University of Leicester biologist Dr Paul Hart has been carrying out a study to reveal the “Biological and Socio-economic Implications of a Limited Access Fishery Management System”, detailing the arguments for and against keeping different methods of fishing apart.
His aim is to discover a fishery management system which will encourage co-operation between stake-holders using the coastal zone. Dr Hart is working on this with two leading scientists from the University of Wales, Bangor
Classifying corals in terms of species is a risky business. Biologist Onno Diekmann from the University of Groningen has discovered that four species of stone corals differ so little in terms of their genetic material that they can scarcely be termed separate species.
Corals are formed by a collection of identical coral polyps which together form a coral colony. Onno Diekmann compared the genetic material from six different species of coral from the Madracis genus, which are found in the co
The link between climate and cholera, a serious health problem in many parts of the world, has become stronger in recent decades, according to a University of Michigan scientist who takes an ecological approach to understanding disease patterns. Mercedes Pascual, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, discussed her work during a symposium Feb. 17 on the ecology of infectious diseases at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In wo
Gaiker y Santa Ana de Bolueta Abrasión, S. A., have developed a novel, rapid and efficient method to reduce abrasion in industrial parts.
The considerable wear suffered by industrial parts and equipment and by extracting tools that come into contact with abrasive materials forces companies to make periodic maintenance breaks in normal activity, thus causing considerable losses in time and money.
Santa Ana de Bolueta Abrasión, S. A., together with Gaiker, have developed a novel metho
Broad implications seen for treating Alzheimer’s and other human diseases
By teaching fruit flies to avoid an odor and isolating mutant flies that can’t remember their lessons, researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York have identified dozens of genes required for long-term memory.
In the same study, using DNA chip technology, the scientists identified another large group of candidate memory genes that are either switched on or off in the fly brain during memo
While the vision-impaired Hubble Space Telescope needed optical doctoring from shuttle astronauts, vision researchers back on Earth were wondering if the human eye was clever enough to fix itself.
Now a neurobiology study at Cornell University suggests that internal parts of the eye indeed can compensate for less-than-perfect conditions in other parts — either developmentally (during the lifetime of one individual) or genetically (over many generations).
Results of the study, “I
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI), in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have found that a recently discovered gene plays an essential role in mediating apoptosis, or cell death, in colorectal cancer cells. The results are published in the Feb. 18 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The gene, PUMA, or p53 up-regulated modulator of apoptosis, is controlled by p53 – a tumor-suppressing gene that prevents norma
A cell type with the potential for making the four major types of human tissue has been found in the stomach and small intestine by a Medical College of Georgia researcher.
These VENT cells have been found in addition to the three sources of cells typically associated with gastrointestinal development, says Dr. Paul Sohal, MCG developmental biologist, who first identified these cells nearly a decade ago.
Identification of VENT – ventrally emigrating neural tube – cells within the
Animals in the oceans surrounding Antarctica are under increasing threat. Fishery management organisations and governments need to do more to eliminate illegal fishing and regulate better legal fishing in Southern Ocean and adjacent areas according to Professor John Croxall speaking today (17 Feb) at a special symposium – Conserving Migratory Marine Organisms: Protecting animals with ocean-sized habitats organised by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Charismatic
The U.S. Government is spending millions of dollars to research the feasibility of stuffing carbon dioxide into coal seams and fields of briny water deep beneath the Earth. But, a scientist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting argues that the government isn’t thinking big enough in its plans to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Dissatisfied with the long-term potential of most current technologies for carbon sequestration, Klaus Lack
New molecular technologies, some driven by the work of a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are exposing unexpectedly high levels of DNA folding and complex protein-rich assemblages within the nucleus of cells that he says “seriously challenge the textbook models.”
“What we are seeing suggests that there may be machinery, not yet identified, that controls the folding and the movements of enzymes that turn genes on and off,” said Andrew Belmont, a professor of cell
Educators and scientists should discard the idea that a cell’s nucleus is just a bag of chromosomes, according to Johns Hopkins’ cell biologist Kathy Wilson, Ph.D. In a Feb. 17 session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Denver, Wilson and five others will introduce visual evidence of the nucleus’s newly recognized importance.
“The old view is that the nucleus is simply a warehouse for chromosomes,” says Wilson, associate
NIAB has patent protection pending for a number of schemes for encoding non-genetic information into DNA. The patent describes four methods by which DNA can be made to hold information in a binary or other number base format as a DNA ’barcode’.
Jonathan White, Head of NIAB’s Molecular and Genotyping Group said, “The encoding of non-genetic information has the overall major benefit of providing a means of ready identification and authentication of goods and organisms and is particul
Austrian physicists report unusual light-metal interaction
A team under Professor Franz Aussenegg at the University of Graz in Austria is looking into unusual interactions between light and submicroscopic metal particles. The physicists’ findings represent a major advance towards the development of improved data storage media and optical sensors. They also confirmed theoretical predictions and merited publication in 13 international scientific journals. These are the impressive result
The fact that infections among adults can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes is now well established by several hundred scientific studies. Both heart attacks and strokes are expressions of arteriosclerosis (thickening of the arteries, previously termed hardening of the arteries). New research from the Section for Pediatric Cardiology in Lund indicates that infections can also contribute to the early development of arteriosclerosis even in childhood.
Doctor Petru Liuba shows in a
Physics gets strange when matter gets small. Take electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom, for example. If they did so with the same dynamics by which planets orbit the sun, classical physics predicts the electrons would spiral toward the nucleus and crash into it in a fraction of a second. But that doesn’t happen.
At very low temperatures, classical physics fails to explain phenomena at tiny scales. This is when quantum mechanics kicks in. Scientists are now chilling materials to ne
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