Life Sciences and Chemistry

Nitric Oxide regulates stem cell division in the adult brain; Strategy seen for repairing brain damage caused by neurodegenerative disease and stroke

Most neurons in the mammalian brain are produced during embryonic development. However, several regions of the adult brain continue to spawn large numbers of neurons through the proliferation of neural stem cells. Moreover, it is becoming clear that these new neurons are integrated into existing brain circuitry.

Now, researcher

Females prefer burrows

The signal is an arched wall of sand called a hood which courting males of the fiddler crab Uca musica build at the entrances to their burrows on sand flats in Panama. Males have one very large claw that they wave to attract females to their burrows and females visit several males before choosing a mate by staying with a male in his burrow. These small crabs are at great risk of predation from ever-present shore birds. When moving between burrows they reduce th

Nanotechnology is an emerging range of technologies in which medicine and engineering meet physics and chemistry. Nanotechnology supporters claim that the machines and materials it may produce will mean faster computers, less pollution and cheaper energy, and longer and healthier lives.

Critics, however – from Prince Charles to Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton – fear that nanomachines could run amok and turn the surface of the Earth into an uninhabitable morass. Environmentalists

A study of microbes that thrive in hot, acidic conditions has overturned a long-held view that species of micro-organisms do not differ by geographic location like other forms of life. The research by the University of Cincinnati and the University of California-Berkeley has just been published online by the journal Science.

When it comes to plant life and animal life, a species usually shows genetic differences in different parts of the world. For the tiny form of life known as micro-org

Some thirty million species now live on Earth, but their spatial distribution is highly uneven. Biologists since Darwin have been asking why. Now, scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), have discovered part of the answer: how plant and animal communities originally assembled is a predictor of future biodiversity and ecosystem productivity.

“Despite its importance, species diversity has proven difficult to understand, in large part because multiple processes operating at

Scientists at the MPI-CBG in Dresden and EMBL in Heidelberg map forces that help cells divide

“Cells obey the laws of physics and chemistry,” begins a famous biology textbook, and one of the main goals of molecular biology is to link the properties of single molecules to the behavior of cells and the lives of organisms. So it is probably no surprise that an important new discovery about the physical forces that underlie cell division comes from a physics student-turned biologist, usi