Star-forming filaments

Interstellar molecular clouds are often seen to be elongated and "filamentary" in shape, and come in a wide range of sizes. In molecular clouds, where stars form, the filamentary structure is thought to play an important ...

How onions recognize when to bulb

New research from New Zealand will help to breed new onions tailored to grow in specific conditions.

The many faces of the bacterial defense system

Even bacteria have a kind of "immune system" they use to defend themselves against unwanted intruders – in their case, viruses. Scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany, were ...

Chromosome 'anchors' organize DNA during cell division

For humans to grow and to replace and heal damaged tissues, the body's cells must continually reproduce, a process known as "cell division," by which one cell becomes two, two become four, and so on. A key question of biomedical ...

Aging human bodies and aging human oocytes run on different clocks

Reproductive and somatic aging use different molecular mechanisms that show little overlap between the types of genes required to keep oocytes healthy and the genes that generally extend life span, according to Coleen Murphy, ...