Life Sciences and Chemistry

A certain species of tick has learned the secret to staying slim–by remaining virgins. Female ticks who mate will drink 100 times their weight in host blood, whereas virgins aren’t so gluttonous says a University of Alberta researcher who has discovered a protein that may offer clues to a $10 billion global tick problem.

“What happens is that a female will remain attached to a host, eating slowly and waiting to be fertilized,” said Dr. Reuben Kaufman from the U of A’s Faculty of

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas are the first to use genetically engineered mice containing a fluorescent molecule to examine in real time the chemical reactions that result in smooth-muscle contraction.

Smooth muscle, found in the walls of blood vessels and in internal organs such as lungs, stomach and the bladder, contracts as the end result of a series of chemical reactions. In a new study, UT Southwestern researchers report that one set of chemical reactions resu

New Caledonian crows, known to be very proficient tool-users, have a preferred way of holding their tools comparable to the way humans are either right- or left-handed, according to research by Oxford zoologists, recently published in ’Biology Letters’.

Studying the tool use of 10 captive New Caledonian crows, the researchers found that each bird had a consistent preference for holding a piece of dowelling either near its left or its right cheek when trying to retrieve mealworms f

Just when you thought it was safe to go to bed, the bed-bug is returning to UK cities

Many urban infesting organisms are in decline. Worryingly, the bed-bug is bucking this trend. One London borough has seen infestations increase nearly ten-fold in the last ten years.

Bed-bugs are not known to spread any diseases, but their bites are a severe nuisance. Would you like to share your home with this ancient bedfellow? And the current trend is especially worrying to hoteliers (n

A team of researchers from the University Hospital of Grenoble (CHU – Inserm U647) and the ESRF1 has found a new treatment that improves the survival of rats with high-grade gliomas.

This research was carried out at the ESRF Medical Beamline. It showed that after a year of this treatment, three rats out of 10 were considered cured, whereas without treatment, all would be dead. The results have just been published in the scientific journal Cancer Research. A glioma is one of the most frequen

A gene-switching mechanism dating back 400 million years to the very first plants that made it onto land has been found by plant biologists at UC Davis. A family of genes required for stem and leaf development in flowering plants is controlled in the same way in everything from mosses to a Douglas fir, according to postdoctoral researcher Sandra Floyd and John Bowman, professor of plant biology at UC Davis.

The mechanism depends on microRNAs, short pieces of RNA that switch genes off by int