Scientists are unravelling the environmental changes that took place around the Arctic during an exceptional episode of ancient global warming. Newly published results from a high-resolution study of sediments collected on Spitsbergen represent …
Video game designers are always striving to make games more lifelike, but they’ll have a hard time topping what Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse is up to. He’s introducing life itself into games.
Riedel-Kruse and his lab group have deve…
Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) at the University of Oxford have uncovered a clue that may help to explain why the earliest evidence of complex multicellular animal life appears around 550 mil…
Rivers and streams supply the lifeblood to ecosystems across the globe, providing water for drinking and irrigation for humans as well as a wide array of life forms from single-celled organisms up to the fish humans eat.
But humans and natur…
HOUSTON — (Sept. 15, 2010) — In a new study this week, Rice University scientists bring the latest tools of computational biology to bear in examining how the processes of natural selection and evolution influence the way bacteria acquire immunity…
Eating your own brain may not sound like a sensible approach to prolonging your life, but researchers at the University of Rochester have discovered that some single-celled organisms essentially do just that to keep themselves healthy. Scientists studied the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and found that contrary to what biologists have believed, the cell would “eat” its own nucleus to rid itself of aged or damaged sections. Though it’s long been known that cells frequently break down and recycle various cell parts in a process called autophagy (after the Greek for “self-eating”), biologists thought that eating the nucleus was strictly off-limits.