A Blog Around The Clock

College Student Sleep Patterns Could Be Detrimental:

A Central Michigan University study has determined that many college students have sleep patterns that could have detrimental effects on their daily performance.

When Following The Leader Can Lead Into The Jaws Of Death:

For animals that live in social groups, and that includes humans, blindly following a leader could place them in danger. To avoid this, animals have developed simple but effective behaviour to follow where at least a few of them dare to tread -- rather than follow a single group member. This pattern of behaviour reduces the risk of imitating maverick behaviour of an individual as the group recognise that consensus is better than following someone that goes it alone.

Ancient Protein Offers Clues To Killer Condition:

More than 600 million years of evolution has taken two unlikely distant cousins -- turkeys and scallops - down very different physical paths from a common ancestor. But University of Leeds researchers have found that a motor protein, myosin 2, remains structurally identical in both creatures.

It Started With A Squeak: Moonlight Serenade Helps Lemurs Pick Mates Of The Right Species:

Lonely hearts columns testify that finding a partner can be hard enough, but at least most human beings can be fairly certain that when we do we have got one of the right species. Things aren't so simple for all animals. Some Malagasy mouse lemurs are so similar that picking a mate of the right species, especially at night time in a tropical forest, might seem like a matter of pot luck. However, new research in BioMed Central's journal BMC Biology has shown that our desperately cute distant cousins use vocalisations to pick up a partner of the right species.

Psychological Stress Linked To Overeating, Monkey Study Shows:

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have found socially subordinate female rhesus macaques over consume calorie-rich foods at a significantly higher level than do dominant females.

'Shaquille O'Neal' Of Bacteria Big Enough To See With Naked Eye:

Cornell researchers are studying bacterium big enough to see -- the Shaquille O'Neal of bacteria. Well, perhaps not quite Shaquille O'Neal. But it is Shaq-teria. The secret to an unusual bacterium's massive size -- it's the size of a grain of salt, or a million times bigger than E. coli bacteria, and big enough to see with the naked eye -- may be found in its ability to copy its genome tens of thousands of times.

Sniffing Dogs Detect Feces To Help Monitor And Protect Threatened Animals In Brazil:

It's a tough job, but somebody, or at least some dogs, have to do it. In the Cerrado region of Brazil, four dogs trained to detect animal feces by scent are helping researchers monitor rare and threatened wildlife such as jaguar, tapir, giant anteater and maned wolf in and around Emas National Park, a protected area with the largest concentration of threatened species in Brazil.

Architecture For Fundamental Processes Of Life Discovered:

A team of Canadian researchers has completed a massive survey of the network of protein complexes that orchestrate the fundamental processes of life. In the online edition of the journal Science, researchers from the Université de Montréal describe protein complexes and networks of complexes never before observed -- including two implicated in the normal mechanisms by which cells divide and proliferate and another that controls recycling of the molecular building blocks of life called autophagy.