’Jurassic Chicken’ project may help studies of human development and evolution of dinosaurs

Scientists from the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California have, for the first time, shown experimentally the steps in the origin and development of feathers, using the techniques of molecular biology. Their findings will have implications for the study of the morphogenesis of various epithelial organs-from hairs to lung tissue to mammary glands-and is already sheddin

Scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and the University of California, San Francisco have shown that feeding behavior in worms is controlled by neurons that detect adverse or stressful conditions.

The findings are published in the Oct. 31 issue of Nature.

The discovery of the gene that controls social feeding behavior in worms was made in 1998 by researchers at UCSF. The new findings build on the earlier research by identifying the nociceptive neurons – ne

As cable companies and Internet access providers compete for customers by offering broadband service, cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSLs) as faster access to the Web, slower download speeds sometimes prompt greater user response than faster download speeds, a study says.

Dr. S. Shyam Sundar, associate professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, and Carson Wagner, assistant professor of advertising at the University of Texa

An innovative new software can detect and correct a database impaired by an attack while the database system continues to process transactions, says a Penn State researcher.

“We simulated attackers’ behaviors on a database and then monitored the response of the database,” said Dr. Peng Liu, assistant professor of information sciences and technology. “We can’t prevent attackers from getting in, but with this technology, the database can heal itself on-the-fly.”

Liu perfor

The rapid increase of nitrogen falling from the sky as a result of fossil-fuel combustion and crop fertilization, combined with carbon stored in Earth’s soils, could change the rate of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, rising into the atmosphere, according to a new study.

Scientists believe about 300 times more carbon is stored in soils than is being put in the atmosphere in the form of C02, according to biology Assistant Professor Alan Townsend of the University of Colorado at Bould

Extreme cold and high heat help optimize the metal’s microstructure

Combining old-fashioned metal-working techniques with modern nanotechnology, engineers at The Johns Hopkins University have produced a form of pure copper metal that is six times stronger than normal, with no significant loss of ductility.

The achievement, reported in the Oct. 31 issue of the journal “Nature,” is important because earlier attempts to strengthen a pure metal such as copper have almost always