Tag Archives: brown university

Cilia use different motors for different tasks

By Guest PostJanuary 17, 2014Scienceanita zimmerman, brown biologist, brown university, cilia, hair like fibers, ilyong jung, james valles, liquid, locomotion, motor behaviors, oral groove, plain water, single celled paramecia, tiny oars, viscosity, viscosity of water

Cilia — short, hair-like fibers — are widely present in nature. Single-celled paramecia use one set of cilia for locomotion and another set to sweep nutrients into their oral grooves. Researchers at Brown have discovered that those two cilia sets operate at different speeds when the viscosity of the environment changes. That suggests different molecular motors driving them, which could help explain how cilia have come to be used for so many different tasks in nature.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Cilia are one of nature’s great multipurpose tools. The tiny, hair-like fibers protrude from cell membranes and perform all kinds of tasks in all kinds of creatures, from helping clear debris from human lungs to enabling single-celled organisms to swim. Now, physicists from Brown University have discovered something that could help scientists understand how cilia have been adapted for so many varied tasks. (more…)

Neuroscience Methods: Optogenetics as good as electrical stimulation

By Guest PostDecember 18, 2013Sciencebrain cells, brown university, daniel brooks, david sheinberg, electrical stimulation, grant called repair, ji dai, lateral intraparietal area, lip, neural activity, neuroscience methods, nonhuman primates, optical case, optical stimulation, optogenetic stimulation, optogenetics, rodent models, technique, therapeutic benefits, visual decision making

Brown researchers have shown that optogenetics — a technique that uses pulses of visible light to alter the behavior of brain cells — can be as good as or possibly better than the older technique of using small bursts of electrical current. Optogenetics had been used in small rodent models. Research reported in Current Biology has shown that optogenetics works effectively in larger, more complex brains.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Neuroscientists are eagerly, but not always successfully, looking for proof that optogenetics – a celebrated technique that uses pulses of visible light to genetically alter brain cells to be excited or silenced – can be as successful in complex and large brains as it has been in rodent models. (more…)

Ancient crater may be clue to Moon’s mantle

By Guest PostDecember 12, 2013Scienceaitken basin, ancient crater, brown university, carle pieters, chandrayaan, dan moriarty, giant spa impact, India, laser program, lower crust, lunar orbiter, lunar science institute, mantle, mantle materials, mapper data, mineralogical surprises, mineralogy, moon, moon mineralogy, NASA, nlsi, peter isaacson, solar system, south pole, spa basin, spa subsurface, subsurface, university of hawaii, upper

A massive impact on the Moon about 4 billion years ago left a 2,500-mile crater, among the largest known craters in the solar system. Smaller subsequent impacts left craters within that crater. Comparing the spectra of light reflected from the peaks of those craters may yield clues to the composition of the Moon’s lower crust and mantle — and would have implications for models of how the Moon formed.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University and the University of Hawaii have found some mineralogical surprises in the Moon’s largest impact crater. (more…)

Compound stymies polyomaviruses in lab

By Guest PostNovember 25, 2013Sciencebiologist walter atwood, bk polyomavirus, brown university, chembridge, chemical compound, compound stymies, cyclizing reaction, daniel carney, daniel dimaio, dhq, dihydroquinazolinone, drug, endoplasmic reticulum, er, hours of infection, immune systems, infection, intracellular protein, jason sello, lab cell cultures, pathogen infection, paul williard, people with hiv, polyomavirus, retro, ricin, sv40 polyomavirus, toxins, trafficking mechanisms, transportation hub, treat polyomaviruses, yale university

There is no approved medicine to treat polyomaviruses, which afflict people with weakened immune systems, but scientists have found that a chemical compound called Retro-2 is able to reduce significantly the infectivity and spread of the viruses in lab cell cultures. Now they are working to improve it.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of scientists reports that a small-molecule compound showed significant success in controlling the infectivity and spread of three polyomaviruses in human cell cultures. To date there has been no medicine approved to treat such viruses, which prey on transplant recipients, people with HIV, and others whose immune systems have been weakened. (more…)

