DURHAM, N.C. -- His office is filled with all sorts of bird books, but Duke neuroscientist Erich Jarvis didn't become an expert on the avian family tree because of any particular interest in our feathered friends. Rather, it was his fascination with how the human brain understands and reproduces speech that brought him to the birds. "We've known for many years that the singing behavior of birds is similar to speech in humans -- not identical, but similar -- and that the brain circuitry is similar, too," said Jarvis, an associate professor of neurobiology at the Duke ...

VIDEO: A microscopy system continuously measures responses to signaling chemicals in thousands of cells at a time. Click here for more information. Scientists have discovered a general principle for how cells could accurately transmit chemical signals despite high levels of noise in the system, they report in Science this week. A cell's response to outside chemical signals depends on its physiological state, which can fluctuate considerably. Amounts of different kinds ...

The entire semiconductor industry, not to mention Silicon Valley, is built on the propensity of electrons in silicon to get kicked out of their atomic shells and become free. These mobile electrons are routed and switched though transistors, carrying the digital information that characterizes our age. An international team of physicists and chemists based at the University of California, Berkeley, has for the first time taken snapshots of this ephemeral event using attosecond pulses of soft x-ray light lasting only a few billionths of a billionth of a second. While ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Where did the songbird get its song? What branch of the bird family tree is closer to the flamingo - the heron or the sparrow? These questions seem simple, but are actually difficult for geneticists to answer. A new, sophisticated statistical technique developed by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Texas at Austin can help researchers construct more accurate species trees detailing the lineage of genes and the relationships between species. The method, called statistical binning, was used in the Avian Phylogenetics Project, ...

This news release is available in Spanish. 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs, as we think about them, became extinct, but certain reptiles and birds survived this mass extinction. The birds that survived experienced rapid evolution and diversification. Until now, explaining the family tree of modern birds has been a difficult and controversial subject amongst scientists. Thanks to the research of an international consortium involving researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, we now have new clues about this evolution and further information ...

FORT LAUDERDALE-DAVIE, Fla. - We all know that ducks, crows, falcons and egrets are birds. A group of scientists, however, wanted to dig deeper and unlock more about how these animals are related genetically. The idea was to investigate how modern species of birds emerged and evolved after the dinosaurs disappeared from the earth. This research included work from Stephen O'Brien, Ph.D., a professor at NSU's Oceanographic Center whose main focus in genomics. Now findings from this research are being announced in several scientific publications, including Science magazine, ...

A Texas Tech University biologist led a team of more than 50 scientists who mapped the genomes of three crocodilians. By mapping these genomes, scientists may better understand the evolution of birds, which are the toothy predators' closest living relatives, said David Ray, an associate professor of biology. The team completed genomes of a crocodile, an alligator and a true gharial to complete the genomic family portrait. Their research, largely funded by the National Science Foundation, will appear Friday (Dec. 12) in the peer-reviewed journal, Science. "One of the ...

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered exactly how the malaria parasite is developing resistance towards the most important front-line drugs used to treat the disease. Malaria is a mosquito-borne parasite which affects over 60 million people worldwide and in serious cases, can be fatal. There is currently no viable vaccine for malaria while antimalarial drugs and prophylaxis are losing its efficacy with increasing drug resistance. NTU Associate Professor Zbynek Bozdech, who led an international research team from 11 different countries, ...

The first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium are being reported nearly simultaneously in 28 papers -- eight papers in a Dec. 12 special issue of Science and 20 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other journals. The full set of papers in Science and other journals can be accessed at avian.genomics.cn Scientists already knew that the birds who survived the mass extinction experienced a rapid burst of evolution. But the family tree of modern birds has confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how birds arrived at the spectacular biodiversity ...

New research from the University of Kent suggests that chickens and turkeys have experienced fewer gross genomic changes than other birds as they evolved from their dinosaur ancestor. Professor Darren Griffin and a team at the University's School of Biosciences have conducted research that suggests that chromosomes of the chicken and turkey lineage have undergone the fewest number of changes compared to their ancient avian ancestor, thought to be a feathered dinosaur. The Kent research is part of a study by a consortium of leading scientists into avian or bird genomes, ...

An international team of scientists has completed the largest whole genome study of a single class of animals to date. To map the tree of life for birds, the team sequenced, assembled and compared full genomes of 48 bird species representing all major branches of modern birds including ostrich, hummingbird, crow, duck, falcon, parrot, crane, ibis, woodpecker and eagle species. The researchers have been working on this ambitious genetic tree of life, or phylogeny, project for four years. As part of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium -- comprised of more than 200 scientists ...

NEW YORK, NY (December 11, 2014) Growing resistance to malaria drugs in Southeast Asia is caused by a single mutated gene inside the disease-causing Plasmodium falciparum parasite, according to a study led by David Fidock, PhD, professor of microbiology & immunology and of medical sciences (in medicine) at Columbia University Medical Center. This finding provides public health officials around the world with a way to look for pockets of emerging resistance and potentially eliminate them before they spread. Though malaria deaths have dropped by 30 percent worldwide since ...

