Fruit-eating fish in South America help disperse fruit trees during flood season. Fungi that attack sea fans get even nastier when the tropical waters warm by just a few degrees, and although sea fans counterattack with upgraded defenses, the fungi win out. A moth that attacks pine trees has expanded its range in the past three decades, and tests show that global warming is to blame.
These are just three of the research results that almost 50 Cornell University scientists w
During last week’s enervating hot spell in the Northeast, the discomfort was not entirely due to the heat or the relative humidity. The real culprit, say Cornell University climatologists, was the high dew point.
The dew point is the day-to-day measure of humidity in the atmosphere. Another critical measure is the “design dew point” — the maximum humidity level at which air-conditioning systems can operate efficiently in different regions.
According to the Northe
Almost 150 years after Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for biological evolution, previously unrecognized diversity has been discovered among the giant tortoises of the Galápagos, Geochelone nigra, whose distinctiveness was an inspiration in formulating the theory of natural selection.
The new taxon (species or sub-species) of Galápagos tortoise was characterized by a team of scientists led by Michael Russello, Adalgisa Caccone and Jeffrey Powell in the Department of Ecolog
Imagine a cancer drug that can burrow into a tumor, seal the exits and detonate a lethal dose of anti-cancer toxins, all while leaving healthy cells unscathed. MIT researchers have designed a nanoparticle to do just that.
The dual-chamber, double-acting, drug-packing “nanocell” proved effective and safe, with prolonged survival, against two distinct forms of cancers–melanoma and Lewis lung cancer–in mice.
The work will be reported in the July 28 issue of Nature, wit
In Jules Verne’s nineteenth century classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an Edinburgh professor and colleagues follow an explorer’s trail down an extinct volcano to the Earth’s core. Ah, fantasy! Here’s reality: For more than a century after Verne wrote his novel, geophysicists have had only one tool with which to peer into our planet’s heart-seismology, or analysis of vibrations produced by earthquakes and sensed by thousands of instrument stations worldwide. But now, geophysicists have
The animal family tree may not be filled just with forks, but may also contain knots: hybrid species with two different ancestors rather than one, according to a team of Penn State researchers.
“We are looking for the origin of species,” says Dr. Dietmar Schwarz, post-doctoral researcher in entomology. “In animals, people envision the formation of a new species by a split of one ancestral species to two derived species or a branching of one species from another.”
However,
The rivers of South America’s Amazon basin are “breathing” far harder – cycling the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide more quickly – than anyone realized.
Most of the carbon being exhaled – or outgassed – as carbon dioxide from Amazonian rivers and wetlands has spent a mere 5 years sequestered in the trees, other plants and soils of the surrounding landscape, U.S. and Brazilian researchers report in the July 28 issue of Nature.
It had been hoped that regions such as the
Search for a special ’genetic endowment’ snares new cancer candidates
Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have identified a telltale set of genes that causes breast cancer to spread and grow in the lungs, where cancer cells often flourish with lethal consequences.
The researchers said that the genes are more than markers that identify the presence of metastatic cancer. These genes are mediators that enable fragments of breast cancer tumors to take root
Previously unrecognized stem cells found in the bone marrow and blood of mice can “restock” a depleted ovary with new egg cells within weeks, according to new research published in this week’s issue of the journal Cell.
This finding provides direct evidence to overturn a long-held dogma in reproductive biology, that female mice generate egg cells only during fetal development and thus are born with a finite stock of eggs that declines throughout life. The new report signifi
Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted into human beings hold the promise of improving patient care, particularly in emergency settings, but only after privacy questions are addressed, according to a Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) physician who has a chip implanted in his arm.
Writing in the July 28 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, John Halamka, MD, chief information officer at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School and an emergency room physi
Follow-up to landmark 2004 paper expands new understanding of female reproductive biology
Last year a group of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers announced surprising findings that female mice – contrary to longstanding theories of mammalian reproductive physiology – retained the ability to make new egg cells or oocytes into adulthood. Now the same investigators report new data supporting the earlier research and identifying a potential source for the production of
Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that a single protein regulates secretion levels in the fruit fly’s salivary gland and its skin-like outer layer.
Described in the May 15 issue of Development, the finding improves understanding of how cells become specialized for secretion, which is a critical ability of certain glands and cell types in organisms from insects to humans.
The researchers discovered that a protein called CrebA single-handedly controls the entire
UCB today announced positive results for the two pivotal Phase III trials (PRECISE 1 and 2) of certolizumab pegol (CDP870) in the induction and maintenance of clinical response in moderate to severe active Crohn’TMs disease. The PRECiSE trials assessed the safety and efficacy of CIMZIATM compared to placebo over a 26 week period, in a total of 1330 patients with active Crohn’TMs disease.
Data from PRECiSE 1 and 2 will be presented in more detail at the major forthcoming gastroent
When we think of organisms actively searching for resources (foraging) we generally think of things like wolves stalking elk or butterflies finding flowers. Why don’t we also think about plants growing roots through the soil? Although they cannot run or fly, plants forage too, for soil nutrients by growing more roots in response to locally high nutrient levels.
One of the most widely accepted explanations of why plants differ in their ability to place roots selectively i
The steroid hormone testosterone regulates the expression of reproductive behaviors and sexual traits of many animal species. While high levels of testosterone are required for reproductive activities or for the expression of sexual traits, these are often costly, and can lead, for instance, to increased parasite infection. Such costs would also ensure honesty in sexual signals or behavior used by animals for assessing the healthiness of a potential mate.
The mechanisms linking elevated
In this SOHO image, taken 21 July 2005, the Sun is represented by the white circle in the centre. Saturn is the bright object to the left of the Sun.
Saturn was approaching a position called ’superior conjunction’, that is, it would be almost directly behind the Sun as seen from Earth. Therefore the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn, was not able to send or receive transmissions normally.
As Cassini passed close by the limb (edge) of the Sun on 24
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