Society for Neuroscience 2013: How sleep aids visual task learning

By Guest PostNovember 22, 2013Health, Sciencebrainwaves, brown university, david orenstein, decline of function, due to aging, electronic encephalography, ji won bang, magnetic resonance imaging, measure the brainwaves, neural mechanism, neural oscillations, playing the piano, polysomnography, psychological sciences, san diego, sigma brainwave, sigma frequency, sleep, sleeping brain, society for neuroscience, supplementary motor area, Takeo Watanabe, visual cortical area, visual task learning, yuka sasaki

At the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego Nov. 10, 2013, Brown University scientists presented research showing what happens in the brain during sleep to lock in learning of a visually oriented “Where’s Waldo”-like task.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — As any indignant teacher would scold, students must be awake to learn. But what science is showing with increasing sophistication is how the brain uses sleep for learning as well. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego Nov. 10, 2013, Brown University researchers discussed new research describing the neural mechanism by which the sleeping brain locks in learning of a visual task. (more…)

Edited RNA + invasive DNA add individuality

By Guest PostNovember 18, 2013Scienceadar, adar hamstrug flies, aicardi goutieres syndrome, brown university, chromatin, edited rna, enzyme, genetic oddity, genome, hoppel transposons, humans, invasive dna, james jepson, rachel whitaker, red color gene, rna in humans, transposons, yiannis savva, yoah jen chang

A study in Nature Communications finds that an enzyme that edits RNA may loosen the genome’s control over invasive snippets of DNA that affect how genes are expressed. In fruit flies, that newly understood mechanism appears to contribute to differences among individuals such as eye color and life span.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The story of why we are all so different goes well beyond the endless mixing and matching of DNA through breeding. A new study in the journal Nature Communications, for instance, reports a new molecular mechanism of individual variation found in fruit flies that uses components operating in a wide variety of species, including humans. (more…)

Celebrated jumping frogs: For top hops, scientists look to Calaveras pros

By Guest PostOctober 21, 2013Sciencebiologist, brown university, bullfrog, calaveras county, calaveras pros, celebrated jumping frogs, frog jockeys, georgia tech university, guinness book, henry astley, jumping frog jubilee, justin bookey, muscle, rhode island, richard marsh, rosie the ribiter, technique, tendon, thomas roberts, trial and error, world records

The Calaveras County Jumping Frog Jubilee has entered the scientific record via a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Experienced bullfrog ‘jockeys’ at the event routinely get their frogs to jump much farther than researchers had ever measured in the lab. How? Decades of refined technique, uncommonly motivated humans and herps, and good old-fashioned large sample size.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — One day, amid his decades-long study of how animals move, including how frogs jump, Brown University biologist Thomas Roberts found himself and colleague Richard Marsh puzzling over the Guinness Book of World Records. A bullfrog named Rosie the Ribiter reportedly had jumped more than 2.1 meters in a single hop at the Calaveras County Jumping Frog Jubilee in 1986, but scientific studies had never reported a bullfrog jump beyond 1.3 meters. (more…)

Nobel in Physics: A long time in the making

By Guest PostOctober 16, 2013Sciencebrown university, CERN, d zero experiment, discovery of physics, fermilab, gerald guralnik, greg landsberg, higgs mechanism, large electron, Large Hadron Collider, lhc, meenakshi narain, nobel foundation, nobel in physics, nobel prize, positron collider, prediction, standard model, theoretical physicists, ulrich heintz

Nearly 50 years of experiments and billions of dollars in equipment followed the prediction of the Higgs mechanism by theoretical physicists in 1964. Ulrich Heintz and Meenakshi Narain, two of the particle physicists at Brown University who worked on experiments at Fermilab and at CERN, note that the successful search for the Higgs was caried on by thousands of researchers.

The Nobel Prize awarded today to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs was a long time in the making. The Higgs mechanism was invented almost 50 years ago, and ever since the standard model emerged as the explanation of everything in particle physics that we have observed so far. The search for the Higgs boson was a quest that heated up for particle physics experimenters with every new facility that came online. Some of us (Heintz, Narain) looked for it in their thesis experiment at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring in the 1980s. Then the search moved to European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to the Large Electron Positron Collider, and back again to the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, where we (Cutts, Heintz, Landsberg, Narain) were part of the discovery of the top quark in 1995 with the D-Zero experiment. (more…)