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Life Sciences



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Life Sciences - Health - 16.12.2019
New Horizons for Arterial Spin Labeling
Over the last two decades researchers have been working on a contrast-agent free magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method called Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) for detecting blood flow changes within the brain and other organs. Recent improvements in imaging hardware, new strategies for efficient data sampling and sophisticated reconstruction algorithms have now brought the application out of research into clinical practice.

History / Archeology - Life Sciences - 07.11.2019
Ancient Rome: a 12,000-year history of genetic flux, migrations and diversity
Ancient Rome: a 12,000-year history of genetic flux, migrations and diversity
Scholars have been all over Rome for hundreds of years, but it still holds some secrets - for instance, relatively little is known about where the city's denizens actually came from. Now, an international team led by Researchers from the University of Vienna, Stanford University and Sapienza University of Rome, is filling in the gaps with a genetic history that shows just how much the Eternal City's populace mirrored its sometimes tumultuous history.

Life Sciences - Environment - 06.11.2019
Minimizing post-harvest food losses
Minimizing post-harvest food losses
By Barbara Gigler Research team from Graz develops biological methods to improve the shelf life of fruit and vegetables. Additional at the end of the text The crops have been harvested. Now it is important to store the various crops well and to preserve them as long and as carefully as possible. Post-harvest losses due to spoilage, however, represent a significant problem along the supply chain and lead to profit losses in the millions.

Pharmacology - Life Sciences - 04.11.2019
From cone snail venom to pain relief
From cone snail venom to pain relief
Conotoxins are bioactive peptides found in the venom that marine cone snails produce for prey capture and defense. They are used as pharmacological tools to study pain signalling and have the potential to become a new class of analgesics. To date, more than 10,000 conotoxin sequences have been discovered.

Health - Life Sciences - 11.10.2019
New method for quicker and simpler production of lipidated proteins
New method for quicker and simpler production of lipidated proteins
By Christoph Pelzl The new method developed at TU Graz and the University of Vienna is leading to a better understanding of natural protein modifications and improved protein therapeutics. Additional at the end of the text Some of the body's proteins are not just made up of amino acids, they are also 'decorated' with lipid chains, which significantly influence the biological functions of the protein.

Environment - Life Sciences - 10.10.2019
Placenta transit of an environmental estrogen
Placenta transit of an environmental estrogen
Researchers show path of zearalenone through the womb using new technology The human foetus is considered to be particularly sensitive to environmental contaminants. A team led by Benedikt Warth from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna and Tina Bürki from the Swiss Materials Science and Technology Institute, Empa, has now been able to demonstrate for the first time how the widespread food estrogen zearalenone behaves in the womb.

Life Sciences - Paleontology - 02.10.2019
Fossil fish gives new insights into the evolution
Fossil fish gives new insights into the evolution
"An experiment of nature" after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction An international research team led by Giuseppe Marramà from the Institute of Paleontology of the University of Vienna discovered a new and well-preserved fossil stingray with an exceptional anatomy, which greatly differs from living species.

Astronomy / Space - Life Sciences - 04.09.2019
Searching for the Origin of Life across the Universe
Searching for the Origin of Life across the Universe
Researchers from European countries discuss life in the Universe at the University of Vienna Astrobiology is a young, rapidly developing branch of science that seeks to address the question of whether life exists, or has existed, elsewhere in the Universe. It is by nature an interdisciplinary science that explores the origins of life, the conditions, and processes that support or challenge life, the influence of different environmental conditions on preservation and detection of biosignatures of past and present life.

Life Sciences - 21.08.2019
Cranial deformation as an indicator for cultural membership
Cranial deformation as an indicator for cultural membership
Scientists study individuals who lived during the Migration Period Led by Ron Pinhasi from the University of Vienna, Austria and Mario Novak from the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia the study combines bioarchaeological isotopic and ancient DNA methods to analyze the dietary patterns, sex, and genetic affinities of three Migration Period (5th century CE) individuals who were recovered from a pit in the city of Osijek in eastern Croatia.

Life Sciences - 05.08.2019
Symphony of genes
Symphony of genes
One of the most exciting discoveries in genome research was that the last common ancestor of all multicellular animals - which lived about 600 million years ago - already possessed an extremely complex genome. Many of the ancestral genes can still be found in modern day species (e.g., human). However, it has long been unclear whether the arrangement of these genes in the genome also had a certain function.

