Body

It could be an artist’s depiction of someone’s stomach before and after a rather decadent meal. But it is a 3-D cryoelectron microscope reconstruction of the cross-section of a virus, before and after cramming itself full of its own DNA.

Global warming and the destruction of natural habitats will lead to significant declines and extinctions in the world’s 8,750 terrestrial bird species over the next century, according to a study conducted by biologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University.

Their study, the first global assessment of how climate change and habitat destruction may interact to impact the distribution of a large group of vertebrates over the next century, appears in the June 5 issue of the journal PLoS Biology.

It’s totally understandable to feel ambivalent when presented with both positive and negative evidence. However, people often feel ambivalent even when all the news is good or bad, anticipating conflict before it arises. The first empirical demonstration of this reaction appears in new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

The basic Keller explant is a rectangle of dorsal mesendoderm and ectoderm from an early-gastrula-stage Xenopus laevis embryo. It is ~60° to 90° wide, extending from the bottle cells to the animal pole. This protocol describes how to dissect, assemble, and cultivate Keller explants. The purpose of Keller explants was initially to allow observation of gastrulation movements, particularly convergent extension, in culture.

What did dinosaurs hear? Probably a lot of low frequency sounds, like the heavy footsteps of another dinosaur, if University of Maryland professor Robert Dooling and his colleagues are right. What they likely couldn't hear were the high pitched sounds that birds make.This diagram illustrates the relationship among archosaurs, which includes dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds. The drawings are of the inner ear structure of the different species. The numbers to the left are the time scale in million years.

Researchers have identified novel genetic mutations that are linked to hereditary diffuse gastric cancer, with these mutations being due to both independent mutational events and common ancestry, according to a study in the June 6 issue of JAMA.

Malignant melanoma is one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer. Nearly 60,000 new cases of melanoma are expected in 2007, and 8,100 deaths are expected to occur.

Higher levels of a protein called S-100 in patients with melanoma may correlate with a higher risk of having the disease return, say researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.

In the first scientific study of its kind, shark cartilage extract, AE-941 or Neovastat, has shown no benefit as a therapeutic agent when combined with chemotherapy and radiation for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, according to researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

A unique examination of one treatment center’s use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in new breast cancer patients has found MRI to be superior to mammography in finding additional tumors in a breast in which cancer has already been diagnosed, and in detecting new tumors in a patient’s supposedly healthy breast.

Rats with erectile dysfunction, or ED, that were injected with a gene therapy vector containing either of two nerve growth factors were able to regain normal function after four weeks, according to a study conducted by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers.

Last year, a groundbreaking international project found that a group of Japanese patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer survived longer —and had a higher rate of side effects — than U.S. patients with the same diagnosis,.when both groups were given two well-known drugs for the disease.

Flaxseed, an edible seed that is rich in omega 3-fatty acids and fiber-related compounds known as lignans, is effective in halting prostate tumor growth, according to a study led by Duke University Medical Center researchers. The seed, which is similar to a sesame seed, may be able to interrupt the chain of events that leads cells to divide irregularly and become cancerous.

Any number of things can go wrong in the cells of the body to cause cancer -- and clinicians can't tell by just looking at a tumor what exactly triggered the once normal cells to turn cancerous.

New tests developed by researchers at Duke University can determine the precise patterns among thousands of genes to identify the cascade of events, or pathways, that led to the cancer.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have performed atomic spectroscopy with integrated optics on a chip for the first time, guiding a beam of light through a rubidium vapor cell integrated into a semiconductor chip.

The Sleeping Beauty tranposon (SB-Tn) system, a gene therapy technology that avoids the pitfalls of transferring genes with viruses, shows promise in laboratory experiments for correcting the gene defect responsible for sickle cell disease (SCD), scientists in Minnesota are reporting.