With honeybee colony health wavering and researchers trying to find technological ways of pollinating plants in the future, a new Georgia Tech study has looked at how the insects do their job and manage to stay clean. According to the study, a honeybee can carry up to 30 percent of its body weight in pollen because of the strategic spacing…
A team spanning Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University, Texas Children’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has developed a new way to sequence genomes, which can assemble the genome of an organism, entirely from scratch, dramatically cheaper and faster. While there is much excitement about the so-called “$1000 genome” in medicine, when a doctor orders the…
Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have found that honeybees treated with a common antibiotic were half as likely to survive the week after treatment compared with a group of untreated bees, a finding that may have health implications for bees and people alike. The scientists found the antibiotics cleared out beneficial gut bacteria in the bees, making…
Researchers at the University of Alberta have developed a new method of controlling biology at the cellular level using light. The tool—called a photocleavable protein—breaks into two pieces when exposed to light, allowing scientists to study and manipulate activity inside cells in new and different ways. “By shining light into the cell, we can cause the photocleavable protein to break,…
UCLA researchers are studying how wildlife mammals live in urban Los Angeles to improve the relationship between animals and humans. With a prize of $225,000 from UCLA’s Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, the researchers will survey residents and study mammals such as squirrels, raccoons and possums in a three-part study starting next quarter. The three parts, which involve studying pathogens animals…
New UCLA-led research finds that Zika-linked abnormalities that occur in human fetuses are more extensive — and severe — than previously thought, with 46 percent of 125 pregnancies among Zika-infected women resulting in birth defects in newborns or ending in fetal death. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests that damage during fetal development from the…