Research reveals trend in bird-shape evolution on islands
MISSOULA - In groundbreaking new work, Natalie Wright, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montana, has discovered a predictable trend in the evolution of bird shape. Like the...
Plants survive better through mass extinctions than animals
But a new study led by researchers at the University of Gothenburg shows that plants have been very resilient to those events. During this long history, many smaller and a few major ...
New insights into underlying cellular mechanisms of information processing in the brain
The continuous release of neurotransmitters is essential to maintain communication between neurons. Synaptic vesicles in cell-to-cell communication While synapses contain hundreds t...
Mars is the next step for humanity – we must take it
It takes about 50% more energy to put something on the surface of the Moon than it does on Mars. It’s feasible to introduce biological life to Mars, but not the Moon. Radiation: An a...
Light-activated genes might be precisely controlled and targeted
With the ability to use light to activate genes in specific locations, researchers can better study genes’ functions, create complex systems for growing tissue, and perhaps eventuall...
Interesting facts about planet Mars
The Planet Mars. For water to flow in the past, the Red Planet needs more atmosphere. But in the life of the Solar System, Phobos has a pretty short lifetime. Mars has methane in its...
Image: Magnetospheric Multiscale Observatories processed for launch
Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) observatories are processed for launch in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Fl...
Evolving a bigger brain with human DNA
The human version of a DNA sequence called HARE5 turns on a gene important for brain development (gene activity is stained blue), and causes a mouse embryo to grow a 12 percent large...
Epigenetic breakthrough: A first of its kind tool to study the histone code
Cancer is actually a disease of development in which the cells don’t maintain their proper functions; they don’t do what they’re supposed to be doing. One aspect of gene regulation i...
Arachnid Rapunzel: Researchers spin spider silk proteins into artificial silk
Jan Rainey’s group at Dalhousie University used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to analyze the structure of AcSp1’s repeat sequence at very high resolution, producing o...
Will we mine asteroids?
Credit: Periodictableru It’s been said that a single asteroid might be worth trillions of dollars in precious rare metals. Mining here on Earth is hard enough, but actually harvesti...
Unraveling the light of fireflies
This detailed microimage shows larger channels branching into smaller ones, supplying oxygen for the firefly’s light emission. We know that this reaction needs oxygen, but what we do...
Time management skills keep animals primed for survival
Many animals may have a previously under-appreciated ability to make up for lost time with more effort, according to new research publishing this week in PLOS Computational Biology. ...
Some of the best pictures of the planets in our solar system
Credit: NASA/JPL Venus is the second planet from our Sun, and Earth’s closest neighboring planet. Credit: NASA Earth is the third planet from the Sun, the densest planet in our Sol...
Seed dormancy, a property that prevents germination, already existed 360 million years ago
Seed dormancy is a phenomenon that has intrigued naturalists for decades, since it conditions the dynamics of natural vegetation and agricultural cycles. Credit: UGR An internationa...
Scientists reprogram plants for drought tolerance
UC Riverside-led research in synthetic biology provides a strategy that has reprogrammed plants to consume less water after they are exposed to an agrochemical, opening new doors for...
Researcher explores how the universe creates reason, morality
Life then seems to exhibit its own pattern of increasing complexity, with simple organisms getting more complex over evolutionary time until they eventually develop rationality and c...
Research sheds light on what causes cells to divide
Or is the real trigger the time period over which the cell keeps growing ever larger? How cells control their size and maintain stable size distributions is one of the most fundament...
Predators, parasites, pests and the paradox of biological control
But what if that caterpillar is infected with larvae from a tiny parasitic wasp–another agent of biological pest control. But in their Nature Communications paper, Ong and Vandermeer...
New tool refines exoplanet search
New work led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, Caltech’s Peter Gao, and Peter Plavchan from Missouri State University reports on a technological upgrade for one method of finding planets...
New evidence for anthropic theory that fundamental physics constants underlie life-enabling universe
German scholar Ulf-G Meißner, chair in theoretical nuclear physics at the Helmholtz Institute, University of Bonn, adds to a series of discoveries that support this Anthropic Princip...
Mapping the maize genome
In plants, the positional cloning method has been traditionally used in studies of model organisms such as rice and Arabidopsis, providing important insights into plant genetics. The...
Indian Neutrino Observatory set for construction – Physics World
Getting ready for construction The Indian government has approved the $236m Indian Neutrino Observatory to be built at Pottipuram, while development of the detector is taking place a...
Herd mentality: Are we programmed to make bad decisions?
We showed that evolution will lead individuals to over use social information, and copy others too much than they should. The result is that groups evolve to be unresponsive to chang...
Heightened scents: Do ambient fragrances make consumers purchase more?
A new study in the Journal of Marketing shows for the first time that the temperature of scents in a store atmosphere may have a powerful effect on what and how much customers buy. P...