Targeted therapies are a growing and groundbreaking field in cancer care in which drugs or other substances are designed to interfere with genes or molecules that control the growth and survival of cancer cells. Now, scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and VCU Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM) have identified a novel interaction between a microRNA and a gene that could lead to new therapies for the most common and deadly form of brain tumor, malignant glioma. In a study recently published in the journal Neuro-Oncology, a team of scientists ...

Advances in treatment for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) have made it possible for people with HIV to survive much longer. As they age, however, many experience impaired thinking, memory loss, mood swings and other evidence of impaired mental function. To stop these changes, scientists have to learn what is causing them. One possibility researchers are considering is that long-term infections with other pathogens, common in HIV-positive patients, are affecting the brain. But a new study has eliminated one of their prime suspects: the hepatitis C virus, which infects ...

Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 11, 2104 -- A University of Nebraska-Lincoln researcher has contributed to discoveries about bird evolution as part of a new study that sequenced the complete genomes of 45 avian species. Published Dec. 11 in the journal Science, the study found that avian genomes -- the complete archive of genetic material present in cells -- have exhibited surprisingly slow rates of evolution when compared with their mammalian counterparts. Jay Storz, a Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, led a research group that assisted the study by examining ...

The fruits and vegetables provided at school deliver an important dietary boost to low income adolescents, according to Meghan Longacre, PhD and Madeline Dalton, PhD of Dartmouth Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center and The Hood Center for Children and Families. In a study released in Preventive Medicine, Longacre and Dalton found that fruit and vegetable intake was higher among low income adolescents on days when they consumed meals at school compared to days when low income adolescent were not in school. The opposite was true for high income adolescents who consumed ...

PITTSBURGH--The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing motivated mass expressions of fear, solidarity, and sympathy toward Bostonians on social media networks around the world. In a recently released study, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Cornell University analyzed emotional reactions on Twitter in the hours and weeks following the attack. The study is the first large-scale analysis of fear and social-support reactions from geographically distant communities following a terrorist attack. The findings show the extent to which communities outside of Boston expressed ...

Origami is capable of turning a simple sheet of paper into a pretty paper crane, but the principles behind the paper-folding art can also be applied to making a microfluidic device for a blood test, or for storing a satellite's solar panel in a rocket's cargo bay. A team of University of Pennsylvania researchers is turning kirigami, a related art form that allows the paper to be cut, into a technique that can be applied equally to structures on those vastly divergent length scales. In a new study, the researchers lay out the rules for folding and cutting a hexagonal ...

A CEO's natural sunny disposition can have an impact on the way the market reacts to announcements of company earnings, according to research from the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business. The study shows that leaders' inclinations to express themselves with optimism carries over into their tone when disclosing company performance - a tendency that can create an uptick in stock price. "Ours is the first study to look at the effect of how managers naturally convey themselves," says Sauder Assistant Professor Jenny Zhang, who co-authored the paper. ...

Senescent cells have a bad-guy reputation when it comes to aging. While cellular senescence - a process whereby cells permanently lose the ability to divide when they are stressed - suppresses cancer by halting the growth of premalignant cells, it is also suspected of driving the aging process. Senescent cells, which accumulate over time, release a continual cascade of inflammatory cytokines, chemokines, growth factors and proteases. It is a process that sets up the surrounding tissue for a host of maladies including arthritis, atherosclerosis and late life cancer. But ...

The ascetic and moralizing movements that spawned the world's major religious traditions--Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity--all arose around the same time in three different regions, and researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 11 have now devised a statistical model based on history and human psychology that helps to explain why. The emergence of world religions, they say, was triggered by the rising standards of living in the great civilizations of Eurasia. "One implication is that world religions and secular spiritualities ...

EMBARGOED for release Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014, at 12 p.m. ET HOUSTON - (Dec. 11, 2014) - The ancient Japanese art of origami is based on the idea that nearly any design - a crane, an insect, a samurai warrior - can be made by taking the same blank sheet of paper and folding it in different ways. The human body faces a similar problem. The genome inside every cell of the body is identical, but the body needs each cell to be different -an immune cell fights off infection; a cone cell helps the eye detect light; the heart's myocytes must beat endlessly. Appearing online ...

Clinical trials to test the new drugs in patients should begin as early as 2015. Existing drugs target faulty versions of a protein called BRAF which drives about half of all melanomas, but while initially very effective, the cancers almost always become resistant to treatment within a year. The new drugs - called panRAF inhibitors - could be effective in patients with melanoma who have developed resistance to BRAF inhibitors. The new study was funded by the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, and jointly led by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, ...

Scientists at the University of Southampton have found that the precise shape of an antibody makes a big difference to how it can stimulate the body's immune system to fight cancer, paving the way for much more effective treatments. The latest types of treatment for cancer are designed to switch on the immune system, allowing the patient's own immune cells to attack and kill cancerous cells, when normally the immune cells would lie dormant. In a study, funded by Cancer Research UK and published in the journal Cancer Cell, the Southampton team have found that a particular ...

PHILADELPHIA - (Dec. 11, 2014) - A team of scientists, led by researchers at The Wistar Institute, has found that an infection with herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) causes rearrangements in telomeres, small stretches of DNA that serve as protective ends to chromosomes. The findings, which will be published in the Dec. 24 edition of the journal Cell Reports, show that this manipulation of telomeres may explain how viruses like herpes are able to successfully replicate while also revealing more about the protective role that telomeres play against other viruses. "We know ...