Like humans, other animals are faced with everyday obstacles in their physical environments and must engage appropriate decision-making and motor skills to deal with them. Navigating these obstacles can involve highly complex events in mammals and other vertebrates, but in new work, researchers have employed an ingenious obstacle-based system for studying the control and structure of goal-oriented motor programs in the fruit fly Drosophila.

The findings are reported in Current Biol

Magnetic orientation is critical to the migratory success of many bird species. By studying the influence of light on the ability of migratory birds to orient to magnetic signals, researchers have found clues to suggest that birds’ orientation abilities may be more complex than previously thought and that birds may be able to interpret magnetic signals by more than one mechanism. The work is reported in Current Biology by a team including Thorsten Ritz, of the University of California, Irvi

It has been known for some time that many species of birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to select a direction of movement–for example, during migration. However, although such birds clearly have a sense of direction, until now it has not been possible to train birds to move in a certain direction in the laboratory, even if they are motivated by a food reward. The reasons for this failure have been perplexing, but researchers now report that they have been able to successfully accomplish thi

Malfunctioning bone marrow cells that produce insulin appear to cause a dangerous nerve condition called neuropathy that disables many people with diabetes, said a research team led by Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

The report from researchers at BCM, Shiga University of Medical Science in Japan, and the University of Chicago appears online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The finding not only provides a basis for understanding the

Vector improved in two ways creates a sustained, partial correction to bleeding problems in mice

A virus that typically infects insects could help with the development of gene therapy treatment for Hemophilia A, a condition in which even a bump on the knee can cause serious internal bleeding in people.

Researchers at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine improved a vector — a vehicle that delivers gene therapy to cells — in two ways to

Recursive splicing is key

Important messages require accurate transmission. Big genes are especially challenging because they combine many coding segments (exons) that lie between long stretches of non-coding elements (introns). During processing, introns are snipped out and exons pasted together to form a template for proteins called messenger RNA (mRNA). Mistakes in RNA processing can reduce the expression of a functional protein or, worse, produce an abnormal protein that interfe

Clashing colonies of sea anemones fight as organized armies with distinct castes of warriors, scouts, reproductives and other types, according to a new study.

The sea anemone Anthopleura elegantissima lives in large colonies of genetically identical clones on boulders around the tide line. Where two colonies meet they form a distinct boundary zone. Anemones that contact an animal from another colony will fight, hitting each other with special tentacles that leave patches of stinging

Scientists have successfully converted human embryonic stem cells into lung cells, taking a first step towards building human lungs for transplantation.

According to research to be published in the journal Tissue Engineering, the team from Imperial College London, took human embryonic stem cells and ’directed’ them to convert into the type of cells needed for gas exchange in the lung, known as mature small airway epithelium.

Dame Professor Julia Polak,

Because of the very high costs in developing drugs for rare genetic diseases, and the low return on investment, the pharmaceutical industry has rarely developed specific treatments for many of these diseases. But a new public-private partnership, called the European Rare Diseases Therapeutic Initiative (ERDITI), could provide an important new mechanism for developing new drugs.

In an article in this month’s open access international medical journal PLoS Medicine, Ala

Changes in heart mass and volume linked to early signs of left ventricle problems

Using magnetic resonance imaging technology, or MRI, to tag the work of millions of individual strands of heart muscle fibers, researchers at Johns Hopkins have successfully mapped the smallest deformations inside the beating hearts of 441 middle-aged and elderly men and women who have either silently developed heart disease or remained healthy. The novel use of the MRI allowed the researchers to creat

Heart healthy habits are good for oral health, too, according to a new study published in the current issue of the Journal of Periodontology, the official publication of the American Academy of Periodontology.

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University examined data from 12,110 individuals who participated in the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) and found that individuals who exercised, had healthy eating habits and maintained a normal weigh

New breast cancer research shows for the first time that even women with large breast tumors can benefit from a less invasive biopsy method that has been reserved until now for women with small breast cancers.

Lymphatic mapping and sentinel node biopsy, when used to determine how far the cancer has progressed into the lymph nodes, can help some patients avoid the pain and discomfort of full armpit node removal, which often causes swelling, numbness and infection.

The su

Sacha Nelson of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA and Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA and their colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition that spontaneous neuronal activity is reduced in the cortex of a knockout mouse model for the childhood neurodevelopmental disorder, Rett Syndrome. The Rett Syndrome Research Foundation (RSRF) and the McKnight Foundation funded this project.

R

Research from The University of Nottingham’s School of Chemistry has contributed to a breakthrough in the complex world of understanding how the quantum mechanics of chemical reactions work.

By understanding chemical processes better chemists will be able to conduct experiments more quickly and accurately, and make new chemicals more cheaply and efficiently.

A study led by Dr Stuart Althorpe, Reader in Physical Chemistry, is published in the August 19 issue of the presti

The latest designs to come out of the d3o products lab are smart, figure hugging components with a cleverly designed geometry following the natural curvature and contours of your body. The macro-densifying mechanism maximises contact and therefore minimises pressure transmitted during impact. Take the elbow component in the picture for example: the geometry is designed to open when the arm is flat, but when the arm is closed, the geometry is configured to provide maximum surface area and therefor

The world’s three leading public repositories for DNA and RNA sequence information have reached 100 gigabases [100,000,000,000 bases; the ’letters’ of the genetic code] of sequence. Thanks to their data exchange policy, which has paved the way for the global exchange of many types of biological information, the three members of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration [INSDC, www.insdc.org] – EMBL Bank [Hinxton, UK], GenBank [Bethesda, USA] and the DNA Data Bank of Japan [M