Earth
How do a couple of universally expressed proteins in stem cells and developing embryos influence an individual cell's ultimate fate -- whether it ultimately becomes, for example, a retinal cell, a heart muscle cell, or a stomach lining cell?
That's the question that Rajesh C. Rao, M.D., and his colleagues at the University of Michigan set out to answer.
Their findings, published in Cell Reports, could lead to new tools for researchers studying different types of specialized cells -- for which U-M was awarded provisional patents.
Microbial communities inhabit every ecosystem on Earth, from soil to rivers to the human gut. While monoclonal cultures often exist in labs, in the real world, many different microbial species inhabit the same space. Researchers at University of California San Diego have discovered that when certain microbes pair up, stunning floral patterns emerge.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA January 14, 2020--Gladstone researchers, in collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche group, have shown therapeutic efficacy of a new experimental drug in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease and a rare genetic form of epilepsy known as Dravet syndrome. The small molecule increases the activity of a subset of neurotransmitter (NMDA) receptors that are found at synapses, the connection points between neurons. These receptors are known to support cognition and memory by enhancing communication between neurons.
Time-resolved infrared spectroscopy in the sub-millisecond range is an important method for studying the relationship between function and structure in biological molecules. However, the method only works if the reaction can be repeated many thousands of times. This is not the case for a large number of biological processes, though, because they often are based on very rapid and irreversible reactions, for example in vision.
It's a resource used in global construction and mined from rivers and coasts across the world.
Now new research, undertaken as part of a project led by University of Southampton, has shown sand mining is causing river beds to lower, leading to riverbank instability and increasing the likelihood of dangerous river bank collapse, damaging infrastructure and housing and putting lives at risk.
The new research has been published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
Bioscience engineers from KU Leuven in Belgium have developed a new antibacterial strategy that weakens bacteria by preventing them from cooperating. Unlike with antibiotics, there is no resistance to this strategy, because the non-resistant bacteria outnumber resistant ones. The findings are published in Nature Communications.
Children are more likely to control their immediate impulses when they and a peer rely on each other to get a reward than when they're left to their own willpower, new research indicates.
The findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers say their experiments are the first to show that children are more willing to delay gratification for cooperative reasons than for individual goals.
The sibling relationship is the longest most people will enjoy in their lifetimes and is central to the everyday lives of children. A new Tel Aviv University and University of Haifa study finds that relationships between children and their siblings with intellectual disabilities are more positive than those between typically developing siblings.
Tropical Storm Claudia now has two factors against it: wind shear and dry air. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided forecasters with an image of the storm on January 14 as it continued to weaken and move further away from Western Australia.
It's been almost a quarter century since the first drug was approved for stroke. But what's even more striking is that only a single drug remains approved today.
In a publication appearing this month in the journal Translational Stroke Research, animal scientists, funded by the National Institutes of Health, present brain-imaging data for a new stroke treatment that supported full recovery in swine, modeled with the same pattern of neurodegeneration as seen in humans with severe stroke.
NASA scientists using data from its NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite, has traced the movement of the smoke coming off the Australian fires across the globe showing that it has circumnavigated the Earth. In an image created from data gathered by the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Nadir Mapper on Suomi NPP, a black circle shows the smoke which had been traced from its origins coming back to the eastern region of Australia after having traveled around the world.
In 1906, Francis Galton was at a country fair where attendees had the opportunity to guess the weight of a dead ox. Galton took the guesses of 787 fair-goers and found that the average guess was only one pound off of the correct weight -- even when individual guesses were off base.
In experiments with genetically engineered and old mice, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have added to evidence that the vast majority of low back pain in people may be rooted in an overgrowth of pain-sensing nerves into spinal cartilaginous tissue.
An estimated 80% of people worldwide will experience low back pain in their lifetimes, sometimes owing to strain or injury. But the vast majority of low back pain, the researchers say, emerges in the absence of injury, especially in older age.
Sophia Antipolis, 14 January 2020: Feeling excessively tired, devoid of energy, demoralised, and irritable? You may have burnout, a syndrome associated with a potentially deadly heart rhythm disturbance. That's the conclusion of a large study published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1
Many owners of rescue dogs imported into the UK believe they arrive through the European Union (EU) Pet Travel Scheme, which has less stringent requirements than the EU Balai Directive, which should be applied for these animals, find the results of a large survey, published in Vet Record.
The EU Pet Travel Scheme is intended only for pets, although it is thought that many of the 300,000 dogs imported under it, don't fall into this category.