Yearly Archives: 2007

City Ants Take The Heat:

While Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, has generated greater awareness of global warming, most people remain unaware of the more rapid warming that has occurred within major cities. In fact, large cities can be more than 10 degrees hotter than their surroundings. These metropolitan hot spots, which scientists refer to as urban heat islands, can stress the animals and plants that make their home alongside humans. Until recently, biologists had focused so much on the effects of global climate change, that they had overlooked the effects of urban warming.

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Researchers Discover Key To Body’s Ability To Detect Subtle Temperature Changes:

Scientists have long known the molecular mechanisms behind most of the body’s sensing capabilities. Vision, for example, is made possible in part by rhodopsin, a pigment molecule that is extremely sensitive to light. It is involved in turning photons into electrical signals that can be decoded by the brain into visual information. But how the human body is able to sense a one-degree change in temperature has remained a mystery.

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Why Even Close Associates Sometimes Have Trouble Communicating:

Particularly among close associates, sharing even a little new information can slow down communication. Some of people’s biggest problems with communication come in sharing new information with people they know well, newly published research at the University of Chicago shows.

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Wow! It seems that all the exciting sience news today are coming from my school:
Researchers Find Genes Involved In Nicotine Resistance In Fruit Flies:

North Carolina State University researchers have gleaned insight into the genes involved in resistance to nicotine in the lab rat of many gene studies – Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. The research team led by Dr. Greg Gibson, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, and his graduate student, Gisele Passador-Gurgel, found that regulation of levels of a certain enzyme – ornithine amino transferase – plays an important role in establishing how long flies can tolerate nicotine. Gibson says that the amount of enzyme seems to do two things – it influences flies’ ability to strip away toxins, and it helps establish how much the drug stimulates them.
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An interesting sidelight in the study was the observation that flies from North Carolina are more resistant to nicotine than flies from California. The researchers found that 30 percent of the North Carolina flies lived longer after exposure to nicotine – thus were more resistant to nicotine – than all but one California fly.
Gibson isn’t sure why, although he has a few theories. North Carolina flies may garner resistance from living near tobacco fields. California flies may have genetically lost their ability to resist nicotine. Many pesticides are nicotine-based, too, so the flies could have evolved some response to insecticides.

‘Buckyballs’ Penetrate Deeper, Faster When Skin Is Flexed, Study Shows:

Researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered that repetitive flexing movements increase the speed and depth at which tiny particles are absorbed through the skin, a finding that could have major implications in medical, consumer and industrial fields. Dr. Nancy Monteiro-Riviere, professor of investigative dermatology and toxicology at NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and graduate student Jillian Rouse, working with Dr. Andrew R. Barron, professor of chemistry and materials science at Rice University, made the discovery by exposing the tiny particles – the soccer-ball shaped materials known as fullerenes or buckyballs which are much smaller than the head of a pin – to pig skin.

Researchers Develop Resin Beads That Capture Mad Cow Disease Agent From Blood:

For the first time, experimental results indicate that it is possible to use a resin filter to remove harmful prion proteins from the blood of an infected animal, a finding that has major implications for the removal of infectious prion proteins – the agents associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, mad cow disease, scrapie and other prion diseases in animals – during blood transfusions.Dr. Ruben Carbonell, Frank Hawkins Kenan Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and director of the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science at North Carolina State University, and scientists from the University of Maryland at Baltimore’s VA Medical Center, the American Red Cross and ProMetic BioSciences, a biotechnology company, developed small resin beads with molecules that are able to bind to harmful prion proteins. The beads serve as an adsorption filter, capturing the bad proteins and allowing other blood components to be effectively cleansed of the prion-disease-causing agents.

Male, Female Or Both? Study Shows Chemicals, Temperature Can Confuse Crustaceans:

Reports of blue crabs exhibiting both male and female sex characteristics in the Chesapeake Bay and other water systems raise a red flag about the environment in which the crabs live, says Dr. Gerald A. LeBlanc, professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at North Carolina State University.

Do You Hear What I See? Research Finds Visually Stimulated Activity In Brain’s Hearing Processing Centers:

New research pinpoints specific areas in sound processing centers in the brains of macaque monkeys that shows enhanced activity when the animals watch a video. This study confirms a number of recent findings but contradicts classical thinking, in which hearing, taste, touch, sight, and smell are each processed in distinct areas of the brain and only later integrated.

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Boosting Brain Power — With Chocolate:

Eating chocolate could help to sharpen up the mind and give a short-term boost to cognitive skills, a University of Nottingham expert has found. A study led by Professor Ian Macdonald found that consumption of a cocoa drink rich in flavanols — a key ingredient of dark chocolate — boosts blood flow to key areas of the brain for two to three hours.

Environment And Exercise May Affect Research Results, Study Shows:

A recently completed study at The University of Arizona may have implications for the thousands of scientists worldwide who use “knockout” mice in their research. In the study, Knockout Mice: Is it Just Genetics? Effects of Enriched Housing on Fibulin-4+/- Mice, lead researcher Ann Baldwin, PhD, suggests that environmental factors may play a large part in research findings that investigators assume are due simply to genetic differences. Further, the study research indicates that appropriate environments may counteract the effects of some genetic deficiencies.

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New Research Finds People And Pigeons See Eye To Eye:

Pigeons and humans use similar visual cues to identify objects, a finding that could have promising implications in the development of novel technologies, according to new research conducted by a University of New Hampshire professor. Brett Gibson, an assistant professor of psychology who studies animal behavior, details his latest research in the journal article, “Non-accidental properties underlie shape recognition in mammalian and non-mammalian vision,” published in Current Biology. Gibson and his colleagues found that humans and pigeons, which have different visual systems, have evolved to use similar techniques and information to recognize objects.

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