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• Discovery of 1,800-year-old “Rosetta Stone” for Tropical Ice Cores
• Researchers identify a protein responsible for the correct arrangement of the chromosome centromeres in the nucleus
• Hepatitis A virus discovered to cloak itself in membranes hijacked from infected cells
• Surprising findings on the energy production in cells
• What is behind Einstein’s turbulence?

Discovery of 1,800-year-old “Rosetta Stone” for Tropical Ice Cores Posted: 05 Apr 2013 07:24 AM PDT Two annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes reveal Earth’s tropical climate history in unprecedented detail—year by year, for nearly 1,800 years. Researchers at The Ohio State University retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003, and then noticed some startling similarities to other ice cores that they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. Patterns in the chemical composition of certain layers matched up, even though the cores were taken from opposite sides of the planet. read more

Researchers identify a protein responsible for the correct arrangement of the chromosome centromeres in the nucleus Posted: 05 Apr 2013 07:14 AM PDT Two metres of DNA are packed into the cell nucleus, presumably based on a strictly defined arrangement. Researchers working with biologist Patrick Heun from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg have now succeeded in explaining a phenomenon, which was first observed 40 years ago. The centromeres, namely the structures at the primary constriction of the X-shaped chromosomes, are clustered in a few specific locations in the cell nucleus. Using fruit flies as a model, the researchers have shown that a single protein plays a key role in this process. read more

Hepatitis A virus discovered to cloak itself in membranes hijacked from infected cells Posted: 04 Apr 2013 09:08 AM PDT Viruses have historically been classified into one of two types – those with an outer lipid-containing envelope and those without an envelope. For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina have discovered that hepatitis A virus, a common cause of enterically-transmitted hepatitis, takes on characteristics of both virus types depending on whether it is in a host or in the environment. read more

Surprising findings on the energy production in cells Posted: 04 Apr 2013 09:00 AM PDT New findings change the idea scientists had for 20 years on the role and importance of the protein MTERF1 in mitochondrial biology. For the first time, a research team at Karolinska Institutet and Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing has investigated in vivo what was up to now only explored in cell culture. In experiments on mice, they made a surprising discovery: MTERF1 does after all not play the key role in mitochondrial transcription and translation that was hitherto ascribed to it. read more

What is behind Einstein’s turbulence? Posted: 04 Apr 2013 08:53 AM PDT The American Nobel Prize Laureate for Physics Richard Feynman once described turbulence as “the most important unsolved problem of classical physics”, because a description of the phenomenon from first principles does not exist. This is still regarded as one of the six most important problems in mathematics today. read more

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