Memed again! Here are some great blogs that make me think 'outside of my box'. Pass on the meme... Secret Sex Lives of Animals A weekly column on the bizarre, wonderful, colourful and sometimes shocking world of animal mating habits.
The Domestic Minx
A deliciously dysfunctional diary about domestic living.

The Dragon's Tales
A great mix of science and current events from all over the globe.

For years, scientists have studied the molecular basis of memory storage, trying to find the molecules that store memory, just as DNA stores genetic memory.

Brandeis University researchers report for the first time that memory storage can be induced and then biochemically erased in slices of rat hippocampus by manipulating a so-called "memory molecule," a protein kinase known as CaMKII.

No snowflake in an avalanche takes the blame.

Using the same database that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses to confirm the rise in obesity rates, researchers have concluded that 100 percent juice is not associated with young children being overweight or at risk for becoming overweight.

Ever since the relationship between land area and number of species crystallized into a mathematical power function, islands and island archipelagoes have been thought of as biological destinations where species from large continents arrive and, over time, evolve into new species in geographic seclusion.

Since islands have many times fewer species than the continent, it seemed only logical that continents were rich sources from which islands drew only a small sample. Once isolated and with fewer species around, island organisms were thought to lose their competitive edge and so they hardly ever re-colonized the continent from which they originated.

Jamaican fruit bat. Photo: Copyright; Merlin D.

It is highly unlikely that older women generate new eggs, report researchers at the University of South Florida in collaboration with a center in China.

The USF study counters the controversial findings of reproductive endocrinologist Jonathan Tilly, PhD, and his team of Harvard scientists. Tilly's work, published in 2004 in Nature with a follow-up study a year later in Cell, challenged the biological dogma that mammals, including women, are born with a limited lifetime supply of eggs.

XDx, a molecular diagnostics company, today announced its AlloMap® molecular expression test will be the subject of presentations and discussions at the American Transplant Congress 2007.

The test, currently used to detect the absence of heart transplant rejection instead of routine invasive heart muscle biopsies, has now been shown to correlate with oxygen saturation levels, cardiac filling pressures, and the electrical properties of the transplanted heart.

Also, data from the Lung Allograft Rejection Gene expression Observation (LARGO) study presented at the ATC sessions demonstrate that a non-invasive blood test can detect cytomegalovirus-induced immune responses in lung transplant patients.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have developed new technology which, combined with proteomics – the large-scale study of the structure and function of proteins and their functions – has allowed them to map an extensive network of the signaling proteins that control cell movement.

Their work, providing the first comprehensive profile of cell movement, could lead to a better understanding of cell migration in cancer metastasis and inflammatory disease.

Confocal photomicrograph of a migrating cell expressing a green fluorescent protein (GFP)-tagged, acting binding protein that localizes to the leading front of the cell (right side).

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new approach to increasing the capacity and stability of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

The technology is based on a new material for the positive electrode that is comprised of a unique nano-crystalline, layered-composite structure.

A new study showed that a certain form of neuropsin, a protein that plays a role in learning and memory, is expressed only in the central nervous systems of humans and that it originated less than five million years ago.

The human and chimpanzee genomes vary by just 1.2 percent, yet there is a considerable difference in the mental and linguistic capabilities between the two species.

The likelihood of developing bipolar disorder depends in part on the combined, small effects of variations in many different genes in the brain, none of which is powerful enough to cause the disease by itself, a new study shows.

However, targeting the enzyme produced by one of these genes could lead to development of new, more effective medications. The research was conducted by scientists at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), with others from the Universities of Heidelberg and Bonn and a number of U.S. facilities collaborating in a major project called the NIMH Genetics Initiative.

The study is the first to scan virtually all of the variations in human genes to find those associated with bipolar disorder.