Life Sciences and Chemistry

McGill research shows fish eating junk food

The junk food phenomena has hit bottom- the bottom of the St. Lawrence River. According to McGill University researchers, some freshwater fish are opting out of their usual diet of insects and crustaceans and dining instead on invasive European quagga mussels: the River’s junk food. This change may have negative effects on fish growth and may also affect other freshwater animals. Although this research is focused on the St. Lawrence R

PNNL-USC team discovers how protein in teeth controls bone-like crystals to form steely enamel

Bone and enamel start with the same calcium-phosphate crystal building material but end up quite different in structure and physical properties. The difference in bone and enamel microstructure is attributed to a key protein in enamel that molds crystals into strands thousands of times longer and much stronger than those in bone. The dimension of an enamel strand is 100,000 by 50 by 25 nan

Large colonies of micro-organisms living under rocks have been discovered in the most hostile and extreme regions of the Arctic and Antarctic – giving new insights on survival of life on other planets.

Reporting in this week’s Nature, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography reveal their surprise findings that rock-dwelling micro-organisms can photosynthesise and store carbon just as much as the plants, lichens and mosses that live

A naturally occurring chemical that may repel yellow fever mosquitoes can now be made in the laboratory, Indiana University Bloomington scientists report.

“The synthesis requires only seven steps,” said organic chemist P. Andrew Evans, who led the research. “It should be quite trivial to scale this up to the production of large quantities.”

Gaur acid is a natural skin secretion of the gaur, an Asian wild ox. Preliminary evidence suggests that this chemical discourages th

Colgate University biology professor Ken Belanger and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, and Saitama University are collaborating to better understand how plants protect themselves from naturally occurring but potentially damaging high-energy molecules. Their findings, said Belanger, could one day help farmers boost crop yields and shield their harvests from extreme environmental conditions, and may have even

To develop new therapeutic approaches to cancer, it is essential to understand the long and extremely complex process that underlies it, in other words the various stages of cancer development from the initial mutation to the tumor. Having already identified the alteration that leads to Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer which afflicts young people, an Inserm team at the Institut Curie has recently used a combination of novel techniques to show that there 86 deregulated genes in these tumors. One of