Physical adaptation is usually thought of as a very slow process. It might take a species of bird several generations to evolve a beak suited for eating fruit compared to, say, pecking wood. This change would involve the death of several birds with “incorrect” sets of genes and the survival of one type of bird with a “correct” set of genes. But what if a creature had a huge library of genes, so that they might bypass natural selection by simply expressing the right genes for their environment? That’s what researchers at Washington University at St. Louis have found occurs in the versatile fire salamander.
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Tags: 2014, Washington University St. Louis, Midwest, 2013, Washington University, Missouri, WashU, WUSTL, BioResearch Product Faire Event, MO, St Louis
Yesterday the police were on high alert, cracking down harder than ever on the sale, possession and use of illegal fireworks. But every day, several Americans light up something far more lethal. Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and remains so dangerous largely due the addictive properties of nicotine. In an effort to curb that dependency, researchers from the University of Minnesota are developing a vaccine that will grant immunity to nicotine.
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Tags: 2014, Midwest, 2013, University of Minnesota, University of Minnesota St. Paul, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Minneapolis, MN, St. Paul, St.Paul, UMinn, UMinnSP, Twin Cities, U-M
Modern-day farmers are locked in a constant arms race with hungry pests, trying to develop methods of deterring bugs and plants faster than these organisms evolve to resist their attacks. As evolution is a fairly slow process, this usually allows the farmers to come out on top, or at least enough to make a profit on their crop yields. However, there is one particularly crafty bug that seemed to evolve at a much faster rate than normal- an anomaly which bioresearchers from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign set out to explain.
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Humans might be on the top of natural food chain, but they still have to be wary of environmental dangers. One such danger that is often overlooked in the excitement of producing new things, like the next model of iPhone or a pair of solar contact lenses, is the effect of man-made products on the environment, and the subsequent consequences on human health. Fortunately, this is the research focus of the Center for Environmental Genetics, located at the University of Cincinnati.
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While solar power is one of the leading sources of renewable energy available to us, it’s easy to argue that we have a long way to go in terms of directly harnessing the sun’s rays. For instance, most solar devices in our daily lives must be hooked up to a battery or capacitor in order to store the energy they derive. A novel invention from the University of Wisconsin, Madison solves this issue by keeping solar energy readily available in the mechanism itself. But most impressive of all is that the mechanism itself is a pair of solar contact lenses.
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Tags: 2014, Midwest, 2013, WI, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Madison, UWiscRP, UWisc, University of Wisconsin Research Park, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Front Line event, Madison
The summer is finally approaching, which means biotechnology news related to mosquito outbreaks is especially hot. (We had the same thought last summer; see Irvine Research Lab Produces Transgenic Mosquitoes to Combat Malaria and Rock Neurogenetics Lab in the Press for Mosquito Research, Fashion Scents.) As was the case last summer, researchers are working hard to reduce the impact of malaria, which is largely transmitted by mosquitoes. At Michigan State University, they are taking a unique approach to this old problem: instead of protecting humans from mosquitoes, just protect mosquitoes from malaria in the first place.
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Though researchers have known for some time that eating a Mediterranean diet is good for the heart and can even help fight cancer, nobody has known exactly how it affects our bodies so positively. Now at Ohio State University, a new study shows how one compound in particular assists in the natural death of cancer cells.
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When speaking about cryptography, one likely imagines a military or computerized setting, where a group of people tries fervently to decipher the coded messages of their enemy in order to gain valuable intelligence. But the same thing is happening in labs at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, only with microbiologists cracking the code of cancer cells.
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Nerves play a vital role in the well-being of our body. Nerve damage is among the most crippling physical damage we can sustain, which is why it is in our best interest to protect them when at all possible. So when new bioresearch from Washington University in St. Louis lays out a method to prevent the body from destroying axons, which transmit nerve signals throughout the body, it’s a sure signal of improvement in the field of nervous studies.
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As humans, we like to think of ourselves as superbly evolved, which is a completely valid standpoint if you place emphasis on things like consciousness and inventiveness. But our cohabitants of Earth have developed some impressive abilities of their own, many of which we can only barely understand. Take for example the bacteria that are shocking several researchers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities lab with their unique ability to change the electrical state of metals.
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Tags: 2014, Midwest, 2013, University of Minnesota, University of Minnesota St. Paul, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Minneapolis, MN, Front Line, St. Paul, UMinn, UMinnSP