Perennial wheat? The possibility is being looked at by a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station researcher. Annual wheat, which is traditionally grown in the Great Plains, is planted in the fall and dies after harvest in mid-summer. But Dr. Charlie Rush, Experiment Station plant pathologist, is testing some perennial lines of wheat bred in Washington state. These perennial lines regrow after harvest and may survive for up to five years, Rush said. And eastern Washington is climatically similar to the Texas Panhandle, except it has harsher winters.
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Common drugs used to treat cancer may be more harmful to healthy brain cells than the cancer cells that they are intended to destroy, according to a new study. The results, which also indicate that chemotherapy may cause long-term brain damage, represent the closest that scientists have come to pinpointing the underlying physiological cause of “chemo brain,” a common side effect of cancer treatment that scientists are only now beginning to comprehend.
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The first large-scale review of weight-loss surgeries performed on older adults suggests bariatric procedures should generally be limited to people younger than age 65, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.
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Implanting a small spacer between lumbar vertebrae during a procedure called interspinous process decompression may be an effective and minimally invasive way to treat spinal stenosis, according to a new report.
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Two fish that share much in common genetically appear to have markedly different abilities to grow, a finding that could provide a new way to research such disparate areas as muscle wasting disease and fish farming. Because the zebrafish and giant danio are closely related and the zebrafish’s genome has already been mapped, scientists hope they can more easily identify the genetic keys to the difference in growth potential between them.
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A molecular ‘battle of the sexes’ long considered the major driving force in a baby’s development is being challenged by a new genetic theory of parental teamwork. Biologists at The University of Manchester say the prevailing view that maternal and paternal genes compete for supremacy in their unborn offspring fails to answer some important questions relating to child development. In fact, rather than a parental power struggle, the researchers suggest that certain offspring characteristics can only be explained by their theory of genetic cooperation.
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University of Alberta researchers have pinpointed a section in the tiny hummingbird’s brain that may be responsible for its unique ability to stay stationary mid-air and hover.
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Scientists have discovered an unsuspected role for a gene known to be one of the best predictors of human breast cancer outcome. The gene, called GATA-3, is in a family of genes that guides development of stem cells into mature cells. University of California, San Francisco researchers have now found that GATA-3 is also required for mature mammary cells to remain mature in the adult. In research focusing on mice mammary glands, they found that without GATA-3, mature cells revert to a less specialized, “undifferentiated” state characteristic of aggressive cancer.
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Researchers in recent years have found water vapor at concentrations as much as twice what they should be in and around cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere, a finding that could alter some conclusions about climate change. A group of European and US scientists is advocating a broad research effort to solve the puzzle.
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The first high-resolution analysis of genomic alterations in breast tumors is reported in the scientific journal Genome Research. In this analysis, scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from Scandinavia, identified three distinct patterns of genomic variation that underlie breast tumor formation, one of which — “firestorms” — may be predictive of aggressive disease progression and short survival.
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