Where and how you live strongly influences both the type and number of microbes you carry on your hands, according to a new international study led by scientists at Yale and Stanford.
The research identified and analyzed bacteria on the hands of women in Tanzania and graduate students in the United States, finding that bacterial populations were more similar among the subjects within a country than between subjects of different countries. (more…)
Microbiologist Jo Handelsman has been named one of the “366 Days: Nature’s 10” people who “mattered” in 2012 by Nature Magazine. Handelsman, professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and a national expert on science education, was recognized for her work showing gender bias in science. (more…)
A Yale scientist and colleagues in Britain have found a highly unusual ancient marine fossil that retains soft body parts as well as its shell, including limbs, eyes, gills and alimentary system. The fossil represents a new species of ostracod, a tiny crustacean related to crabs, lobsters and shrimps.
“Fossil ostracods often provide evidence of the relative ages of the rocks in which they occur, but it is very difficult to determine their relationship to living forms because only the shell is normally preserved,” said Derek E. G. Briggs, director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the research. “This 425-million-year-old new form is remarkable in preserving the limbs and other anatomical features as well.” (more…)
Yale scientists have discovered the molecular pathway by which maternally inherited deafness appears to occur: Mitochondrial DNA mutations trigger a signaling cascade, resulting in programmed cell death. The study is in the Feb. 17 issue of Cell.
Mitochondria are cellular structures that function as “cellular power plants” because they generate most of the cell’s supply of energy. They contain DNA inherited from one’s mother. Mitochondria determine whether a cell lives or dies via the process of programmed cell death, or apoptosis. (more…)
