11/07/2007

White blood cells are picky about sugar

Biology textbooks are blunt—neutrophils are mindless killers. These white blood cells patrol the body and guard against infection by bacteria and fungi, identifying and destroying any invaders that cross their path. But ...

New light cast on key chemical reactions in interstellar space

A detailed understanding of key chemical reactions that take place in interstellar space has been provided by groundbreaking research at two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories and two European universities.

Researchers discover evidence of very recent human adaptation

A Cornell study of genome sequences in African-Americans, European-Americans and Chinese suggests that natural selection has caused as much as 10 percent of the human genome to change in some populations in the last 15,000 ...

Arizona State scientists keep an eye on Martian dust storm

Scientists at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Center are using the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter to monitor a large dust storm on the Red Planet. The instrument, a multi-wavelength ...

Robot walks on water

Water striders, insects that walk on the surface of the water, may never set foot on land in their lives, and yet they’re not swimmers. Over the past million or so years, this insect—sometimes called a water skater—has ...

A First-Principles Model of Early Evolution

In a study publishing in PLoS Computational Biology, Shakhnovich et al present a new model of early biological evolution – the first that directly relates the fitness of a population of evolving model organisms to the properties ...

Piecing together the cyanobacteria puzzle

Blue green algae are significant species in the global carbon cycle because they transform nitrogen gas from the atmosphere into a useable nutrient, enabling photosynthesis in nutrient-poor waters.

page 2 from 3