LIfe Sciences News

An ancient Egyptian mummy has had quite an afterlife, traveling more than 6,000 miles, spending six decades in private hands, and finally, in 1989, finding a home at the World Heritage Museum (now the Spurlock Museum) at the University of Illinois. The mummys travels did not end there, however. It has made two trips to a local hospital once in 1990 and again this year for some not-so-routine medical exams.

Researchers report they have figured out how the cancer-causing bacterium Helicobacter pylori attacks a cells energy infrastructure, sparking a series of events in the cell that ultimately lead it to self-destruct.

The Return of the Mummy: New Imaging Results on the Spurlock Museums Egyptian Mummy will be the most thorough public presentation yet of the many types of evidence collected in 1990 and again in 2011. The symposium will begin at 4 p.m. in the Knight Auditorium of the museum at 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana.

What if you could trace the history of everything you buy back to its origins? Using your smart phone camera, you could learn what factory made the ingredients in your heart medication, what country grew the corn in your breakfast cereal, or even how to recycle the phone. You could follow the whole life cycle of a product and everyone who handled it along the way to ensure that the medicine youre taking isnt counterfeit and the food youre eating is safe.

Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they dont know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell.

A new study reveals that distinct networks of genes in the honey bee brain contribute to specific behaviors, such as foraging or aggression, researchers report.