A Blog Around The Clock

Who Dares Sings, And Who Sings Wins: Bold Birds Get The Girl:

Humans often choose partners based on behavioural keys that are displayed during social interactions. The way we behave in different social contexts can reflect personality traits or temperament that may inspire long-term love. Behavioural norms that we perceive as sexually attractive are not culturally or evolutionarily arbitrary.

Disproving Conventional Wisdom On Diversity Of Marine Fossils And Extinction Rates:

It took a decade of painstaking study, the cooperation of hundreds of researchers, and a database of more than 200,000 fossil records, but John Alroy thinks he's disproved much of the conventional wisdom about the diversity of marine fossils and extinction rates.

New Mode Of Gene Regulation Discovered In Mammals:

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have discovered a type of gene regulation never before observed in mammals -- a "ribozyme" that controls the activity of an important family of genes in several different species.

RNA Emerges From DNA's Shadow:

RNA, the transporter of genetic information within the cell, has emerged from the shadow of DNA to become one of the hottest research areas of molecular biology, with implications for many diseases as well as understanding of evolution. But the field is complex, requiring access to the latest equipment and techniques of imaging, gene expression analysis and bioinformatics, as well as cross-pollination between multiple scientific disciplines.

Biodiversity Defensing Against Climate Change:

Climate change is happening, and we must develop ways for all life to be able to cope, environmental advocates urge. WWF Vietnam Programme is looking at this through the development of resilient multifunctional landscapes that also work as forest corridors, assisting with species dispersal and adaptation, by changes in land-use practices.

Will Our Future Brains Be Smaller?:

The speed at which we react to threatening situations can have life or death implications. In the more primitive past, it could have meant escaping a wild animal; today it might mean swerving to avoid a head-on car crash. It has been thought for some years that mammals have two decision-making systems in their brains which operate at different speeds to cope with different situations. New research from the University of Bristol supports this theory and has shown that the evolutionary pressures arising from the older, faster, but less accurate, part of the brain may have shaped the more recent development of the slower-acting but more precise cortex, found in humans and higher animals.