Indiana
A naturally occurring chemical that may repel yellow fever mosquitoes can now be made in the laboratory, Indiana University Bloomington scientists report. ''The synthesis requires only seven steps,'' said organic chemist P. Andrew Evans, who led the research. ''It should be quite trivial to scale this up to the production of large quantities.'' Gaur acid is a natural skin secretion of the gaur, an Asian wild ox. Preliminary evidence suggests that this chemical discourages the landing and feeding of Aedes aegypti, a common mosquito that carries and transmits the yellow fever virus in some parts of the world.
Untapped reserves of methane, the main component in natural gas, may be found deep in Earth's crust, according to a recently released report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. These reserves could be a virtually inexhaustible source of energy for future generations. The team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, Harvard University, Argonne National Laboratory and Indiana University, South Bend, through a series of experiments and theoretical calculations, showed that methane forms under conditions that occur in Earth's upper mantle.
When it comes to making noise, both parrots and humans rely on extremely specialized vibrating organs in their throats. Now scientists at Indiana University and Leiden University in The Netherlands have shown for the first time that parrots, like humans, also can use their tongues to craft and shape sound. ''This is the first direct evidence that parrots are able to use their large tongues to change the acoustic properties of their vocalizations,'' said IU Bloomington neurologist Roderick Suthers, who participated in the research. ''The basic idea here, we believe, is that motor control of tongue movements is an important part of communication, just as it is in humans.''
If he'd only had an office computer and online treasure maps, Indiana Jones might have avoided all those snakes, scrapes and sneaky rivals. Now, archaeologists exploring the southeastern Idaho desert have a new tool that Indy would really die for. Computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's INEEL have developed a geographic computer system that sifts through data from various sources to help find and map archaeological sites. The system will save archaeologists time, money -- and maybe some digging.
Purdue University is leading a team of experts from other Indiana universities, the military and industry to develop an advanced ''video compression'' technology needed for surveillance and commercial applications. The new technology will enable future military drones to more efficiently transmit data and surveillance video. This will allow the unmanned aircraft to operate longer on a single battery charge and to expand what they see by adding more sensors.
For many Air Force aircrews, discomfort caused by sitting on extended missions is just part of the job. Col. Kerry Keithcart, a KC-135 Stratotanker pilot for the 434th Air Refueling Wing at Grissom Air Reserve Base, Ind., said he and his crew do what they can to make those longer missions more bearable. ''Some of us try to stretch and that's of some value. We also drink a lot of water to stay hydrated,'' Colonel Keithcart said. ''But when you're sitting in one position for as many as 13 hours at a time, you're going to experience different aches and pains.''
Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine have discovered how the body makes the cells that line its blood vessels, work that could someday lead to dramatic new treatments for vascular problems ranging from stroke to diabetes.
Sometimes the most extreme environment for life isn't at the bottom of the ocean or inside a volcano. It's just south of Chicago. Illinois groundwater scientists have found microbial communities thriving in the slag dumps of the Lake Calumet region of southeast Chicago where the water can reach extraordinary alkalinity of pH 12.8. That's comparable to caustic soda and floor strippers -- far beyond known naturally occurring alkaline environments.
Sscientists are developing an instrument that can fabricate custom-made biochips for protein analysis, offering a potentially powerful new tool for drug development and basic medical research. The instrument makes use of a new method to remove and isolate the tangle of proteins found within cells, a process necessary to reveal protein function within an organism. In contrast to other, more labor-intensive separation methods, the Purdue team's technique allows proteins with similar chemical properties to be separated in the gas phase based on their mass so that analysis can be accomplished in far fewer steps than previously required.
A pickle-shaped root is revealing how plants develop from embryos to adults and also may hold answers about cancer cell growth. Purdue University researchers have uncovered nine specific genes that are shut off before plants make the developmental transition from the embryonic stage to adulthood. Results of the latest study are published in the July issue of The Plant Journal.
A medication used to treat the symptoms of mild-to-moderate Alzheimer disease may actually do more - it may be able to delay progression of the disorder, according to a study conducted at the Indiana University School of Medicine. The study, which appears in the June issue of Archives of Neurology, enabled researchers to evaluate a change in cognition observed in patients who prematurely discontinued treatment with placebo or Exelon ? (rivastigmine tartrate), a medication prescribed for many patients.
How infants respond to their mother's touches and smiles influences their development in a manner much like what young birds experience when learning to sing, according to a research project involving the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington and the Biological Foundations of Behavior program at Franklin and Marshall College.
On June 18, 2002, a magnitude 5.0 earthquake occurred in southern Indiana, followed by a 1.2 magnitude aftershock on June 25, 2002. Because the region of occurrence, the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone, is seismically active, Dr. Won-Young Kim, a seismologist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, conducted research to determine the potential hazard of future earthquakes to this region. His findings suggest that an ancient fault line dating back to the Precambrian era of geological history (from 4.6 billion to 570 million years ago) has become reactivated and was the likely cause of the June 2002 earthquakes. Kim is presenting his findings at the Seismological Society of America in May, and publishing in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
In a finding that could shed light on the earliest origins of mankind, fossil remains found in South Africa of an ancestral human species have proven far older than expected when evaluated by a Purdue University research team. Purdue's Darryl Granger and Marc Caffee have determined the age of a fossilized skeleton thought to be an Australopithecus ? a genus of African hominids from which humanity is thought to have developed ? by measuring the radioactivity of the cave sediments in which the skeleton was buried millions of years ago. Their measurement technique, generally used to estimate the age of geological formations such as glaciated valleys and river terraces, has never before been used to date biological fossils.
A liposuction-like procedure called lipectomy results in a loss of humoral immune protection in two commonly studied rodent models, the prairie vole and the Siberian hamster, scientists have found. The report by a team of researchers at Indiana University, Ohio State University and Johns Hopkins University was made available online this week by The Royal Society. Their study is the first to show that even a moderate loss of fat leads to decreased amounts of infection-fighting IgG antibodies.
