CHAMPAIGN, lll. — Blood clotting is a complicated business, particularly for those trying to understand how the body responds to injury. In a new study, researchers report that they are the first to describe in atomic detail a chemical interaction that is vital to blood clotting. This interaction – between a clotting factor and a cell membrane – has baffled scientists for decades.
The study appears online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
In the treeless, flat Prairie, you'd think a city would provide a good home for bats who like to snuggle up and roost in trees and buildings. But researchers at the University of Calgary made the surprising discovery that the urban landscape is far from ideal for these animals.
Johnson's research has taken her to Kanngiqtugaapik (Clyde River) on Baffin Island, Nunavut. There, she has been finding out how Inuit communities are adapting to climate change, and what contributions they are able to make to the development of policies and programs that affect them.
Research being carried out at Carlos III University of Madrid analyzes the key factors in climate change and the risks to public policies that it implies. This study approaches the issue from the perspective of Sociology, Economics and Law.
Decorative white silk crosses are an ingenious tactic used by orb-weaving spiders to protect their webs from damage, a new study from the University of Melbourne has revealed.
The team, led by Dr Andre Walter and Professor Mark Elgar from the University of Melbourne's Department of Zoology, found that orb-weaving spiders respond to severe damage to their webs by building bigger silk crosses, but if the damage is mild they don't bother adding extra decoration.
Scientists from Finland and France have developed a new synchrotron X-ray technique that may revolutionize the chemical analysis of rare materials like meteoric rock samples or fossils. The results have been published on 29 May 2011 in Nature Materials as an advance online publication.
The study shows shifts in the composition of coral species and reductions in biodiversity and recruitment on the reef as pH declined from 8.1 to 7.8. The team also reports that reef development would cease at a pH below 7.7. The IPCC 4th Assessment Report estimates that by the end of the century, ocean pH will decline from the current level of 8.1 to 7.8, due to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Northwestern Georgia felt the effects of severe weather season yesterday, May 27, as severe thunderstorms brought heavy rainfall, gusty winds and reports of a tornado. NASA's Aqua satellite provided an infrared look at that storm system that revealed very strong thunderstorms with icy cold cloud tops.
Boulder, CO, USA - What would we see and what would we learn if we were able to cut North America in half, pull it apart, and look at the resulting cross section through the continent, from the surface all the way down to its very deepest mantle roots? Although it sounds like an impossible undertaking, Philip Hammer of the University of British Columbia and colleagues have done just that.
Researchers of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch have discovered what enables embryonic stem cells to differentiate into diverse cell types and thus to be pluripotent. This pluripotency depends on a specific molecule – E-cadherin – hitherto primarily known for its role in mediating cell-cell adhesion as a kind of "intracellular glue". If E-cadherin is absent, the stem cells lose their pluripotency.
Coastal communities hard hit by ocean acidification hotspots have more options than they may realize, says an interdisciplinary team of science and legal experts. In a paper published in the journal Science, experts from Stanford University's Center for Ocean Solutions and colleagues make the case that communities don't need to wait for a global solution to ocean acidification to fix a local problem that is compromising their marine environment.
A general rule in data processing is that disturbances cause the distortion or deletion of information during data storage or transfer. Methods for conventional computers were developed that automatically identify and correct errors: Data are processed several times and if errors occur, the most likely correct option is chosen. As quantum systems are even more sensitive to environmental disturbances than classical systems, a quantum computer requires a highly efficient algorithm for error correction.
AMES, Iowa – The long, slow decay of carbon-14 allows archaeologists to accurately date the relics of history back to 60,000 years.
PASADENA, Calif.—There's a theory about how the Marinoan ice age—also known as the "Snowball Earth" ice age because of its extreme low temperatures—came to an abrupt end some 600 million years ago. It has to do with large amounts of methane, a strong greenhouse gas, bubbling up through ocean sediments and from beneath the permafrost and heating the atmosphere.
Scientists at Imperial College London have made the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the humble electron, finding that it is almost a perfect sphere, in a study published in the journal Nature today.
The experiment, which spanned more than a decade, suggests that the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. This means that if the electron was magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair.