One-letter switches in the DNA code occur much more frequently in human genomes than anticipated, but are often only found in one or a few individuals. The abundance of rare variations across the human genome is consistent with the population...
Biology & Nature
Imagine reading an entire book, but then realizing that your glasses did not allow you to distinguish "g" from "q." What details did you miss? Geneticists faced a similar problem with the recent discovery of a "sixth...
Biology & Nature
How species diversity is maintained is a fundamental question in biology. In a new study, a team of Indiana University biologists has shown for the first time that diversity is influenced on a spatial scale of unparalleled scope, in part, by how...
Biology & Nature
Scientists at The University of Nottingham have opened the way for more accurate research into new ways to fight dangerous bacterial infections by proving a long-held theory about how bacteria communicate with each other. Researchers in the...
Health & Medicine
Picture a turtle the size of a Smart car, with a shell large enough to double as a kiddie pool. Paleontologists from North Carolina State University have found just such a specimen -- the fossilized remains of a 60-million-year-old South American...
Paleontology & Archaeology
Black carbon aerosols and tropospheric ozone, both humanmade pollutants emitted predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere's low- to mid-latitudes, are most likely pushing the boundary of the tropics further poleward in that hemisphere, new research...
Earth & Climate
Common variants of the ApoE gene are strongly associated with the risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease, but the gene's role in the disease has been unclear. Now, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have found that in...
Health & Medicine
Plants are dependent on the sun. Sunlight does not only supply them with energy, but also controls their development steps. So-called photoreceptors activate the processes of germination, leaf development, bud formation, and blossoming in the cells...
Biology & Nature
Scientists at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and the University of Ottawa (uOttawa) have discovered that mice that lack a gene called Snf2l have brains that are 35 per cent larger than normal. The research, led by Dr. David Picketts...
Biology & Nature
Surgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have restored some hand function in a quadriplegic patient with a spinal cord injury at the C7 vertebra, the lowest bone in the neck. Instead of operating on the spine itself, the...
Health & Medicine
Researchers have created an ultrasensitive biosensor that could open up new opportunities for early detection of cancer and "personalized medicine" tailored to the specific biochemistry of individual patients. The device, which could be...
Physics & Chemistry
Tall, waving corn fields that line Midwestern roads may one day be replaced by dwarfed versions that require less water, fertilizer and other inputs, thanks to a fungicide commonly used on golf courses. Burkhard Schulz, a Purdue University assistant...
Biology & Nature
Reticulated dragonet have been found in Väderöarna -- "Weather Islands" -- off the west coast of Sweden. It is not often that a new species of fish is discovered in Sweden. Lars-Ove Loo is the underwater photographer who has...
Earth & Climate
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a genetic test that can accurately predict whether the most common form of eye cancer will spread to other parts of the body, particularly the liver. In 459 patients...
Health & Medicine
If the world's nations ever sign a treaty to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide gas, there may be a way to help verify compliance: a new method developed by scientists from the University of Utah and Harvard. Using measurements from...
Earth & Climate
The foundation of biological inheritance is DNA replication -- a tightly coordinated process in which DNA is simultaneously copied at hundreds of thousands of different sites across the genome. If that copying mechanism doesn't work as it should,...
Biology & Nature
The sound of silence isn't so golden for consumers, and both marketers and advertisers should take note, says new research from a University of Illinois expert in new product development and marketing. According to published research from Ravi Mehta...
Psychology & Sociology
Using the latest satellite tracking technology, conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the University of Exeter (UK), and the Government of Mexico have completed a ground-breaking study on a mysterious ocean giant: the manta ray....
Earth & Climate
Researchers at Rutgers University have uncovered a new way to stimulate activity of immune cell opiate receptors, leading to efficient tumor cell clearance. Dipak Sarkar, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the Rutgers School of...
Health & Medicine
Barley grown in Scandinavian countries is adapted in a similar way to reindeer to cope with the extremes of day length at high latitudes. Researchers have found a genetic mutation in some Scandinavian barley varieties that disrupts the circadian...
Biology & Nature
For those who study earthquakes, one major challenge has been trying to understand all the physics of a fault -- both during an earthquake and at times of "rest" -- in order to know more about how a particular region may behave in the...
Earth & Climate
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have found the first chemical compounds that act to block an enzyme that has been linked to inflammatory conditions such as asthma and arthritis, as well as some inflammation-promoted cancers. The new...
Biology & Nature
Forests in the Amazon Basin are expected to be less vulnerable to wildfires this year, according to the first forecast from a new fire severity model developed by university and NASA researchers. Fire season across most of the Amazon rain forest...
Earth & Climate
The typical naked mole rat lives 25 to 30 years, during which it shows little decline in activity, bone health, reproductive capacity and cognitive ability. What is the secret to this East African rodent's long, healthy life? Scientists from the...
