Researchers from the University of Liverpool have identified and dated the genetic mutation that gave rise to the black form of the peppered moth, which spread rapidly during Britain's industrial revolution.
The new findings solve a crucial missing piece of the puzzle in this iconic textbook example of evolution by natural selection.
The typical form of the peppered moth has light-coloured wings.
In the densely populated southeastern U.S., forested watersheds are particularly important to drinking water supplies. Recent estimates show that forests in the Southeast deliver surface drinking water to an estimated 48.7 million people, with streams from the mountainous Southern Appalachian region alone providing water supplies to 10 million people, many of them living in major cities such as Atlanta, Georgia.
New identification of a gene involved in the fracture healing process could lead to the development of new therapeutic treatments for difficult-to-heal injuries.
Fracture healing involves communication between bone, muscle, vasculature and the thin membrane covering the outer surface of bones (periosteum) during the fracture repair. The periosteum contains stem cells that migrate to the fracture site and differentiate into chondrocytes (cartilage-forming cells) and/or osteoblasts (bone-forming cells).
The average healthy man is 54 percent muscle by mass, but people with muscular dystrophy, an incurable, genetic condition, have almost no muscle at terminal stages of the disease. New research from The Rockefeller University provides insights about what causes patients' muscles to degenerate and offers potential avenues for drug development.
Research at the Buck Institute shows the same mechanisms that lead to neuronal cell death in mice genetically fated to develop Parkinson's disease (PD) are involved in the much more common sporadic form of the age-related, neurodegenerative disorder that robs people of the ability to move normally. The research, published in the journal Neurobiology of Disease identifies new targets that show promise for drug development for an incurable condition that affects as many as one million Americans.
June 1, 2016 - Language is a key obstacle to meeting guidelines for educating parents of newborns about "shaken baby syndrome" -- also called abusive head trauma (SBS/AHT), reports a study in the Journal of Trauma Nursing, official publication of the Society of Trauma Nurses. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.
BUFFALO, N.Y. - Do you often wonder what the person next to you is thinking?
You might be high in mind-reading motivation (MRM), a newly coined term for the practice of observing and interpreting bits of social information, like whether the person next to you is rhythmically drumming his fingers because he's anxious or if someone is preoccupied because she's gazing off into the distance.
A new study in today's issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery found minimal risk for severe infection with osseointegrated implants--a newer prosthetic system, press-fitted directly into the femur bone--that enables bone growth over a metal, robotic prosthetic limb in patients with above knee amputations.
A weedy plant found on the roadside in northern Australia has stems ripe for biofuel production.
Scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls at the University of Adelaide have discovered that a variety of sorghum growing wild in Australia, Arun, has the potential to yield over 10,000 litres of bioethanol per hectare per year.
Japan -- The Greek goddess Psyche borrowed help from ants to sort a room full of different grains. Cells, on the other hand, do something similar without Olympian assistance, as they organize molecules into robust, functional fibers. Now scientists are able to see self-sorting phenomena happen in real time with artificial molecules.
The achievement, reported in Nature Chemistry, elucidates how two different types of nanofibers sort themselves into organized structures under artificial conditions.
Aerosol particles generated by human activity counteract the warming of the earth's atmosphere by greenhouse gases. However, this effect might be smaller than first thought, as many particles were already generated from tree emissions in pre-industrial times. This was the finding of a simulation carried out as part of the international CLOUD experiment, in which researchers from the Goethe University played a major role. The results are published in the form of three papers in the renowned journals "Science" and "Nature".
What if scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and funders could restart scholarly communication all over? This was the slogan of the first FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group (SCWG) workshop, which took place in February.
The Australian small carpenter bee populations appear to have dramatically flourished in the period of global warming following the last Ice Age some 18,000 years ago.
Researchers from Bochum have engineered a hydrogen-producing enzyme in the test tube that works as efficiently as the original. The protein - a so-called hydrogenase from green algae - is made up of a protein scaffold and a cofactor. The latter is the reaction centre where the substances that react with each other dock. When the researchers added various chemically synthesised substances to the protein scaffold, the cofactor spontaneously assembled.
New research led by the University of Stirling has found a global pattern of sustained species extinctions on islands within hydroelectric reservoirs.
Scientists have discovered that reservoir islands created by large dams across the world do not maintain the same levels of animal and plant life found prior to flooding.
Despite being hailed as conservation sanctuaries that protect species from hunting and deforestation, islands undergo sustained loss of species year on year after dam construction, a pattern otherwise known as 'extinction debt'.