An article by Kenneth P. Dial and two co-authors in the May 2006 issue of BioScience summarizes experimental evidence indicating that ancestral protobirds incapable of flight could have used their protowings to improve hindlimb traction and thus better navigate steep slopes and obstructions.
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Have you ever tried to do the limbo? For ants it’s a way of life! Tobias Seidl from the University of Zurich has found that ants are able to learn how to visually judge the height of horizontal barriers so that they can successfully crawl under it without slowing down.
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A tool for examining hovering flight of insects and birds could allow researchers to study other matters pertaining to locomotion, Stephen Childress, a professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, demonstrated at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in St. Louis.
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In this month’s issue of the leading scientific journal Genome Research, scientists from Kyushu University report how environmentally damaged DNA may contribute to human genetic diversity. They describe the co-occurrence of an aberrant nucleobase, called 8-oxoguanine (8-oxoG), with genomic regions enriched in meiotic recombination “hotspots” and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The findings have implications for understanding the interplay between heredity and the environment in shaping human phenotypic variation.
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Lab researchers have discovered that three is the magic number when it comes to strengthening metals. Since the Iron Age, metallurgists have known that metals such as steel become stronger and harder the more you hit (or beat) on them. But it wasn’t always clear why this happened. Vasily Bulatov and colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory discovered that the common explanation for this hardening process ignored a key component.
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Using a new genomic strategy that has the power to survey the entire human genome and identify genes with common variants that contribute to complex diseases, researchers at Johns Hopkins, together with scientists from Munich, Germany, and the Framingham Heart Study, USA, have identified a gene that may predispose some people to abnormal heart rhythms that lead to sudden cardiac death, a condition affecting more than 300 thousand Americans each year.
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New animal studies conducted at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies show that the only human gene therapy treatment to date considered to be largely successful, is, in fact, riskier than realized. The Salk researchers, led by Inder Verma, PhD, a professor in the Laboratory of Genetics, discovered that the healthy copy, which replaces the defective gene can itself promote cancer development. Their findings appear in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.
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Increasing carbon levels can be a good thing in some cases: Scientists at the University of Durham propose that higher levels of inorganic carbon can have a positive influence on human health. Dr Martin Cann presented his work on the enzyme adenylyl cyclase (AC) that can sense carbon levels and affect sperm motility or the virulence of a dangerous human pathogen.
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Percutaneous cryoablation, a relatively non-invasive technique that destroys tumors by freezing them, is a safe method for treating kidney tumors in selected patients who are not considered candidates for surgery, according to a new study by researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
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A study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows that computerized systems that match fingerprints using interoperable minutiae templates — mathematical representations of a fingerprint image — can be highly accurate as an alternative to the full fingerprint image. NIST conducted the study, called the Minutiae Interoperability Exchange Test (MINEX), to determine whether fingerprint system vendors could successfully use a recently approved standard* for minutiae data rather than images of actual prints as the medium for exchanging data between different fingerprint matching systems.
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