Category Archives: News & Archives

A lesson from mating birds: The song gets sweeter over time, a Miami scientist finds

On a dewy summer morning, Karla Rivera-Cáceres, an ornithology researcher at the University of Miami, crouched in her usual workspace –– the tall grasses of Costa Rica’s woodland –– and heard something unusual. Rivera-Cáceres studies bird song, and that day she was listening to the canebrake wren, a brown bird whose bland appearance (it was…

Germs with unusual antibiotic resistance widespread in U.S.

Health departments working with CDC's Antibiotic Resistance (AR) Lab Network found more than 220 instances of germs with "unusual" antibiotic resistance genes in the United States last year, according to a CDC Vital Signs report released today. Germs with unusual resistance include those that cannot be killed by all or most antibiotics, are uncommon in a geographic…

DNA mutations cause tumor cells to grow out of control, but they also generate variety that enables organisms to adapt to their environments and evolve. Until now, biologists have only had crude methods for estimating the average rates and effects of mutations. But in a new study, biophysicists have documented individual mutations as they happen in bacterial cells.…

Astronaut’s DNA no longer matches that of his identical twin, NASA finds

Spending a year in space not only changes your outlook, it transforms your genes. Preliminary results from NASA's Twins Study reveal that 7% of astronaut Scott Kelly's genes did not return to normal after his return to Earth two years ago. The study looks at what happened to Kelly before, during and after he spent…

New Species of ‘Indestructible’ Animal Found in Surprising Place

Tardigrades are microscopic, resilient organisms that might just outlive the Sun—and their known world just got a little bigger. Kazuharu Arakawa, a researcher at Tokyo's Keio University, picked up a tardigrade specimen when he was gathering samples from the parking lot of his apartment building in Tsuruoka-City, Japan. He plucked a clump of moss protruding from the concrete…

Bubbles of life from the past: Tiny bubbles of oxygen got trapped 1.6 billion years ago

Take a good look at these photos: They show you 1.6 billion years old fossilized oxygen bubbles, created by tiny microbes in what was once a shallow sea somewhere on young Earth. The bubbles were photographed and analyzed by researchers studying early life on Earth. Microbes are of special interest: They were not only the…

Extraordinary warmth envelops Arctic as Polar Vortex dislodges cold air to US, Europe

During the middle of February, a split in the Polar Vortex allowed cold air to plunge southward and warm air to surge northward to the North Pole. The Polar Vortex is a storm high in the atmosphere that helps to keep frigid air locked up in the Arctic. Occasionally, this storm gets distorted, moves southward and can…

Chemists use technology to decode language of lipid-protein interaction

Technology has a massive impact on our day-to-day lives, right down to the cellular level within our own bodies. Texas A&M University chemists are using it to determine how lipids talk to each other when they interact with membrane proteins, one of the primary targets for drug discovery and potential treatments for any number of…

Loops, loops, and more loops: This is how your DNA gets organized

It's so impressive: a living cell is able to neatly package a big jumble of DNA, over two meters in length, into tidy, tiny chromosomes while preparing for cell division. For over a century, it has been clear that a cell can do so, but scientists have been puzzled for decades on how the process…

Two Bacteria Revealed as Culprits Behind Colon Cancer in New Study

Two species of bacteria work cooperatively to trigger colon cancer tumors, a study published Thursday reports. The finding, which surprised the researchers, could eventually lead to new avenues for treatment. Past research hinted at the potential importance of these bacteria to the development of colon cancer. A 2015 study by Dr. Cynthia Sears and colleagues at the Sydney…