The world may be closer to knowing why Ebola spreads so easily thanks to a team of researchers from Tulane University and other leading institutions who discovered a new biological activity in a small protein from the deadly virus. The team’s findings were recently published in the Journal of Virology.
articles
Newly identified gene helps time spring flowering in vital grass crops
Winter is no time to flower, which is why so many plants have evolved the ability to wait for the snow to melt before investing precious resources in blooms.
Waking up to flower as the warmer, longer days of spring arrive — and the risk of a damaging frost recedes — requires a process called vernalization, in which flowering is blocked until the plant senses a sufficient cold spell. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have identified a gene that keeps grasses from entering their flowering cycle until the season is right, a discovery that may help plant breeders and engineers get more from food and energy crops.
Sowing Stem Cells: Lab-Grown Organoids Hold Promise for Patient Treatments
Ophir Klein is growing teeth, which is just slightly less odd than what Jeffrey Bush is growing – tissues that make up the face. Jason Pomerantz is growing muscle; Sarah Knox is growing salivary glands; and Edward Hsiao is printing 3-D bone using a machine that looks about as complex as a clock radio.
Together, these members of the UC San Francisco faculty are cultivating organs of the craniofacial complex – the skull and face – which too often go terribly wrong during fetal development. Deformities of these bones or soft tissues, the most common of birth defects, can cut life short by blocking the airway or circulation. Or they can disfigure a face so profoundly that a child struggles to see, hear, or talk. Perhaps most painful of all, such deformities render children physically other, potentially leading to a lifetime of corrective surgeries and social isolation.
Motor-boat noise makes fish bad parents, leading to the death of their babies
Noise from motorboats is making fish become bad parents, and reducing the chance of their young surviving, research led by marine experts at the University of Exeter has shown.
The sound of motorboat engines disturbed coral reef fish so acutely it changed the behaviour of parents, and stopped male fish properly guarding their young, feeding and interacting with their offspring.
Study Identifies an Enzyme Inhibitor to Treat Gulf War Illness Symptoms
At least 100,000 military veterans who served in the 1990-1991 Gulf War were exposed to chemical weapons, released into the air after the United States bombed an ammunition depot in Khamisiyah, Iraq. Today, many are still suffering from Gulf War Illness, a mysterious, multi-symptom disease that experts believe is linked to organophosphate nerve agents sarin and cyclosarin.
New method enables real-time monitoring of materials during irradiation
A new advance on a method developed by MIT researchers could enable continuous, high-precision monitoring of materials exposed to a high-radiation environment. The method may allow these materials to remain in place much longer, eliminating the need for preventive replacement. It could also speed up the search for new, improved materials for these harsh environments.
The new findings appear in the journal Applied Physics Letters, in a paper by graduate student Cody Dennett and assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering Michael Short. This study builds on the team’s earlier work that described the benchmarking of the method, called transient grating spectroscopy (TGS), for nuclear materials. The new research shows that the technique can indeed perform with the high degree of sensitivity and time-resolution that the earlier calculations and tests had suggested should be possible for detecting tiny imperfections.