NewScITech

Mice whose brains had atrophied like those of Alzheimer’s disease patients regained long-term memories and the ability to learn after living in an enriched environment, researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory report in the April 29 advance online edition of Nature. The same results also were achieved with a new experimental class of drugs. Read the rest of this entry »

Before fish began to invade land, about 365 million years ago, they had some big problems to solve. They needed to come up with new ways to move, breathe, and eat. Read the rest of this entry »

Bugs in the gut are known as gut microbes and they live symbiotically in human and animal bodies, playing an important role in metabolism. Abnormalities in some types of gut microbes have recently been linked to diseases such as diabetes and obesity. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists have confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the fossil bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) and a half-million-year-old mastodon. Read the rest of this entry »

When the body’s own immune system begins to assault the cells in the pancreas responsible for producing insulin, the result is type 1 diabetes. Now, researchers studying the immune system’s dendritic cells in mice have found a way to stop the destruction and help revive and maintain the population of insulin-producing β cells, a discovery that could lead to a lasting cure. Read the rest of this entry »

Oceanographers have completed an important step in constructing the first deep-sea observatory off the continental United States. Workers in the multi-institution effort laid 32 miles (52 kilometers) of cable along the Monterey Bay sea floor that will provide electrical power to scientific instruments, video cameras, and robots 3,000 feet (900 meters) below the ocean surface. The link will also carry data from the instruments back to shore, for use by scientists and engineers from around the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Combing the genomes of the rat and the human, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found swaths of genetic code that can be used to assess the risk of human breast cancer. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most profound predicted impacts of climate change was discussed in a landmark conference at Oriel College by scientists, conservationists and policymakers from Europe and North and South America. They discussed some key research showing that although intact forests are fairly resistant to climate change, with partial deforestation the entire landscape could become drier and a domino effect could occur producing a ‘tipping point’ affecting the whole forest. Scientists were unwilling to quantify the risk of this happening, but talked about ‘corridors of probability’ with models predicting the risk at between 10 to 40 per cent over the next few decades. Read the rest of this entry »

Although mice, like most mammals, typically view the world with a limited color palette—similar to what some people with red-green color blindness see—scientists have now transformed their vision by introducing a single human gene into a mouse chromosome. The human gene codes for a light sensor that mice do not normally possess, and its insertion allowed the mice to distinguish colors as never before. Read the rest of this entry »

The remains of an ancient HIV-like virus have been found in rabbits. Scientists at Oxford University discovered the unique lentivirus, part of a family of viruses closely related to HIV, ‘fossilised’ inside the genome of the European rabbit. The discovery, reported this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, promises to change how scientists think about the evolution of viruses including HIV. Read the rest of this entry »

An international team of American and Chinese paleontologists has discovered a new species of mammal that lived 125 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era, in what is now the Hebei Province in China. Read the rest of this entry »

Whip spiders, considered by many to be creepy-crawly, are giving new meaning to the term touchy-feely. In two species of whip spiders, or amblypygids, mothers caress their young with long feelers and siblings stick together in social groups until they reach sexual maturity. This is surprising behavior for these arachnids, long-thought to be purely aggressive and anti-social, according to a Cornell researcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Ape-like human ancestors known as australopiths maintained short legs for 2 million years because a squat physique and stance helped the males fight over access to females, a University of Utah study concludes. Read the rest of this entry »

They might be giants, but many dinosaurs apparently had genomes no larger than those of a modern hummingbird. Read the rest of this entry »

Mayo Clinic researchers have safely transplanted cardiac preprogrammed embryonic stem cells into diseased hearts of mice successfully regenerating infarcted heart muscle without precipitating the growth of a cancerous tumor — which, so far, has impeded successful translation into practice of embryonic stem cell research. Read the rest of this entry »