A Blog Around The Clock

Insects Evolved Radically Different Strategy To Smell:

Darwin's tree of life represents the path and estimates the time evolution took to get to the current diversity of life. Now, new findings suggest that this tree, an icon of evolution, may need to be redrawn. In research to be published in the April 13 advance online issue of Nature, researchers at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo have joined forces to reveal that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of other organisms -- an unexpected and controversial finding that may dissolve a dominant ideology in the field.

Fly Is At Home On A Crab, With New Evolutionary Neighbors:

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany, have rediscovered Drosophila endobranchia, a fly living in the mouth of land crabs. The members of Drosophilidae, a family consisting of about 3000 species, are often referred to as fruit flies although most of the members feed on microbes. As microbes can be found growing on a wide range of substrates, fruit flies can accordingly also be found in a multitude of habitats.

Sleep, Baby, Sleep: Parents' Behavior Has Direct Impact On Children's Sleep Problems:

Parents who want their babies to sleep through the night would be wise to avoid co-sleeping arrangements or feeding their children evening snacks beyond early infancy. According to a Université de Montréal study the way parents put their babies to bed has a direct impact on how well children sleep when they reach four to six years old.

Shorebird Numbers Crash In Australia:

One of the world's great wildlife spectacles is under way across Australia: as many as two million migratory shorebirds of 36 species are gathering around Broome before an amazing 10,000-kilometre annual flight to their northern hemisphere breeding grounds. But an alarming new study has revealed that both these migrants and Australia's one million resident shorebirds have suffered a massive collapse in numbers over the past 25 years.