Life Sciences and Chemistry

Weizmann Institute scientists reveal key part of nerve regeneration mechanism

A new study conducted by Weizmann Institute scientists has now uncovered a key process leading to the regeneration of peripheral nerves. Nerves in the peripheral nervous system (any part of the body aside from the brain and spinal cord) are capable of regenerating, though often they do so poorly or slowly. Scientists have been trying to understand how they regenerate in order to better treat damage to the pe

Conventional wisdom says that people deficient in one sense–such as vision or hearing–often acquire heightened acuity in another. These adjustments, of course, take place over the lifetime of an individual. Now it appears, however, that similar adjustments may occur over evolutionary time. Yoav Gilad and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthology in Germany and the Weizmann Institute in Israel have found a correlation between the loss of olfactory receptor (OR) genes, whi

How does the nervous system code, transmit, and process the information that steers our behaviour? Ronald S. Johansson’s research team at Umeå University in Sweden is now publishing its discovery of a new principle for this.

The prevailing view is that information is coded and transmitted by variations in the number of nerve impulses per time unit in the fibres of the nerve cells, that is, as a frequency code.

Johansson’s research team at the Section for Physiology present in the jo

By exposing rats to novel objects and measuring their brain signals, Duke University researchers have detected telltale signal reverberations in wide areas of the brain during sleep that reveal the process of consolidating memories. According to the researchers, their findings offer important evidence that extensive regions of the brain are involved in processing memories during a particular form of sleep, called slow-wave sleep.

The researchers said their findings lay to rest previous doub

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientists recently unveiled an online calculator on NIST’s Web site designed to make chemical analysis by mass spectrometry faster and more reliable. The tool also may make some chemical evidence introduced in criminal cases more trustworthy.

The NIST tool, called MassSpectator, automates the mathematical calculations needed to convert plots of mass spectrometry data into final results–a listing of the chemical components and conc

An innovative method that allows increased success and speed of protein crystallization – a crucial step in the laborious, often unsuccessful process to determine the 3-dimensional structure unique to each of the body’s tens of thousands of folded proteins – has been developed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and verified in tests with the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG) at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Genomics Institute