Venom from a West Indian tarantula has been shown to cause pain by exciting the same nerve cells in mice that sense high temperatures and the hot, spicy ingredient in chili peppers, UCSF scientists have discovered.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have figured out how one particular protein contributes to long-term memory and helps the brain remember things longer than an hour or two. The findings are reported in two papers in the November 9 issue of Neuron.
As the Northern Hemisphere braces for another flu season, researchers at Florida State University’s National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida are making strides toward better understanding the mechanics of the virus that causes it — a virus that kills between one-quarter and one-half million people each year.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has seen something never before seen on another planet — a hurricane-like storm at Saturn’s south pole with a well-developed eye, ringed by towering clouds.
Argonne National Laboratory scientists in collaboration with Xradia have created a new X-ray microscope technique capable of observing molecular-scale features, measuring less than a nanometer in height. Combining X-ray reflection together with high resolution X-ray microscopy, scientists can now study interactions at the nanometer-scale which often can exhibit different properties. Improving our understanding of interactions at the nanoscale holds promise to help us cure the sick, protect our environment and make us more secure.
Potentially blinding blood vessel growth in the cornea resulting from eye injury or even surgery can be reduced by more than 50 percent with a new manmade protein, researchers say.
A new RNA map, created by a team of researchers at Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, shows for the first time how the specific location of short snippets of RNA affects the way that alternative splicing is controlled in the brain.
Movement ecology is on the move, with the world’s first international research group on this topic having begun its work this fall at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute for Advanced Studies.
Over the last half century, researchers have found that mineral surfaces may have played critical roles organizing, or activating, molecules that would become essential ingredients to all life–such as amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and nucleic acids (the essence of DNA). But which of the countless possible combinations of biomolecules and mineral surfaces were key to this evolution? This vexing question has stumped scientists for years because of the sheer volume of possibilities.
In a recent experiment, to be published in Nature on Nov. 9, Dr. Matthias Meschke and professor Jukka Pekola, together with Dr. Wiebke Guichard, a coworker from French CNRS, investigated heat exchange between two small pieces of normal metal, connected to each other only via superconducting leads. The results demonstrate that at very low temperatures heat is transferred by electromagnetic radiation.