PLOS Biology is a peer-reviewed open-access journal publishing research across all areas of biology, from molecular mechanisms to ecology and evolution.
Neuchâtel researchers imaged 32 speakers with real-time MRI and found very different vocal tracts producing the same American English vowels. The result bears on whether anatomical variation helps drive language diversity.
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SUNY Upstate researchers report in PLOS Biology that oligodendrocytes use the Piezo1 channel to sense axon width and set how long each myelin segment grows. The work covers early myelination, so using the sensor to lengthen the short sheaths in chronic multiple sclerosis lesions is still only a proposal.
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University of Oregon biologists revived antimicrobial peptides up to 160 million years old, and some killed drug-resistant bacteria better than modern versions. The lab work suggests evolutionary history is a real source of leads against antibiotic-resistant infections.
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University of Oregon biologists rebuilt lactoferrin's bacteria-killing peptide across 160 million years. The strongest candidates came from recent ancestors; the oldest one let bacteria heal.
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York researchers report that theta strength while people learned word-picture pairs predicted which pairs were consolidated overnight, which places the triage step in the waking brain and leaves sleep to carry it out.
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The site holds about 17,000 tagged feeding observations covering some 5,700 species, contributed by roughly 2,000 observers in more than 100 countries. The team is still building tools to validate submissions.
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Lige Leng's team at Xiamen University deleted the protein in young mice and delivered it back into 20-month-old ones, a pairing that separates a driver of aging from a marker. The D-serine arm covered cognition only.
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In a yeast that stores up to 70 percent of its biomass as fat, a transcription factor called Cbr1 both switches on the enzyme that splits cellobiose and blocks the glucose signal that would silence that gene.
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