Life Sciences and Chemistry

Transgenic mouse shows other intriguing physiological changes

A transgenic mouse designed to grow more hair than other mice has provided University of Southern California researchers with some surprising results-and insight into the development and regulation of growth in epithelial organs that extend beyond skin and hair.

In an upcoming paper in the American Journal of Pathology—now available online—Cheng-Ming Chuong, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology at the Keck School o

Better drugs, improved industrial applications and even cleaner laundry may be possible with a new computer method to predict which hybrid enzymes are likely to have high activity, according to a team of Penn State chemists and chemical engineers.

“FamClash is quite successful at qualitatively predicting the pattern of the specific activity of the hybrids,” the researchers report in this week’s online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “By identifying incompat

Scientists at Jefferson Medical College and Jefferson’s Kimmel Cancer Center have discovered one part of the mechanism behind a popular anti-cholesterol drug.

Steven Farber, Ph.D., assistant professor of microbiology and immunology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Eric Smart, Ph.D., at the University of Kentucky and their co-workers have found that treating hypercholesterolemic mice with the drug ezetimibe (Zetia) disrupts a complex of two pro

Already renowned as a leading centre for plant science research, the University of Reading’s Herbarium is now a world resource for botanists after the launch of a new internet website featuring an ever-expanding database of specimens.

The Herbarium, which was founded in 1900, contains 264,500 plant specimens from around the world, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom and Mediterranean countries such as Spain and Morocco.

There are extensive collections of phanerogams, pter

It has long been known that migratory birds can make use of the earth’s magnetic fields to navigate. Birds read the angle that magnetic fields create on the ground and thereby determine how far north or south they are of the magnetic equator and the magnetic pole. But how do they do this? Is there some unknown “magnetic sense”? It seems that birds can actually see magnetic fields-providing the lighting conditions are right. Experiments on redbreasts carried out by a zoo-ecologist at Lund University i

Pieris butterflies are not like all other butterflies. Both sexes agree about sex. In a dissertation about olfactory communication, Johan Andersson, a scientist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH), Sweden, presents exciting new findings about a joint effort that provides an alternative view of the theory of sexual selection.

The Western man gives his partner an engagement ring when he wants to show the world that this woman is spoken for. When mating, the male white-winge