Some bottles of wine are worth thousands of dollars. But if oxygen has leaked past the cork, it could be thousand-dollar vinegar — and there’s no way to tell without opening the bottle. Now chemists at the University of California, Davis, can check an unopened bottle for spoilage using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the same technology used for medical MRI scans.

Natural bacteria in wine use oxygen from the air to turn alcohol into vinegar, or acetic acid. If a wine bottle is secur

Like tiny Russian dolls, the mealybugs that infest your houseplants carry bacteria inside their cells that are themselves infected with another type of bacteria. A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, shows that instead of spreading from bug to bug, the second set of bacteria infected the first several times in the past and are now being passed along and evolving with them.

The knowledge could be useful for working out how the insect species are related to each o

Citric acid may help alleviate chronic shortages of critical clotting factor

The common additive that gives “tartness” to orange juice, lemon juice and sodas also can dramatically boost the production of a protein critical for treating victims of hemophilia and other bleeding disorders, a UC Irvine study has found.

The findings indicate that citric acid, the juice additive, may help alleviate recurring shortages of a protein called Factor VIII, which is important for the norm

Children raised in a house with two or more dogs or cats during the first year of life may be less likely to develop allergic diseases as compared with children raised without pets, according to a study in the August 28 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

“The striking finding here is that high pet exposure ear

The link between climate and cholera, a serious health problem in many parts of the world, has become stronger in recent decades, say researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Barcelona and the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh.

Their research will be published in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

In a previous study published in the journal Science, the researchers found eviden

Research on an AIDS-like disease in monkeys continues to help scientists understand problems such as how HIV causes AIDS, how the virus “hides” from the immune system and how the disease might be prevented or treated, two decades after the human and monkey diseases were identified.

“These animals have been indispensable for understanding how the virus works and in working toward vaccines,” said Murray Gardner, professor emeritus of medical pathology at the UC Davis Center for Comparative Me

Rush is one of only two sites in nation testing the drug that may provide new treatment option

Physicians at Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center have begun to recruit patients as part of a clinical research study that will evaluate the effectiveness of a new drug as a potential treatment for fragile X syndrome and autism.

The trials are taking place at Rush and the University of California, Davis. The principal investigators in the study are Dr. Elizabeth Berry-Krav

Scientists have analyzed the complete genome sequence of an emerging human pathogen, Streptococcus agalactiae (also known as group B streptococcus or “strep B”), which is a leading cause of pneumonia and meningitis in newborns and the source of life-threatening illnesses in a growing number of adults with deficient immune systems.

The study, published this week in the on-line version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), not only determined the pathogen’s genet

Forget about duct tape. Just grab the ’gecko glue’

Geckos, nature’s supreme climbers, can race up a polished glass wall at a meter per second and support their entire body weight from a wall with only a single toe. But the gecko’s remarkable climbing ability has remained a mystery since Artistotle first observed it in fourth century B.C.

Now a team of biologists and engineers has cracked the molecular secrets of the gecko’s unsurpassed sticking power–opening the door for e

For nearly 200 years, scientists have known that the elements molybdenum and oxygen can form various large molecules, which usually impart a unique blue color to aqueous solutions. Only recently have scientists been able to isolate these molecules, but no one was able to explain their supramolecular structure in solution, until now. In a paper scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (available online August 20), Tianbo Liu, a physicist at the U.S. Depa

Using transplants of bone marrow cells improved the recovery from stroke in rat experiments, according to a study published in the August 27 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The rats treated with an intravenous transplant of adult human stromal cells (mature cells from bone marrow) had significant improvements in their ability to function 14 days after the stroke, compared to rats that did not receive transplants after a stroke.

“The

Results of three studies presented today at the International Congress of The Transplantation Society provide encouraging evidence that a patient’s immune system can be fooled into accepting a transplanted organ without the need for anti-rejection drugs.

According to one study conducted in India, patients are off the immunosuppressive drug cyclosporine three months after undergoing living donor kidney transplantation and an elaborate set of treatments that included a separate surgical

Treating the skin with caffeine has been shown to prevent skin cancer in laboratory studies conducted in the Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

“It is not a sun-screening effect, but it’s something more than that – it’s a biological effect,” said Allan Conney, William M. and Myrle W. Garbe Professor of Cancer and Leukemia Research at Rutgers’ Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy. “We may have found a safe and effecti

Combining the tumor suppressing Rb2 gene with doses of gamma radiation speeds up the ability of tumor cells to die, according to a study by researchers at Temple University’s College of Science and Technology.

The results of the study, “pRb2/p130 promotes radiation-induced death in glioblastoma cell line HJC12 by p73 upregulation and Bcl-2 downregulation,” appear in the August 29 issue of Oncogene (Vol. 21, Issue 38).

In the study, which was started at Thomas Jefferson Universi

UCI researchers find that consumption of certain food types cause the constricting reptile to expend excessive energy in digestion

Gary Larson, creator of “The Far Side,” is noted for morphing animal scientific attributes into human behavior in his comic strips. Consider the sketch of a family of pythons lying about after Thanksgiving dinner. The snakes that consumed a mouse, some chicken and glucose are ready to go out and play football shortly after dining. But the pythons that indu

A comprehensive examination of how the unique head and snout affects maneuverability and the role of its electrosensory function for seeking food along the ocean floor

Why the peculiar head shape of the hammerhead shark developed as it did has been the subject of much speculation. The dorso-ventrally compressed and laterally expanded pre-branchial head is an unmistakable diagnostic feature of the sphyrnid sharks. This unique head shape has been termed the cephalofoil in recognition of