After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
Sweet potatoes, one of the most important food crops for human consumption, contain genes from the bacterium Agrobacterium but that was not done by scientists. The foreign DNA that turned sweet potatoes into a GMO was put there by nature.
The researchers discovered the foreign DNA sequences of Agrobacterium while searching the genome - this is the entire DNA-code - of sweet potato for viral diseases. Instead of contributing this peculiar finding to bacterial contamination of the plant samples, the researchers decided to study these sequences in more detail.
A study of disease dynamics in a California grassland has shed light on fundamental principles underlying the spread of pathogens among species, according to researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz who measured the amount of disease on the leaves of plants in a meadow on campus.
They found that the amount of disease on each species depended on how common it was, as well as on the abundance of its close relatives. The results were a tight link between the structure of a plant community and the vulnerability of individual species to disease. In addition, when the researchers introduced novel plant species into the grassland, they were able to predict which ones would be most strongly affected by naturally occurring diseases.
Researchers have determined that the eardrum evolved independently in mammals and diapsids - the taxonomic group that includes reptiles and birds. Published in Nature Communications, the work shows that the mammalian eardrum depends on lower jaw formation, while that of diapsids develops from the upper jaw. Significantly, the researchers used techniques borrowed from developmental biology to answer a question that has intrigued paleontologists for years.
Nerve cells come in very different shapes and a new paper reveals why, in insects, the cell body is usually located at the end of a separate extension.
Nerve cells follow a functional design: They receive input signals over more or less ramified cell branches (dendrites), which they forward to other nerve cells along an elongated, thin cell process (axon). The cell body contains the nucleus with genetic material and other components of the machinery that keeps the neuron alive.
Its location differs significantly between animal classes: in mammals, the cell body is usually found at a central position between the dendrites and the axon, while in insects, it is often "outsourced" to the end of a separate prolongation.
Stegosaurus, a large, herbivorous dinosaur with two staggered rows of bony plates along its back and two pairs of spikes at the end of its tail, lived roughly 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic in the western United States. Some individuals had wide plates, some had tall ones, with the wide plates being up to 45 percent larger overall than the tall plates.
According to a new study, the tall-plated Stegosaurus and the wide-plate Stegosaurus were not two distinct species, nor were they individuals of different age - they were actually males and females.
The famous Vitruvian Man, drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, pictures the canon of human's proportions - though we did not become bilaterally symmetric all at once. There are two main points of view on the last common bilaterian ancestor, its appearance and the course of evolution. It is likely that the ancestor of Bilateria appeared at the end of the Vendian period which is the last geological period of the Neoproterozoic Era preceding the Cambrian Period. It lasted from approximately 635 to 541±1 million years ago. The organisms, which lived in the Vendian sea, were mostly radially symmetrical creatures. Some of them were floating in the water, while others were crawling along the bottom or leading sessile benthic life.
Forget vibrating joysticks on your Xbox, Rice University engineers have invented a glove that allows a user to feel what they're touching while gaming.The Hands Omni provides a way for gamers and others to feel the environments they inhabit through the likes of three-dimensional heads-ups displays. The prototype glove,
developed with Houston sponsor Virtuix and introduced at the George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase, is intended to provide next-generation force feedback to the fingertips as players touch, press or grip objects in the virtual world. The project won the "People's Choice" award at Rice's recent Engineering Design Showcase.
Invasive plants animals and plants spreading is not new but predicting the dynamics of these invasions is difficult - and of great ecological and socioeconomical interest. Scientists at Eawag and University of Zurich are now using computer simulations and small artificial laboratory worlds, to study how rapid evolution makes invaders spread even faster.
A new study of animal behavior suggests that evolution is hard at work when it comes to the acrobatic courtship dances of male golden-collared manakins, a tropical bird species.There are about 60 different species of manakins, most of which perform, to some degree, a physically complex display behavior to both court females and to compete with other males. The new study says
the ability to detect testosterone in the body regulates the acrobatic courtship and competitive behavior - bird brawn.
Neutrinos are among the more mysterious elementary particles in the universe: Billions of them pass through every cell of our bodies every second, yet these ghostly particles are incredibly difficult to detect, because they don’t appear to interact with ordinary matter. Scientists have set theoretical limits on neutrino mass, but researchers have yet to precisely detect it.
51 Pegasi b, about 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus, was discovered in 1995 and was the the first confirmed exoplanet to be found orbiting an ordinary star like our Sun. It is the archetypal Hot Jupiter -- a class of planets similar in size and mass to Jupiter but orbiting much closer to their parent stars.
Since that landmark discovery, more than 1,900 exoplanets in 1,200 planetary systems have been confirmed, but 51 Pegasi b now has another "first" - it has been directly detected in visible light.
While growing new organs from a patient's own stem cells is the future much of science is working toward, there are people who need replacements right now. Lots of people are signed up for organ donations in the case of death but willing donors is not the biggest obstacle.It's time. Typically, donor organs have to kept in preservation solution at a static temperature of 4 °C and the clock begins ticking immediately. They have short preservation times; about 6 hours for hearts and lungs, 12 hours for livers, and 20 hours for kidneys.
