News Articles

A fungus called microsporidia that causes chronic diarrhea in AIDS patients, organ transplant recipients and travelers has been identified as a member of the family of fungi that have been discovered to reproduce sexually. A team at Duke University Medical Center has proven that microsporidia are true fungi and that this species most likely undergoes a form of sexual reproduction during infection of humans and other host animals. The findings could help develop effective treatments against these common global pathogens and may help explain their most virulent attacks.

Researchers have defined a mutation in the mouse genome that mimics progressive hearing loss in humans. A team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, working with colleagues in Munich and Padua, found that mice carrying a mutation called Oblivion displayed problems with the function of hair cells in the inner ear, occurring before clear physical effects are seen. The study is published October 31 in PLoS Genetics.

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key."We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. "Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone's keys from a distance without them even noticing."

We all experience memory errors from time to time and research has suggested that 'false' memories may be a result of having too many other things to remember or perhaps if too much time has passed.

In a new research report published online in The FASEB Journal, researchers describe a discovery that may allow some obese people avoid common obesity-related metabolic problems until they can lose weight: make a common antioxidant, melanin, in excess.  Melanin is a common antioxidant responsible for skin and eye color.Most promising is that some of the antioxidant drugs that can mimic the melanin effect are FDA-approved and available. This availability would greatly speed the development of new treatments, should they prove effective in clinical trials.

A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa writing in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience say appearance counts  when it comes to perception of politicians - but mostly if the appearance is negative.   This effect diminishes the more people know about a candidate.    So, voters who know little about John McCain coming up to election 2008 might be inclined to view him negatively when compared to a younger, more charismatic Barack Obama.

The natural world behaves a lot like the stock market, with periods of relative stability interspersed with dramatic swings in population size and competition between individuals and species.While scholars may be a long way from predicting the ins and outs of the economy, University of Calgary biologist Edward McCauley and colleagues have uncovered fundamental rules that may govern population cycles in many natural systems. Their discovery is published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Chemistry researchers at The University of Warwick and the John Innes Centre, have found a novel signalling molecule that could be a key that will open up hundreds of new antibiotics unlocking them from the DNA of the Streptomyces family of bacteria.

The amount of methane in Earth’s atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing to an end a period of about a decade in which atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable, according to a paper published this week in Geophysical Review Letters. Methane levels in the atmosphere have more than tripled since pre- industrial times, accounting for at least one-fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global warming. Until recently, the leveling off of methane levels had suggested that the rate of its emission from the Earth’s surface was approximately balanced by the rate of its destruction in the atmosphere.

Don't reach for that antihistamine just yet, if you have allergies.  A new article in the December issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology provides evidence that allergies are much more than just an annoying immune malfunction - they may protect against certain types of cancer.  So suppressing cancer fighting defenses may not be the best idea.

It’s the most famous chord in rock 'n' roll, an instantly recognizable twang rolling through the open strings on George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker. It evokes a Pavlovian response from music fans as they sing along to the refrain that follows:"It’s been a hard day’s nightAnd I’ve been working like a dog"The opening chord to "A Hard Day’s Night" is also famous because, for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing.

We know a lot about the lifestyles of dinosaur - where they lived, what they ate, how they walked - but not much was known about their sense of smell.  Until now.Scientists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum are providing new insight into the sense of smell of carnivorous dinosaurs and primitive birds in a research paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study, by paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky and Royal Tyrrell Museum curator of dinosaur palaeoecology François Therrien, is the first time that the sense of smell has been evaluated in prehistoric meat-eating dinosaurs. They found that Tyrannosaurus rex had the best nose of all meat-eating dinosaurs, and their results tone down the reputation of T. rex as a scavenger.