Biology & Nature
Last year, images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured sand dunes and ripples moving across the surface of Mars -- observations that challenged previously held beliefs that there was not a lot of movement on the red planet's surface. Now...
Astronomy & Space
A Cornell University scientist and designer from Africa have together created a fashionable hooded bodysuit embedded at the molecular level with insecticides for warding off mosquitoes infected with malaria, a disease estimated to kill 655,000...
Physics & Chemistry
With the age of the incandescent light bulb fading rapidly, the holy grail of the lighting industry is to develop a highly efficient form of solid-state lighting that produces high quality white light. One of the few alternative technologies that...
Physics & Chemistry
The overwhelming majority of proteins and other functional molecules in our bodies display a striking molecular characteristic: They can exist in two distinct forms that are mirror images of each other, like your right hand and left hand....
Physics & Chemistry
Wondering why your toddler is acting up? University of Alberta researcher Christina Rinaldi says it may be time to take a look at your parental style -- and your partner's. Rinaldi's study, which appears in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, looked...
Psychology & Sociology
On May 1, USDA Forest Service, U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the Memphis Zoo, and other partners released seven young Louisiana pine snakes on a restored longleaf pine stand in the Kisatchie National...
Biology & Nature
One popular climate record that shows a slower atmospheric warming trend than other studies contains a data calibration problem, and when the problem is corrected the results fall in line with other records and climate models, according to a new...
Earth & Climate
The exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae serve an important role in measuring the universe, and were used to discover the existence of dark energy. They're bright enough to see across large distances, and similar enough to act as a "...
Astronomy & Space
The requirement for efficient mosquito mass-rearing technology has been one of the major obstacles preventing the large scale application of the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) against mosquitoes. However, according to a new article in the next issue...
Biology & Nature
Recently, many U.S. Internet service providers have fallen in line with their international counterparts in capping monthly residential broadband usage. A new study by a Georgia Tech researcher, conducted during an internship at Microsoft Research,...
Mathematics & Economics
Sloppy shipping of a donated human retina to an Indiana University researcher studying a leading cause of vision loss has inadvertently helped uncover a previously undetected mechanism causing the disease. The discovery has led researchers to urge...
Health & Medicine
This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our Moon. Astronomers didn't aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of...
Astronomy & Space
The atmosphere of Mars is less than 1 percent the density of Earth's. It's one of the reasons liquid water covers much of our planet but cannot exist on the Red Planet. As more research points toward the possibility of water on early Mars,...
Astronomy & Space
In order to prevail against native plants, non-native plant species develop special strategies. These differ in part considerably from the propagation strategies of endemic plant species. Dr. Ingolf Kühn and Dr. Sonja Knapp of the Helmholtz...
Biology & Nature
Using a refined technique for trapping and manipulating nanoparticles, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have extended the trapped particles' useful life more than tenfold. This new approach, which one...
Physics & Chemistry
Every second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere, about 60 miles...
Astronomy & Space
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel way of producing light pulses that are "superluminal" -- in some sense they travel faster than the speed of light. The technique, called four-...
Physics & Chemistry
A new study by a team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) indicates that thin polymer films can have different properties depending on the method by which they are made. The results* suggest that...
Physics & Chemistry
A team led by Johns Hopkins engineers has discovered some previously unknown properties of a common memory material, paving the way for development of new forms of memory drives, movie discs and computer systems that retain data more quickly, last...
Physics & Chemistry
Changes in the speed that ice travels in more than 200 outlet glaciers indicates that Greenland's contribution to rising sea level in the 21st century might be significantly less than the upper limits some scientists thought possible, a new study...
Earth & Climate
Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology have discovered a key element in the mechanism of DNA repair. When the DNA double helix breaks, the broken end goes searching for the similar sequence and uses that...
Biology & Nature
Under some conditions, the brains of embryonic chicks appear to be awake well before those chicks are ready to hatch out of their eggs. That's according to an imaging study published online on May 3 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, in...
Biology & Nature
Embryonic stem cells -- those revered cells that give rise to every cell type in the body -- just got another badge of honor. If they suffer damage that makes them a threat to the developing embryo, they swiftly fall on their swords for the greater...
Biology & Nature
A highly toxic beta-amyloid -- a protein that exists in the brains of Alzheimer's disease victims -- has been found to greatly increase the toxicity of other more common and less toxic beta-amyloids, serving as a possible "trigger" for the...
Health & Medicine
Current nanomedicine research has focused on the delivery of established and novel therapeutics. But a UNC team is taking a different approach. They developed nanoparticle carriers to successfully deliver therapeutic doses of a cancer drug that had...
Health & Medicine
A study by the Wildlife Conservation Society documents that intense development of the two largest natural gas fields in the continental U.S. are driving away some wildlife from their traditional wintering grounds. Researchers tracking 125 female...
Earth & Climate
