News Articles

Researchers have known for decades that certain neurodegenerative diseases, such as mad cow disease or its human equivalent, Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease, result from a kind of infectious protein called a prion. Remarkably, in recent years researchers also have discovered non-pathogenic prions that play beneficial roles in biology, and prions even may act as essential elements in learning and memory.

The presence of ecologically distinct males and females greatly increases a species' niche, say researchers.
Some Caribbean lizards' strong sexual dimorphism allows them to colonize much larger niches and habitats than they might otherwise occupy, allowing males and females to avoid competing with each other for resources and setting the stage for the population as a whole to thrive. The finding, reported this week in the journal Nature, suggests sex differences may have fueled the evolutionary flourishing of the Earth's wildly diverse fauna in a way not previously appreciated by scientists.

A plateau on Mars known as Home Plate shows evidence of long-past explosive volcanic activity, say scientists on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. And data collected during the rover Spirit's initial pass across the 90-meter (295 feet) wide plateau also supports earlier findings indicating that water once existed at or beneath the planet's surface.

In suspicious environments, like bars and math study groups, females are at greater risk. Scientists from Seoul National University, in Korea, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have recently done a study to determine how females avoid the bad males while assessing the good ones.
The males peacock’s showy plumage, for example, is thought to attract females with the promise of better offspring. Showy male peacocks also escape from predators despite their annoyingly conspicuous ornaments and behavior — proof of their superiority.

Need a place to hide? I have a big claw

Call it sperm competition.
According to a study appearing in Current Directions in Psychological Science, sexual characteristics exhibited by human males indicate that men have evolved to deliver their sperm more effectively to females who have multiple partners to choose from.

Temple University School of Medicine researchers have developed a new biosensor that sniffs out explosives and could one day be used to detect landmines and deadly agents, such as sarin gas.
To create the biosensor, Danny Dhanasekaran and colleagues genetically engineered a yeast strain with mammalian (rat) olfactory signaling machinery and genetically linked it to the expression of green fluorescent protein. Into these yeast cells, they cloned individual rat olfactory receptors. When the olfactory receptor "smells" the odor of DNT, an ingredient in the explosive TNT, the biosensor turns fluorescent green. The research team is the first to identify, clone and sequence this novel olfactory receptor.

In the past, the newborns' umbilical cord was not clamped right after birth, thus allowing the blood flow to stop naturally. This practice, known as "late clamping", was replaced by "early clamping", that is, cutting the cord immediately after the infant is expelled.
However, this new practice lacks studies corroborating its benefits. In fact, recent studies on the importance of when clamping should be done have shown contradictory results.

The long search for Herod the Great's tomb has ended with the exposure of the remains of his grave, sarcophagus and mausoleum on Mount Herodium's northeastern slope, Prof. Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology announced today.
Herod was the Roman-appointed king of Judea from 37 to 4 BCE, who was renowned for his many monumental building projects, including the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the palace at Masada, as well as the complex at Herodium, 15 kilometers south of Jerusalem.

A general view of the slope of Herodium in which Herod's tomb was found.Credit: Hebrew University of Jerusalem photos

Using data from the SCIAMACHY instrument aboard ESA's environmental satellite Envisat, scientists have determined that the carbon monoxide hovering over Australia during the wildfire season largely originated from South American wildfires some 13 000 kilometres away.
Using SCIAMACHY, Annemieke Gloudemans from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and her colleagues at Utrecht University, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) witnessed large quantities of released carbon monoxide (CO) above the southern continents. They also saw increased concentrations of carbon monoxide above Central Australia, a desert region that is not prone to forest fires.

For years, scientists have studied the molecular basis of memory storage, trying to find the molecules that store memory, just as DNA stores genetic memory.
Brandeis University researchers report for the first time that memory storage can be induced and then biochemically erased in slices of rat hippocampus by manipulating a so-called "memory molecule," a protein kinase known as CaMKII.

No snowflake in an avalanche takes the blame.
Using the same database that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses to confirm the rise in obesity rates, researchers have concluded that 100 percent juice is not associated with young children being overweight or at risk for becoming overweight.

Ever since the relationship between land area and number of species crystallized into a mathematical power function, islands and island archipelagoes have been thought of as biological destinations where species from large continents arrive and, over time, evolve into new species in geographic seclusion.
Since islands have many times fewer species than the continent, it seemed only logical that continents were rich sources from which islands drew only a small sample. Once isolated and with fewer species around, island organisms were thought to lose their competitive edge and so they hardly ever re-colonized the continent from which they originated.

Jamaican fruit bat. Photo: Copyright; Merlin D.