In the 1980s, scientists captured the precise mechanics of a protein machine. It looked strange, to researchers its tall thin structure with stubby legs invoked the enchanted broomstick that stole the show in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Disney's 1940 Fantasia film.
The 1KITE project (1,000 Insect Transcriptome Evolution) seeks to understand the millions of living insect species that shape our terrestrial living space and both support and threaten our natural resources by analyzing more than 1,000 insect transcriptomes, a set of all RNA molecules.Using a dataset consisting of 144 carefully chosen species, 1KITE scientists have just presented reliable estimates on the dates of origin and relationships of all major insect groups based on the enormous molecular dataset they collected. They show that insects originated at the same time as the earliest terrestrial plants about 480 million years ago.
When a cell divides, it passes through a sequence of complex events and mitochondria, the organelles called the power plants of the cell, are the main source of energy for these processes: They convert food into energy the cell can use. Freiburg biochemists Dr. Angelika Harbauer and professor Chris Meisinger led a team that have discovered a signaling path that links these two key tasks, cell division and energy conversion. .
8 percent of our genome derives from retroviruses that inserted themselves into human sex cells millions of years ago and right now the koala retrovirus (KoRV) is invading koala genomes.Koalas are the only known organism where a retrovirus is transitioning from exogenous to endogenous. An exogenous retrovirus infects a host, inserts its genetic information into the cell’s DNA, and uses the host cell’s machinery to manufacture more viruses. When an exogenous retrovirus infects an egg or sperm cell and the viral genetic information is then passed down to the host’s offspring, the virus becomes an endogenous retrovirus (ERV).
Patients with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, have difficulty with action verbs: Why action verbs and not regular verbs or nouns? According to some papers, the fact that ALS patients experience it isn't the actual severe motor deficits of the disease, the greater linguistic difficulty with verbs denoting action compared to nouns depends on the motor deficit. The motor system plays a role in the semantic encoding of action verbs? Real or spurious correlations? A new tested this hypothesis and their conclusion suggests a major role for the “executive function”.
In the NFL, teams share revenue from national television contracts and to sell local tickets, if a team has not sold at least to a specific threshold, the game is blacked out locally. If enough people are attending, the game is shown to fans in the region
That appeals to 'hometown' fans. One satellite network shows all games to its package subscribers but otherwise fans are only going to see their local team. If they don't have one, they see something nearby. It is a rule and there is no choice.
In the modern mobile population, that may not be a wise strategy. Fans no longer live within an hour of where they grew up and a new paper finds that choosing to broadcast the local team isn't always the smartest ratings decision. Writing in
Over a mile beneath the West African ocean, off the coast of Angola, are over 2,000 mounds of asphalt containing a wealth of deep-water creatures. A paper in Deep-Sea Research 1 examined the images and data captured at the site to build an intriguing picture of the life and geology of this underwater area. The naturally-occurring asphalt mounds are made up of the same substance that covers our roads. They range in size from single football-sized blobs to small hills several hundred meters across.
What is the best way to learn a dance sequence?
Professional dancers make it look easy. A choreographer rattles off a long list of moves, kicks and turns and the dancers somehow remember it all. But what about the rest of us who will be hitting the club this weekend?
Researchers from Bielefeld University and the Palucca University of Dance in Dresden are here to help. They researched whether dancers learn a dance sequence better by seeing or by listening, that is, if a dance instructor first demonstrates the sequence, or if he or she first gives a spoken explanation.
An experiment with 42 people under functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) found that if people see pictures of others being loved and cared for, it subsequently reduces
the brain's threat monitor, the amygdala,
response to threats.
This occurred even if the person was not paying attention to the content of the first pictures.
The study in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, suggests that being reminded of being loved and cared for dampens the threat response and may allow more effective functioning during, and activation of soothing resources after, stressful situations. This was particularly true for more anxious individuals.
In World War II, did people with bird feeders have substantially different chirping friends than we see today?Probably not, but a group of researchers warns than 2075 might look a lot less like then, or even 1975, or today. The distribution of birds in the United States could change a lot.A new U.S. Geological Survey study in
PLOS ONE
predicts where 50 bird species will breed, feed and live in the conterminous U.S. by 2075. While some types of birds, like the Baird's sparrow, could lose a significant amount of their current U.S. range, other ranges could nearly double.
Last year, two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider announced the finding of a new elementary particle - the long-theorized Higgs particle.
Many calculations indicate that the particle discovered last year in the CERN particle accelerator was indeed the famous Higgs particle. Physicists agree that the CERN experiments did find a new particle that had never been seen before, but an international team say they are not convinced it was the Higgs particle.
Maybe it just looks like it. And maybe it is not alone.
The research team analyzed the existing scientific data from the LHC and published an analysis in Physical Review D.
Another American election season has come and gone. In San Francisco, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the House, campaigned only modestly, even in a year when voters turned on Democrats nationwide she was sure to get 80 percent of the vote, and once again she talked about abortion, saying that if Democrats were not in charge, they would be banned.
It is hard to imagine that 1 person out of 435 would cause a 40-year-old abortion law to be overturned but the implication has always been that the federal government must control it because of the dangers of 'back alley abortions' that were unsafe.
If you voted for a Democrat this week, it may not be because of the issues, it may be because your emotions caused you to gloss over facts, according to a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Emotions are obviously powerful forces in human behavior and attitudes and to some extent they play an important role in guiding policy support. A paper by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya studied the interaction between emotion and political ideology, showing that the motivating power of emotions is not the same for those on different ends of the ideological spectrum.
