Using atomic-force microscopy, vision researchers have taken pictures of some of the eye’s photon receptors in their natural state, and have analyzed their packing arrangement. Their findings, published in the Jan. 9 issue of Nature, offer insight on how light signaling might be controlled in the retina’s outer edge.

The retina receives light through rods and cones. Rods, which are most heavily concentrated on the retina’s outer edge, are sensitive to dim light and to movemen

Neural circuits that control eye movements play multiple roles in visual attention

With so many visual stimuli bombarding our eyes — cars whizzing by, leaves fluttering — how can we focus attention on a single spot — a word on a page or a fleeting facial expression? How do we filter so purely that the competing stimuli never even register in our awareness?

A pair of Princeton scientists have found that it has a lot to do with the brain circuits that control eye movements.

In an organic chemistry lab located in the Science II building on the campus of Binghamton University, Scott Handy is busy whipping up promising new substances modeled after natural compounds found in sea sponges and tobacco plants. Some of the synthetic compounds could help in the fight against cancer and AIDS. Others could provide a safer, more effective, and more affordable alternative to the traditional solvents organic chemists use to catalyze reactions and synthesize compounds, one molecule at

Findings point to complex social behaviour

The large tusks of an animal that roamed Earth before the dinosaurs may provide the earliest evidence yet of male-female distinctions in land animals that existed millions of years ago, say U of T scientists.

Robert Reisz, a biology professor at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, and his team have found convincing evidence of sexual dimorphism – different physical traits between the sexes of the same species – in their study

Recent research shows that insects and humans have something surprising in common: Some six-legged species take in oxygen using a similar means to the way we fill our lungs.

Scientists from the Field Museum and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and from Clemson University used a powerful x-ray imaging device to get the first comprehensive view of live insects breathing. Their observations and research results are reported in the Jan. 24 issue of Science, an internationally respected res

Fear of the dark is a common complaint in children and is often attributed to attention seeking behaviour. Yet researchers in this week’s BMJ suggest that it may be due to night blindness – a diagnosis which can be easily missed.

They describe two children with an inherited form of stationary night blindness. Both were very frightened of the dark, had a history of bumping into things at night, and insisted that curtains were drawn much earlier than others would choose. One child had fear of

Authors of a fast-track study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET propose an alternative to antibiotics to treat infection associated with the use of chemotherapy for patients with blood cancer.

The toxic effects of chemotherapy cause organisms in the gut to migrate to the bloodstream, frequently resulting in bacterial infection. Michael Ellis and colleagues from the United Arab Emirates investigated whether interleukin 11 (IL-11)-an agent involved in the immune response and thought to prote

Findings Show The Force of Blood Flow Has Anti-Inflammatory Effect

Scientists have found a new way in which exercise may protect against heart disease. Increased blood flow can mimic the powerful anti-inflammatory actions of certain glucocorticoid steroid drugs, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Medicine and Engineering. The researchers discovered that an increase in shear stress – the drag force exerted by blood flowing over endothelial

A vaccine aimed against AIDS, developed at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University, the Emory Vaccine Center, and the Laboratory of Viral Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will begin a Phase I clinical trial this week.

A total of 30 human volunteers will be enrolled at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the San Francisco Departmen

Stress at work and fatigue increase the chance of acute infections such as common colds, flu-like illnesses and gastroenteritis. This was discovered in research carried out by Danielle Mohren at Maastricht University, in which more than 8000 employees from various companies were followed over a three-year period.

The study revealed that employees in highly demanding jobs suffered from colds 20 percent more often than employees in less demanding positions. Also job insecurity, for example as

Vessel wall cells and blood cells have been found to release cell particles which can damage blood vessels. This was demonstrated in laboratory experiments carried out by Marja van Wijk during her doctoral research at the University of Amsterdam. Poorly functioning blood vessels play a role in pre-eclampsia.

For her research (conducted at the Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam) Van Wijk isolated blood vessels from pieces of tissue taken from pregnant women. She placed the blood

Opens new door to study of mood disorders in humans

Researchers report finding a gene that is essential for normal levels of anxiety and aggression. Calling it the Pet-1 gene, researchers at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine Department of Neurosciences say that when this gene is removed or “knocked out” in a mouse, aggression and anxiety in adults are greatly elevated compared to a control (also called wild type) mouse.

(Videos displaying aggressive beha

The scientists have not yet found the limits of the monkeys’ learning capacity

Psychologists have found evidence that monkeys have sophisticated abilities to acquire and apply knowledge using some of the same strategies as do humans. Specifically, the researchers have discovered that rhesus monkeys can learn the correct order of arbitrary sets of images and can apply that knowledge to answer new questions about that order.

Not only can the monkeys choose which image came f

Researchers using three dimensional computer modeling and wind tunnels have made the first accurate comparative measurements of muscle power output of birds in-flight to establish that physical structure, body mass, force and flight style all have major effects upon the magnitude and shape of a species’ power curve.

The research by Harvard integrative physiologist Andrew A. Biewener and fellow researchers was publicly funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published in the

Animals lacking molecules called cryptochromes have abnormal sleeping patterns because their internal biorhythms are disrupted. New research from scientists at Stanford University, the University of North Carolina and SRI International published in the open access journal, BMC Neuroscience shows that mice lacking these molecules also respond differently to sleep deprivation. This suggests that cryptochromes are also involved in sleep homeostasis, the process by which we feel tired after we have been

Employing high-tech, digital X-ray microtomography (microCT), Northwestern University scientists have discovered the way in which newts form new bone and cartilage during limb regeneration. Newts are a type of salamander, the only vertebrates capable of rebuilding lost structures such as limbs throughout their lifetimes.

Reporting in the January issue of Developmental Dynamics, Northwestern researchers Hans-Georg Simon and Stuart Stock showed that bone formation in a regenerated forelimb co