Life Sciences - 11.07.2019
Scientists gain new insights into the mechanisms of cell division
Scientists gain new insights into the mechanisms of cell division
Mitosis is the process by which the genetic information encoded on chromosomes is equally distributed to two daughter cells, a fundamental feature of all life on earth. Scientists led by Alexander Dammermann at the Max Perutz Labs, a joint venture of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, now examine how centrioles contribute to this process.

Life Sciences - Physics - 09.07.2019
Tungsten as interstellar radiation shielding?
Tungsten as interstellar radiation shielding?
Metallophilic microorganisms could benefit from the heavy metal in harsh survival conditions A boiling point of 5900 degrees Celsius and diamond-like hardness in combination with carbon: tungsten is the heaviest metal, yet has biological functions - especially in heat-loving microorganisms. A team led by Tetyana Milojevic from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna report for the first time rare microbial-tungsten interactions at the nanometer range.

Health - Life Sciences - 18.06.2019
Antidepressants can reduce the empathic empathy
Antidepressants can reduce the empathic empathy
Antidepressant treatment, not only depression per se, can lead to reductions in behavioral and neural responses to pain empathy Depression is a disorder that often comes along with strong impairments of social functioning. Until recently, researchers assumed that acute episodes of depression also impair empathy, an essential skill for successful social interactions and understanding others.

Health - Life Sciences - 12.06.2019
The Fascination of the Abstract
The Fascination of the Abstract
By Werner Schandor Jürgen Hartler hardly has time for swimming, his favourite pastime, because he's busy conducting research into mass spectrometry of lipids at UC San Diego - where the sea is on his doorstop. "I haven't had much time to go to the beach," explains the bioinformatics expert, who began his year-long stay at UC San Diego's Department of Pharmacology in October 2018.

Psychology - Life Sciences - 20.05.2019
Empathic birds
Empathic birds
Raven observers show emotional contagion with raven demonstrators experiencing an unpleasant affect To effectively navigate the social world, we need information about each other's emotions. Emotional contagion has been suggested to facilitate such information transmission, constituting a basic building block of empathy that could also be present in non-human animals.

Health - Life Sciences - 14.05.2019
Symbionts as lifesavers
Symbionts as lifesavers
Researchers discover new factor influencing the spread of Legionella When people fall ill from bacterial infection, the first priority is to treat the disease. But where do these pathogens come from and how do they thrive in the environment before the infection occurs' An international team led by Matthias Horn from the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna has tackled this question using an important bacterial pathogen that causes lung disease.

Life Sciences - 01.04.2019
The evolution of bird-of-paradise sex chromosomes revealed
The evolution of bird-of-paradise sex chromosomes revealed
Birds-of-paradise are a group of songbird species, and are known for their magnificent male plumage and bewildering sexual display. Now, an international collaborative work involving Dept. of Molecular Evolution and Development of University of Vienna, Zhejiang University of China, and Swedish Museum of Natural History analyzed all together 11 songbird species genomes, including those of five bird-of-paradise species, and reconstructed the evolutionary history of their sex chromosomes.

Life Sciences - Health - 07.03.2019
Excessive hygiene promotes resistance to antibiotics
Excessive hygiene promotes resistance to antibiotics
By Christoph Pelzl In Nature Communications, researchers from Graz, Austria present new perspectives to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistances in hospitals. Additional at the end of the text. The number of people who die from antibiotic-resistant germs is increasing worldwide. The World Health Organization WHO considers the spread of antibiotic resistance and appropriate countermeasures as one of the most important global challenges nowadays.

Life Sciences - Environment - 12.02.2019
To tool or not to tool?
To tool or not to tool?
Orangutans make complex economic decisions about tool use depending on the current 'market' situation Flexible tool use is closely associated to higher mental processes such as the ability to plan actions. Now a group of cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists from the University of Vienna, the University of St Andrews and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna that included Isabelle Laumer and Josep Call, has studied tool related decision-making in a non-human primate species - the orangutan.

Life Sciences - Health - 04.02.2019
Where does this contamination come from?
Where does this contamination come from?
When bodies of water become polluted, it is important to find the cause as quickly and as economically as possible. To this end, TU Wien has now developed a new, DNA-based rapid testing procedure. Water contamination is one of the world's major health risks. In order to swiftly resolve the problem in the event of faecal contamination, it is vital that the cause is identified as quickly as possible: is it contamination from agriculture?