Life Sciences and Chemistry

Evidence from fossilised embryos of worm-like creatures that lived 500 million years ago shows that embryos developed then in much the same way as their living relatives do today. The implications of this remarkable discovery, reported in this week’s issue of Nature, is that embryological processes that occur today must have been established very early on in the evolution of animals.

Because embryos are composed of tissues that decay away to nothing in an instant they are very rarely preserv

Researchers from LSU, NASA and Mexico find Mars-like conditions in a South American desert

A team of scientists from LSU, NASA, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and other research organizations has discovered an area of Earth that is shockingly similar to the surface of Mars.

This joint research effort has discovered clues from one of Earth’s driest deserts about the limits of life on this planet, and why past missions to Mars may have failed to detect life.

Sediment samples dating back thousands of years and taken from under the deep water of West Olaf Lake in Minnesota have revealed an unexpected climate indicator that can be factored into future projections.

In the Jan. 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report that native C4 plants did not fare well during prolonged periods of severe drought that occurred in the middle Holocene (4,000 to 8,000 years a

Flowering plants are the largest group of plants and contain just about all of our food crops. Khidir Hilu’s research using rapidly evolving genes to determine the molecular evolution of flowering plants is providing new insights into plant relationships, according to the cover story article in the recently released December 2003 issue of the American Journal of Botany (Angiosperm phylogeny based on matK sequence information1).

Flowering plants include cereals such as wheat, barle

Purdue University scientists have found the glue that saltwater mussels use to affix themselves to rocks is a subject worth sticking to, both for its pure scientific interest and for its potential applications in medicine and industry.

Jonathan Wilker and his research group have discovered that the formation of mussel adhesive requires iron, a metal that has never before been found in such a biological function. While the discovery is valuable for its scientific merit, it also could impact

In many species, the reproductive cells of the germline can only form properly if certain mRNAs are prevented from translating into proteins until they have been transported to precise target locations in the egg and the appropriate developmental stage has been reached. In a study published in the January issue of Developmental Cell, members of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) Laboratory for Germline Development (Akira Nakamura, Team Leader) report that, in the fruit fly Drosophila, t