Life Sciences and Chemistry

Many creatures including our fellow primates the New World Monkeys rely on highly specific scent molecules called pheromones to find a suitable mate. Even our humble mammal cousin, the mouse, was found to have 140 genes just for pheromone receptors when its genome was completely sequenced earlier this year.

But humans are clueless when it comes to pheromone signals, according to University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Jianzhi “George” Zhang. He believes color vision put our pheromones

Some people can burn the midnight oil, while others might prefer to tackle their challenges early in the morning. Although most people know instinctively if they are an ‘evening’ or ‘morning’ person, scientists have now discovered why we fall into a certain category.

Scientists at the University of Surrey, in co-operation with clinical colleagues at St Thomas’’s Hospital (London) and Hospital de Gelderse Vallei (Netherlands), have discovered a correlation between a difference in th

Putting to rest years of controversy, an international research team led by Johns Hopkins scientists has discovered that the eye’s job of detecting light is most likely carried out by just three cell types.

Writing in the June 15 advance online section of Nature, the team reports that rods, cones and special retinal cells that make a protein called melanopsin together account for the entirety of a mouse’s reaction to light levels. Others have proposed a role for cells that make proteins cal

Researchers at the University of Rochester have produced compelling evidence of how the hand of natural selection caused one species of fruit fly to split into two more than 2 million years ago. The study, appearing in today’s issue of Nature, answers one of evolutionary biologists’ most basic questions–how do species divide–by looking at the very DNA responsible for the division. Understanding why certain genes evolve the way they do during speciation can shed light on some of the least

A biomedical-imaging technique that would highlight the cytoskeletal infrastructure of nerve cells and map the nervous system as it develops and struggles to repair itself has been proposed by biophysics researchers at Cornell and Harvard universities.

Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS June 10, 2003) , the researchers say that besides the new imaging technique’s obvious applications in studying the dynamics of nervous system development, it could answer the

The tiny spheres inside brain cells that ferry chemical messengers into the synapse make their rounds much more expeditiously than once assumed, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) – funded researchers have discovered. They used a dye to track the behavior of such synaptic vesicles in real time, in rat brain cells. Rather than fusing completely with the cell membrane and disgorging their dye contents all at once, brain vesicles more often remained intact, secreting only part of the tracer car