Life Sciences and Chemistry

The answer to how the complex, cavernous inner ear forms from a mostly homogenous group of cells may be that it doesn’t, says a Medical College of Georgia researcher who has found a new cell type that appears to migrate to the developing ear.

Dr. Paul Sohal first saw the cells he named ventrally emigrating neural tube cells in 1995, following the path of newly formed nerves out of the developing neural tube.

His research published in the June issue of the International Journal of D

In Letter to Nature, NYU and Syracuse neuroscientists prove that we read by detecting simple features

Do we visually recognize things — words or faces — by wholes or by parts? Denis Pelli of New York University and Bart Farell of Syracuse University have answered that question in their forthcoming Letter to Nature. Their article, “The Remarkable Inefficiency of Word Recognition,” is accompanied by a “News and Views” piece discussing their work.

Using the example of letters

The ability of proteins to guide small molecules to reaction sites and across membranes is essential to many metabolic pathways, but the process is not well understood. Now, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have shown that a globular protein with a barrel structure can direct small molecules in much the same fashion as a membrane protein.

Chemistry professor Zaida Luthey-Schulten, graduate student Rommie Amaro, and Emad Tajkhorshid, assistant director of physics

Humans became hairless to reduce the effects of the many biting flies and other disease-carrying parasites that live in fur and to enhance sexual attractiveness and selection, according to scientists from the Universities of Reading and Oxford. The new theory, which challenges the accepted view that human hairlessness evolved to control body temperature in hot climates, is to be published by the Royal Society in Biology Letters, a new companion to Proceedings: Biological Sciences.

Humans ar

Whether food-borne bacteria make people sick depends on a variety of factors, and better understanding of the infection process could lead to ways to stop such illnesses from occurring, according to Purdue University scientists.

In the first comprehensive study of the virulence of Listeria monocytogenes, researchers report that how well the bacteria attach to cells does not alone determine the degree of illness. The factors that determine if a person becomes ill and the degree of illness in

Scientists working with cells that may someday be used to replace diseased or damaged cells in the brain have taken neural stem cell technology a key step closer to the clinic.

Writing in the current online edition (June 2003) of the Journal of Neurochemistry, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center describe the first molecular profile for human fetal neural stem cell lines that have been coaxed to thrive in culture for more than a year.

The work is a