Charles Darwin based his groundbreaking theory of natural selection on the realization that genetic variation among organisms is the key to evolution.
Some individuals are better adapted to a given environment than others, making them more l…
MANHATTAN, KAN. — Two Kansas State University researchers focusing on rice genetics are providing a better understanding of how pathogens take over a plant’s nutrients.
Their research provides insight into ways of reducing crop losses or developi…
In a unique study involving young boa constrictors, University of Cincinnati researchers put snakes to work on varying diameters and flexibility of vertical rope to examine how they might move around on branches and vines to gather food and escape e…
A more personalized treatment for people with a type of metastatic liver cancer –hepatocellular carcinoma — may be possible by targeting the protein c-Met, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is …
By applying the same rules that explain how genomes evolve, Rice University physicists have shown that the world economy is more sensitive to recessionary shocks and recovers more slowly from recessions now than it did 40 years ago, due to increased…
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — OCT. 13, 2010 — Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an extremely complicated disease. Several proteins seem to be involved in its cause and progression. For example, the lipid-transport protein apolipoprotein E4 (apoE4) is the major ge…
Pre-kindergartners who spend much of their classroom day engaged in so-called free-choice play with little input from teachers make smaller gains in early language and math skills than children who receive input from teachers in a range of different…
A new study has uncovered more evidence that black holes form before the galaxies that contain them. The finding could help resolve a long-standing debate, says the study’s lead scientist. Marianne Vestergaard, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Ohio State, came to this conclusion when she studied a collection of very energetic, active galaxies known as quasars as they appeared some 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only one billion years old. While the quasars were obviously young — they contained large stellar nurseries in which new stars were forming — each also contained a very massive, fully formed black hole.
Scientists have taken an important step toward understanding a virus that infects and lies dormant in most people, but emerges as a serious illness in transplant patients, some newborns and other people with weakened immune systems. The virus, called human cytomegalovirus, enters the bone marrow and can hide there for a lifetime. Until now, however, scientists had not been able to study the virus in its latent stage because it infects only humans and does not readily infect or become dormant in laboratory strains of bone marrow cells. In a new study researchers demonstrated a laboratory system for studying the virus in its latent stage and discovered a set of genes that may give the virus its great capacity for stealth.
A baby’s first look at the world is likely a dizzying array of shapes and motion that are meaningless to a newborn, but researchers at the University of Rochester say they have now shown that babies use relationships between objects to build an understanding of the world. By noting how often objects appear together, infants can efficiently take in more knowledge than if they were to simply see the same shapes individually, says the paper published in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.