A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
Research performed in the Center for Biomolecular Science&Engineering (CBSE) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that mobile repetitive elements--also known as transposons or "jumping genes"--do indeed affect the evolution of gene regulatory networks.
A little more than a year after University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists showed they could turn skin cells back into stem cells, they have pulsating proof that these "induced" stem cells can indeed form the specialized cells that make up heart muscle. In a study published in Circulation Research, the team showed that they were able to grow working heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) from induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells. The heart cells were originally reprogrammed from human skin cells by James Thomson and Junying Yu, two of Kamp's co-authors on the study.
A York University research team has tracked the migration of songbirds, the most common type of bird in our skies, by outfitting them with tiny geolocator backpacks – a world first and interesting because they are too small for conventional satellite tracking. They now say we have underestimated the flight performance of songbirds dramatically.
Adaptation is one of the driving forces behind evolution, along with selection and the appearance of new species, say a group of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München researchers, but they say that the interpretation familiar since Darwin - these processes increase the "fitness" of the species overall, since, of two competing species, only the fittest would survive - is actually a case of the fittest being the 'weakest' most often.
University of Leicester biologist Dr David Harper has conducted research for over 25 years at Lake Naivasha in Kenya and says today that your cheap boyfriend's (unless you are are the cheap boyfriend, in which case he means you) cut-price Valentine roses which are exported for sale to the UK are 'bleeding that country dry.'Harper claimed that cheap roses grown by companies that had no concern for the environment were having a devastating effect on the ecology of Lake Naivasha - the center of Kenya's horticultural industry. Instead, he urged UK shoppers to buy Fair Trade roses produced by companies that he says are environmentally conscientious and had a transparent supply chain.
Are you smarter than a pigeon? We don't mean smarter as in able to figure out why it's $14 a day for lousy internet access in a hotel or $14 to see an old movie in your hotel room or the hospitality industry's general preference for the number 14, we mean practical social smarts, like meeting the opposite sex. Animals have "social smarts" too, it turns out, with a range of behaviors that can enhance species survival, according to studies being presented here in Chicago at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. Evolution shouldn't leave out social behavior, it seems.
Neandertals were the closest relatives of currently living humans. They lived in Europe and parts of Asia until they became extinct about 30,000 years ago. For more than a hundred years, paleontologists and anthropologists have been striving to uncover their evolutionary relationship to modern humans.
A multi-institutional team of researchers has reported the sequences for all of the 99 known strains of cold virus, nature's most ubiquitous human pathogen. The feat exposes, in precise detail, all of the molecular features of the many variations of the virus responsible for the common cold, the inescapable ailment that makes us all sneeze, cough and sniffle with regularity. Conducted by teams at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the J. Craig Venter Institute, the work to sequence and analyze the cold virus genomes lays a foundation for understanding the virus, its evolution and three-dimensional structure and, most importantly, for exposing vulnerabilities that could lead to the first effective cold remedies.
Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill say they have helped develop a new genomic test that can help clinicians predict which breast cancer patients are most likely to survive the disease and which treatments may be most effective in increasing those chances of survival.By specifically measuring the activity level of a small subset of the 20,000 plus genes that may be “turned on” or “turned off” within each tumor, this genomic test can give patients a more accurate picture of how their disease might progress.
Not sure who to date? Garth Sundem answers it in The Valentine's Day Man-O-Meter. Be sure to take it as gospel because he never just makes stuff up.If you're still unsure who to pursue, you may be looking in the wrong places. This study says We Want To Date People Slightly More Attractive Than We Are. How, then, does anyone get a date? It's another mystery of love.
One of the weaknesses of using a surname as a guide in understanding genetic characteristcs has been the belief that 1 in 10 births were the result of infidelity - so the name is not only an incorrect characteristic but could even be deceptive.Not, so, says a study funded by the Wellcome Trust published this week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, which may help genealogists create more accurate family trees even when records are missing. It suggests that the often quoted "one in ten" figure for children born through infidelity is unlikely to be true.
Sky diving and base jumping are not for everyone. However, for certain people, the more risk and adrenaline involved in an activity, the better! What draws some people to daredevil behavior while others shy away from it? Psychologists Jane E. Joseph, Xun Liu, Yang Jiang and Thomas H. Kelly from the University of Kentucky, along with Donald Lyman of Purdue University were interested in testing how the brains of sensation-seekers differ from those of us who avoid risky behavior.
