How do female whale sharks meet their perfect mates and go on to create offspring? While little is known about the reproductive behavior of those ocean-roaming giants, a newly published analysis led by University of Illinois at Chicago biologist Jennifer Schmidt reveals new information about the mating habits of this elusive, difficult-to-study fish.
The pregnant shark carried a amazingly many embryos — 304 — still in the uterus and representing a spectrum of age and development phases ranging from being still egg-encased to developed, near-term animals. Continue Reading »
Individuals who suffer from migraines with aura (temporary visual or sensory disturbances before or during a migraine headache) are at a higher risk of dying from heart disease or stroke, according to research published today on bmj.com. This is the first large population-based study showing a link between migraine and overall mortality as well as specific mortality.
The findings support increasing evidence that migraine, particularly with aura, is associated with death from heart disease. The researchers stress, however, that the individual risk for a migraine sufferer remains low. Continue Reading »
A desire to understand how breast cancer starts has seen Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researcher Dr Marie-Liesse Asselin-Labat today win one of three 2010 L’Oreal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships.
Dr Asselin-Labat, a senior postdoctoral fellow in the institute’s Stem Cells and Cancer division in Melbourne, Australia, is rapidly establishing an international profile for her studies of how breast stem cells develop and how these cells are influenced by oestrogen and other steroids. Continue Reading »
A special energy efficiency workshop designed to help small business owners and organization facility managers save real building operations money will be presented in Mason, Cabell and Lincoln Counties in August and September.
The workshop, titled “Get Smart, Get Efficient,” will be offered on Thursday, August 26 at the Lowe Hotel in Point Pleasant, on Thursday, September 2 at the Lincoln County School Board Building in Hamlin, and on Tuesday, September 14 at Huntington’s Kitchen in Huntington. Each will be held from 5:30 p.m. though 7:30 p.m. Admission costs nothing, and anyone who manages buildings is invited. Continue Reading »
Human pluripotent stem cells, which can become any other kind of body cell, hold great potential to treat a wide range of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries. However, scientists who work with such cells have had trouble growing large enough quantities to perform experiments — in particular, for use in human studies. Furthermore, most materials now used to grow human stem cells include cells or proteins that come from mice embryos, which help stimulate stem-cell growth but would likely cause an immune reaction if injected into a human patient.
To overcome those issues, MIT chemical engineers, materials scientists and biologists have devised a synthetic surface that includes no foreign animal material and allows stem cells to stay alive and continue reproducing themselves for at least three months. It’s also the first synthetic material that allows single cells to form colonies of identical cells, which is necessary to identify cells with desired traits and has been difficult to achieve with existing materials. Continue Reading »
In “The Sign of the Four” Sherlock Holmes tells Watson he has written a monograph on 140 forms of cigar-, cigarette-, and pipe-tobacco, “with colored plates illustrating the difference in the ash.” He finds the ash invaluable for the identification of miscreants who happen to smoke during the commission of a crime.
But Sherlock Holmes and his cigarette ash and pipe dottle don’t have a patch on geologists and the “redox proxies” from which they deduce chemical conditions early in Earth’s history.
Redox proxies, such as the ratio of chromium isotopes in banded iron formations or the number of isotopes in sulfide particles trapped in diamonds, tell geologists indirectly whether the Earth’ s atmosphere and oceans were reducing (inclined to give away electrons to other atoms) or oxidizing (inclined to glom onto them). Continue Reading »
Researchers have developed technology for large-scale solar power installations to self-clean.
Find dusting those tables and dressers a chore or a bore? Dread washing the windows? Imagine keeping dust and grime off objects spread out over an area of 25 to 50 football fields. That’s the problem facing companies that deploy large-scale solar power installations, and scientists have now presented the development of one solution — self-dusting solar panels ― based on technology developed for space missions to Mars.
In a report at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on August 22, they described how a self-cleaning coating at first glance of solar cells could increase the efficiency of producing electricity from sunlight and reduce maintenance costs for large-scale solar installations. Continue Reading »
The first incarnation of the web was composed of static websites that linked to each other and search engines that will help you find sites of interest. Web 2. brought a social element to the web, with users sharing, commenting, and interacting through sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr. The future web, the “semantic web,” or Web 3., will embed meaning within digital information so that any given page can be understood by computers as well as people. Continue Reading »
For those with high blood pressure, chili peppers might be just what the doctor ordered, according to a study reported in the August issue of Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication. While the active ingredient that gives the peppers their heat — a compound known as capsaicin — might set your mouth on fire, it also leads blood vessels to relax, the research in hypertensive rats shows.
“We found that long-term dietary consumption of capsaicin, one of the most abundant components in chili peppers, could reduce blood pressure in genetically hypertensive rats,” said Zhiming Zhu of Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China. Continue Reading »
Scientists hoping to understand how cells work may get a boost from a new technique to tag and image proteins within living mammalian cells.
The new technique, developed by a research team led by University of Illinois at Chicago assistant professor of chemistry Lawrence Miller, provides the clearest, most dynamic view yet of protein-protein interactions in cells when viewed through a specially modified microscope. Continue Reading »
