, you can't look at their movements, and when you add external contrast agents you can never be sure that ...High blood pressure, low energy -- a recipe for heart failure
...rt fails because it becomes energy starved. And if you could feed the heart by using a drug that enhances ERR, for example you might enable the heart to better keep pace with its energy requirements." Although preventions and ...Tropical insects 'go the distance' to inform rainforest conservation
...t animals in small reserves tend to go extinct, you should plan for one large area instead of having a lot of small and distant areas to manage and conserve. Cognato and Hulcr expect similar patterns in other tropical lowland rain forests, as they are typically situated in the extensive low basins ...OHSU turns mouse into factory for human liver cells
...are converted to other chemicals in the liver, and you can't predict how the compound you developed in the lab will be converted," Grompe said. "Often, it's not the drug that's toxic, but th...1 of deep ocean's most turbulent areas has big impact on climate
...warmer water that is closer to the surface much as you would mix cream into coffee by stirring it with a ... of seawater. This is a huge amount of energy when you add all the seawater in the passage, equal to around five million watts, which is comparable to outp...Evolution is driven by gene regulation
...Conn. It is not just whats in your genes, its how you turn them on that accounts for the difference between species at least in yeast according to a report by Yale researchers in this weeks issue of Science. Weve known for a while that the protein coding genes of humans and chimpanzees are about 99 ...Smithsonian scientists show differing patterns of rainforest biodiversity
... data should be useful to address, Miller said. If you can preserve 10,000 hectares of forest, is it better to preserve it as 10 small 1,000 hectare plots or one large 10,000 hectare plot" Strategies for preserving high and low beta diversity forests might not be the same. Our data from the New Guine...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...e Norman, 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 t...Bacteria you can live without em, but it wont do you any good, according to a study of fruit flies by University of Southern California biologists. Fli...Other highlights in the Aug. 7 JNCI
...se, loss of imprinting means the copy of IGF2 that you get from your mother (which is usually turned off) is activated. This unusual activation occurs in about half of all Wilms tumors. Andrew Feinberg, M.D., of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues studied 59 Wilms tumor samples to dete...Lost forest yields several new species
...nd six new species in such a short period it makes you wonder what else is out there, said WCS researcher Dr. Andrew Plumptre, director of the societys Albertine Rift Program. The forest survey was conducted between January and March of 2007, and included participants from WCS, the Field Museum in Chi...Link between sunspots, rain helps predict disease in east Africa
... the predictable rhythms of sunspot peaks. "When you think of climate troubles in Africa, it's usually about drought," Stager said. "You don't often think of the opposite situation. "Too much rain can create just as many problems."...In limiting life span, study finds booming bacteria innocent
...y to devote to different processes, Tower said. If you devote a lot [of energy] to controlling bacteria, preventing them from growing to a toxic level, then that energy isnt available to maintain tissues and organs. However, we found no effect on the animals longevity even when their bacteria are taken f...Macho men are seen as bad choice for long-term love
... fitness and disease immunity. Masculinity may buy you dominance but not necessarily tip top physical condition. Instead women see a healthy guy as the source of wealth, and fit for family life. ...Study: Sticking to the sand might not be such good, clean fun for beachgoers
Just when you thought it was safer to stay out of the water. Microbes that result in beach closures and health advisories when detected at unsafe levels in the ocean also have been detected in the sand, according to a recent study by a team of Stanford scientist...