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Scientists have tracked the flight paths of a group of bumblebees throughout their entire lives to find out how they explore their environment and search for food.

This is believed to be the first time any insect has been tracked throughout its whole life.

In this unconventional study, the researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) discovered the individual bumblebees differed greatly from one another in the way they flew around the landscape when foraging for nectar.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The cost and environmental impact of producing liquid biofuels and biochemicals as alternatives to petroleum-based products could be significantly reduced, thanks to a new metabolic engineering technique.

Liquid biofuels are increasingly used around the world, either as a direct "drop-in" replacement for gasoline, or as an additive that helps reduce carbon emissions.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Alcohol-craving rats have provided researchers with a detailed look into the complicated genetic underpinnings of alcoholism.

By comparing the genomes of rats that drank compulsively with those that abstained, Purdue and Indiana University researchers identified 930 genes associated with alcoholism, indicating that it is a highly complex trait - on par with human height - influenced by many genes and the environment.

A new study from Autism Speaks' MSSNG program expands understanding of autism's complex causes and may hold clues for the future development of targeted treatments. The report, appearing in npj Genomic Medicine is the largest-ever whole genome study of autism, involving 200 children with the condition and both their unaffected parents.

Because the oceans absorb man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, its pH declines. Effects of this chemical change on tropical coral reefs can be examined in laboratory or short-term field experiments. However, a team led by Dr.

A group of Russian physicists, with the contribution from their Swiss colleagues, developed a way to use the therapeutic effect of heating or cooling the tissues due to the magnetocaloric effect. The article with the results of the work was published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Refrigeration.

A research team headed by investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) has developed a tool that allows scientists to quickly manipulate levels of two proteins in the same cell. They say the method, dubbed a "dual molecular tuner," offers an easy way to perform in-depth analyses in mammalian cells in general, and stem cells in particular.

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Three different investigational Zika virus vaccine platforms--an inactivated virus vaccine, a DNA-based vaccine, and an adenovirus vector-based vaccine--protected against infection, induced immune responses, and produced no adverse side effects when tested in rhesus macaques challenged with the Zika virus, according to findings appearing August 4 in the journal Science. The results suggest that each of the three approaches holds promise for designing an effective Zika vaccine, according to the authors.

INDIANAPOLIS - Using rats carefully bred to either drink large amounts of alcohol or to spurn it, researchers at Indiana and Purdue universities have identified hundreds of genes that appear to play a role in increasing the desire to drink alcohol.

The study, published in PLOS Genetics, not only reinforces the view that the genetics of alcoholism are important, are complex and involve many genes, but also that the sections of the genetic code that regulate the actions of genes are at least as important as the genes themselves.

A new study, published in Biochemistry this week, examines the biomechanics of sugar-seeking proteins. Specifically, it delves into galectin-3's interaction with glycosaminoglycans (GAG) and proteoglycans. Tarun Dam, an associate professor of chemistry at Michigan Technological University, led the study.

"Seeing galectin-3 interact with GAGs and proteoglycans is like finding a rose in the petunias--it's very unexpected," Dam says. "It's fair to say that this requires revisiting the reported biological functions of GAGs, proteoglycans and galectin-3."

Protein Chemistry

New research has taken us a step closer to finding a cure for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), as well as other infections including the glandular fever virus, which is associated with the development of lymphoma. Some infections, such as HIV, cannot be cured with antiviral therapy because the virus effectively hides from the immune system.

A Brazilian study shows that inhibition of an RNA named RMEL3, which is encoded by a previously uncharacterized gene (also named RMEL3), can reduce the viability of cultured melanoma cells by up to 95%.

Although RMEL3 is a non-coding RNA and hence does not contain information for protein synthesis, it appears to modulate the main signaling pathways related to cell proliferation and survival. How it does so is not fully understood.

In the modern era, it's clear that women can do just about anything that men can do. But, according to researchers reporting evidence based on hours watching online videos of social interactions after professional sports matches, men and women still manage conflict differently, most likely based on differences in traditional gender roles that go way, way back. The findings are published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 4.

Clusters of hunter-gatherers spent much of the late Stone Age working out the basics of farming on the fertile lands of what is now Turkey before taking this knowledge to Europe. In an analysis of ancient genomes published August 4 in Current Biology, researchers at Stockholm University and Uppsala University in Sweden and Middle East Technical University in Turkey report that at least two waves of early European settlers belonged to the same gene pool as farmers in Central Turkey--genealogy that can be traced back to some of the first people to cultivate crops outside of Mesopotamia.

All living toothed whales rely upon echoes of their own calls to navigate and hunt underwater, a skill that works best in conjunction with high-frequency hearing. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 4 who studied one of the best-preserved ears of any ancient whale ever discovered find that whales' high-frequency hearing abilities arose earlier than anticipated.