Researchers at CU Boulder are starting work on a new collaborative grant from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that will improve solar wind modeling.
New published research from the College of Veterinary Medicine shows that heightened levels of genomic instability can prove fatal to female embryos in mice.
Although white-nose syndrome (WNS) has pushed some bat populations to extinction, researchers have found that higher fat stores are helping some little brown bats to survive this deadly disease. The study, led by scientists at UC Santa Cruz, was published February 19 in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
For more than a century, the world's oceans have been becoming steadily more acidic as they soak up ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the impacts can be fatal for invertebrates such as shellfish, plankton, and corals that rely on dissolved minerals to build their shells and exoskeletons.
The smell of food induces a variety of physiological processes in our body. Thus, the production of saliva and digestive enzymes is stimulated before the actual food intake in order to prepare the gastrointestinal tract for the upcoming digestive process. In a healthy organism, this coordination depends on a dynamic balance between formation and degradation of proteins (proteostasis). This plays an important role for the recycling of cells and during the aging process.
Miniaturization is the watchword of progress. Nanoscience, studying structures on the scale of a few atoms, has been at the forefront of chemistry for some time now. Recently, researchers at the University of Tokyo developed the new strategy to construct sub-nanosized metal aggregates, building up small metal clusters into grander 3-D architectures. Their creations could have real industrial value.
Scientists working in a range of disciplines joined forces to identify a new approach to combat African sleeping sickness. Fundamental research undertaken under the supervision of Professor Ute Hellmich of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has revealed a promising strategy to develop a suitable agent. "There is still a long way to go before we arrive at a pharmaceutical product," said Hellmich. "But our highly interdisciplinary work involving parasitology, theoretical and organic chemistry, structural biology, and biochemistry has shown how the parasite that causes sleeping sickness can be rendered harmless." The researchers succeeded in demonstrating how a specific inhibitory substance docks on to and deactivates a vital protein of the parasite.
Biodiversity is one of Earth's most precious resources. However, for most places in the world, scientists only have a tiny picture of what this diversity actually is. Researchers at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have now constructed from scattered data a world map of biodiversity showing numbers of tree species. With the new map, the researchers were able to infer what drives the global distribution of tree species richness. Climate plays a central role; however, the number of species that can be found in a specific region also depends on the spatial scale of the observation, the researchers report in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The new approach could help to improve global conservation.
In order to explain the known anomalies in water, some researchers assume that water consists of a mixture of two phases, even under ambient conditions. However, new X-ray spectroscopic analyses at BESSY II, ESRF and Swiss Light Source show that this is not the case. At room temperature and normal pressure, the water molecules form a fluctuating network with an average of 1.74 ± 2.1 percent donor and acceptor hydrogen bridge bonds per molecule each, allowing tetrahedral coordination between close neighbors.
We're fighting a different kind of wildfire whose behaviour experts are struggling to predict.
