By Cassandra Brooks Flu clues CDC/ Dr. F. A. Murphy The paper: A. Lowen et al., “Influenza virus transmission is dependent on relative humidity and temperature,” PLoS Pathogens, 3(10): e151. (Cited 71 times) The finding: The reason why more people get the flu during colder months has long been a mystery. To investigate the role of weather conditions on flu transmission, researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medici

In a remarkable union of science and art, landscape painter linkurl:Diane Burko;http://www.dianeburko.com/ shows how the planet's glaciers have changed form over the last century in her latest exhibit linkurl:"Politics of Snow.";http://www.locksgallery.com/exhibits.php?eid=74 To tell the story, Burko tracked down glaciologists from the US Geological Survey's linkurl:National Snow and Ice Data Center;http://nsidc.org/ at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and others. She then painted a series

Researchers have discovered one way that asexually reproducing organisms maintain variation in their DNA. Female whiptail lizards can actually double their own chromosomes during meiosis, according to a study published online today in Nature. A checkered whiptail lizard Image: Peter Baumann "It's a great piece of work," said linkurl:Charles Cole,;http://www.amnh.org/science/divisions/vertzoo/bio.php?scientist=cole a herpetologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was

Patricia Clarke, a distinguished British biochemist who deepened the field's understanding of bacterial evolution and was a role model for women in science, died last month at 90 years of age. Pseudomonas aeruginosaImage: Wikimedia Commons, CDC/Janice Haney Carr "She had always been determined to get into academia," said Barbara Banks, a physiological chemist and a former colleague at the University College London. "She was a student at Cambridge - before the days when they gave degrees to wome

Researchers have developed a novel technique for identifying patient-specific biomarkers in tumor DNA which they say can reliably monitor the progression of individual patients' cancers. Their findings are presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego and will be published next week in Science Translational Medicine. Image: Courtesy of Life Technologies and Digizyme, Inc."This study pushes the limits of what we can do and what we might be

For the first time researchers have sequenced an ancient human genome, revealing characteristics of Greenland's first inhabitants and providing evidence of a previously unknown human migration, according to a study published in this week's Nature. Artist rendition of ancient Saqqaq Image: Nuka GodfredtsenPast studies have sequenced partial genomes or mitochondrial DNA, which only codes for the mother's side of the genome, said linkurl:David Lambert,;http://www.griffith.edu.au/environment-plan

Reproductive biologists have identified the mechanism that triggers sperm's race to the egg, reports a study in Cell today. Stained sperm cells(Blue, nucleus; red, mitochondria; green, Hv1protein localized in the sperm flagellum) Image: Yuriy KirichokBy measuring the electrical current passing through the sperm cell membrane, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, identified a channel that releases a flood of protons from a sperm cell, initiating its trip up the fallopian

Repeat untranscribed DNA sequences are generally thought to be genetic junk at best, harmful at worst, but in ribosomes they are essential to repairing DNA damage, according to a study published this week in Science. Ribosomal protein complex Image: Wikimedia Commons Ribosomal DNA (rDNA) codes for the RNA that makes up a major component of ribosomes, the site of protein synthesis. Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) comprises 80% of the RNA found in a typical cell and is highly conserved from bacteria to hum