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 »

A major study sheds new light on the role of carbon dioxide once it’s transported to the oceans’ depths. The research indicates that instead of sinking, carbon dioxide is often consumed by animals and bacteria and recycled in the “twilight zone,” a dimly lit area 100 to 1,000 meters below the surface. Because the carbon often never reaches the deep ocean, where it can be stored and prevented from re-entering the atmosphere as a green-house gas, the oceans may have little impact on changes in the atmosphere or climate. 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 »

A protein acting as a long-distance signal from leaf to shoot-tip tells plants when to flower, says new research published in Science Express on Thursday 19 April 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists using one of the nation’s newest and most capable research aircraft are launching a far-reaching field project this month to study plumes of airborne dust and pollutants that originate in Asia and journey to North America. 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 »

Did life arrive from space? Rather than developing here, could the first life forms have been catapulted to Earth on a chunk of rock from outer space? Investigations show that microbes are capable of surviving just such a journey. 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 »

Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light, offering the prospect of controlling the haywire neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to research at the nanoscale, vision is not necessarily an advantage. The subjects are so small, no one can see them. To encourage people with visual impairments to pursue fields in nanotechnology, educators have developed a way to craft accurate, detailed and touch-friendly models of nanoscale objects like carbon nanofibers, allowing the students to “see” those objects for the first time. 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 »