PHYSorg Headline News Reader

Stem cells – the body's master cells – demonstrate a bizarre property never before seen at a cellular level, according to a study published today from scientists at the University of Cambridge. The property – known as auxeticity – is one which may have…

With gene expression analysis growing in importance for both basic researchers and medical practitioners, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland have developed a new computational method that dramatically speeds up estimates…

(Phys.org) —Members of the Open Source Seed Initiative this week held a rally and seed giveaway event. The group is concerned over restricting access to seeds through patents. They are stirring up public awareness over their mission to model a new crop…

Protecting wildlife while feeding a world population predicted to reach 9 billion by 2050 will require a holistic approach to conservation that considers human-altered landscapes such as farmland, according to Stanford researchers.

Seeds that sprout as soon as they're planted may be good news for a garden. But wild plants need to be more careful. In the wild, a plant whose seeds sprouted at the first warm spell or rainy day would risk disaster. More than just an insurance policy against…

(Phys.org) —An international team of researchers, led by Robert Lanza, of Advanced Cell Technology, has announced that they have performed the first successful cloning of adult human skin cells into stem cells. A paper by the team describing their work has…

The cell is an immensely complex biological system involving a multitude of components that work together to drive the cellular machine. Identifying how all of the components fit together in any given cell type is a challenge in itself—integrating the pieces…

Bacteria's memories of hostile viruses are stronger than thought. Even when the intruders change their DNA sequence, the immune system of bacteria can recognise these and subsequently destroy them. That is the conclusion of NWO Vidi researcher Stan Brouns in…

The emergence of technologies for analyzing gene expression at the genomic scale has required parallel efforts to develop software that make sense of the data. Such 'browser' tools provide scientists with a visual atlas of the thousands of genes that are…

(Phys.org) —"The Modern View of Domestication," a special feature of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published April 29, raises a number of startling questions about a transition in our deep history that most of us take for…

(Phys.org) —Cell movement plays an important role in a host of biological functions from embryonic development to repairing wounded tissue. It also enables cancer cells to break free from their sites of origin and migrate throughout the body.

Central-east Mexico gave birth to the domesticated chili pepper—now the world's most widely grown spice crop—reports an international team of researchers, led by a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis.

(Phys.org) —The incident was captured by Dr Bruna Bezerra and colleagues in the Atlantic Forest in the Northeast of Brazil.  Dr Bezerra is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol and a Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil.

Japan will target fewer whales when its Pacific hunt begins next week and will observe them in the Antarctic next season with the aim of resuming full-fledged commercial whaling, the fisheries minister said Friday.

Japan has decided to continue its whaling programme in the Pacific Ocean, reports said Friday, despite losing a United Nations court case on its other "research" hunt in the Antarctic.

Research done by U.S. scientists in the Cayman Islands suggests that native predators can be trained to gobble up invasive lionfish that colonize regional reefs and voraciously prey on juvenile marine creatures.

Suddenly there was a word for chili peppers. Information about archaeological remains of ancient chili peppers in Mexico along with a study of the appearance of words for chili peppers in ancient dialects helped researchers to understand where jalapeños were…

The tropical disease malaria is caused by the Plasmodium parasite. For its survival and propagation, Plasmodium requires a protein called actin. Scientists of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Germany used high-resolution structural biology…

Within each strand of DNA lies the blueprint for building an organism, along with the keys to its evolution and survival. These genetic instructions can give valuable insight into why pathogens like Cryptococcus neoformans—a fungus responsible for a million…

Researchers at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL), Norwich, collaborating with structural biologist Bostjan Kobe in Brisbane, have made a major advance in understanding plant disease resistance.

In a time of global climate change and rapidly disappearing habitat critical to the survival of countless endangered species, there is a heightened sense of urgency to confirm the return of animals thought to be extinct, or to confirm the presence of newly…

Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered an unexpected phenomenon in the organs that produce sperm in fruit flies: When a certain kind of stem cell is killed off experimentally, another group of non-stem cells can come out of retirement to replace them.

One day about eight years ago, Katia Silvera, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Riverside, and her father were on a field trip in a mountainous area in central Panama when they stumbled upon an orchid they had never seen before.

An international team of biogeographers has found that assumptions about similarities between biodiversity in forest fragments and true islands are not as clear-cut as has been assumed. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team reports on the…

Fruit flies are pretty predictable when it comes to scheduling their days, with peaks of activity at dawn and dusk and rest times in between. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports on April 17th have found that the clusters of brain…

Several parasites and pathogens that devastate honeybees in Europe, Asia and the United States are spreading across East Africa, but do not appear to be impacting native honeybee populations at this time, according to an international team of researchers.

If you've ever bitten into a strawberry and wondered why it doesn't taste as sweet or as good as others in the punnet, you could blame the fruit's genetics.

Many of our ideas about domestication derive from Charles Darwin, whose ideas in turn were strongly influenced by British animal-breeding practices during the 19th century, a period when landowners vigorously pursued systematic livestock improvement.

Gene expression is the process whereby the genetic information of DNA is used to manufacture functional products, such as proteins, which have numerous different functions in living organisms. Messenger RNA (mRNA) serves as an important intermediary during…

Researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 17 have discovered little-known cave insects with rather novel sex lives. The Brazilian insects, which represent four distinct but related species in the genus Neotrogla, are the first…