A collaborative team of researchers led by Dale Zhou, who did his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, and Dani Bassett in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science looked at how nearly half a million people around the world use Wikipedia's knowledge networks. They found stark differences in browsing habits between countries offering insights into cultural differences and potential drivers of curiosity and learning.
Read more …Studying Wikipedia browsing habits to learn how people learn
Drosophila is one of the most thoroughly studied lab animals -- with the exception of the female reproductive tract. Now a team of biologists has taken the first deep look at the Drosophila uterus and found some surprises, which could have implications not just for understanding insect reproduction and potentially, pest control, but also for understanding fertility in humans.
Read more …Invisible anatomy in the fruit fly uterus
Research shows that the breast cancer gene 1 (BRCA1) not only pushes accurate DNA repair to guard against cancer but promotes subsequent activity in tumor suppression.
Read more …Novel role of BRCA1 in tumor suppression
For all its pervasiveness and the efforts to study it, cancer is still somewhat of a mystery. Why do some animals get it at a higher rate than others? This is the question at the heart of Peto's paradox, the observation that large animals, by virtue of their number of cells, are statistically more likely than smaller animals to develop and accumulate genetic mutations that lead to cancer, yet they don't. In fact, some large animals, including whales and elephants, get much less cancer than expected for an animal of its body size and number of cells.
Read more …Researchers complete the largest compilation of cancer prevalence across vertebrates