Culture
The role of Hox genes in changing the layout of different body parts during evolution has been challenged by a study led by researchers out of the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Biological Sciences.
Hox genes are vital to developing differences in repeated body parts such as vertebrae, limbs, or digits in most animal species, including human beings. Ever since their discovery, scientists have thought that modifications to Hox genes could be the primary way that the animal body plan has been altered during evolution.
HERSHEY, Pa. -- Atypical eating behaviors may be a sign a child should be screened for autism, according to a new study from Penn State College of Medicine.
Research by Susan Mayes, professor of psychiatry, found that atypical eating behaviors were present in 70% of children with autism, which is 15 times more common than in neurotypical children.
Atypical eating behaviors may include severely limited food preferences, hypersensitivity to food textures or temperatures, and pocketing food without swallowing.
Research results on drug-gene interactions are much less likely to be replicated if they are performed by hierarchical communities or close-knit groups of frequent collaborators who use similar methods, instead of independent groups of scientists using different methods, suggests a paper published last week in eLife.
The findings may help improve the reliability of scientific results by helping to identify possible factors that contribute to the publication of unreliable, misleading or false results about potential drug-gene interactions.
When anthropologists consider the origins of warfare, their evolutionary theories tend to boil it down to the resource-scarcity trifecta of food, territory and mates - three resources that would justify the loss of life and risk to a warring group of hunter-gatherers.
A deep learning-powered computational framework, 'DeepEC,' will allow the high-quality and high-throughput prediction of enzyme commission numbers, which is essential for the accurate understanding of enzyme functions.
A team of Dr. Jae Yong Ryu, Professor Hyun Uk Kim, and Distinguished Professor Sang Yup Lee at KAIST reported the computational framework powered by deep learning that predicts enzyme commission (EC) numbers with high precision in a high-throughput manner.
Dolomite is widely in the metal industry as a fireproof material and in construction, such as for joint grouting in panel building. Of course, dolomite is also known as a collector of hydrocarbons.
The immune system is indispensable for defense against invading pathogens, but its aberrant activation may lead to autoimmune diseases. Regulatory T cells play a crucial role in preventing excess immune activation; mice without enough Treg function develop autoimmune disorders and are susceptible to immune diseases.
Exactly how fast is the universe expanding?
Scientists are still not completely sure, but a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists has used the neutron star merger detected in 2017 to come up with a more precise value for this figure, known as the Hubble constant. Their work appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Astronomy.
Osaka, Japan -- A "vacuum" is generally thought to be nothing but empty space. But in fact, a vacuum is filled with "virtual particle-antiparticle pairs" of electrons and positrons that are continuously created and annihilated in unimaginably short time-scales.
Increasing development of micro-scale electronics has stimulated demand of the corresponding micro-scale power sources, especially for micro-batteries (MBs). However, complex manufacturing process and poor flexibility of the traditional stacked batteries have hindered their practical applications.
University of Groningen Professor of Drug Design, Alexander Dömling, has devised a method to rapidly synthesize thousands of new molecules and evaluate their properties as potential drugs. In a paper published by Science Advances on 5 July, he shows that this method works well when applied to boronic acid chemistry, an important technique in synthetic organic chemistry. The study also produced an inhibitor of the phosphatase MptpB, a virulence factor of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which had previously been considered an 'undruggable' target.
Predators are not only a deadly threat to many animals, they also affect potential prey negatively simply by being nearby. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have studied what happens to the prey's immune system when they are forced to expend a large amount of their energy on avoiding being eaten.
A hard tackle on the football-field, a crash on your bike or a fall from a ladder in your home can easily cause a concussion, which eventually can cost your job - especially if you are in your thirties, and have a higher education.
Cheetah experts in many zoos around the world are at a loss. Despite all their efforts, these cats often do not reproduce in the desired manner. Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), together with colleagues from the Allwetterzoo Münster, have now found a key to the issue: the age of the mothers at the first pregnancy is the decisive factor. In contrast to the wild, felines kept in zoos are often bred only years after they have reached sexual maturity.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 9, 2019 -- Microfluidics and learning-on-a-chip research -- involving the manipulation of small amounts of fluids to run miniaturized experiments in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine -- are a prolific research field. But, so far, there aren't many published examples of how to teach it in an easily understandable way to students or how to communicate the numerous significant advances within the field to public audiences in a relatable manner.