Science News
clock | December 1, 2008
Humanity May Hold Key For Next Earth Evolution:
Human degradation of the environment has the potential to stall an ongoing process of planetary evolution, and even rewind the evolutionary clock to leave the planet habitable only by the bacteria that dominated billions of years of Earth's history, Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir said Thursday (Nov. 13).
Want Sustainable Fishing? Keep Only Small Fish, And Let The Big Ones Go:
Scientists at the University of Toronto analysed Canadian fisheries data to determine the effect of the "keep the large ones" policy that is typical of fisheries.…
clock | November 30, 2008Science Professors Know Science, But Who Is Teaching Them How To Teach?:
U.S. science and engineering students emerge from graduate school exquisitely trained to carry out research. Yet when it comes to the other major activity they'll engage in as professors - teaching - they're usually left to their own devices. That's now beginning to change, thanks to work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the Nov. 28 issue of Science, a team led by bacteriology professor Jo Handelsman describes its program of "scientific teaching," in which graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are…
clock | November 28, 2008
Social Amoeba Seek Kin Association:
Starving "social amoebae" called Dictyostelium discoideum seek the support of "kin" when they form multi-cellular organisms made up of dead stalks and living spores, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston in a report that appears online today in the open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology.
Adult Brain Neurons Can Remodel Connections:
Overturning a century of prevailing thought, scientists are finding that neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections. In work reported in the Nov. 24 online…
clock | November 27, 2008How Did Turtles Get Their Shells? Oldest Known Turtle Fossil, 220 Million Years Old, Give Clues:
With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be. Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with their shells intact, and scientists lacked conclusive evidence to support competing evolutionary theories. Now with the discovery in China of the oldest known turtle fossil, estimated at 220- million-years-old, scientists have a clearer picture of…
clock | November 26, 2008Now I finally understand the lyrics! Joan Baez was really singing to Bob about prehistoric turtles!
clock | November 26, 2008
Jurassic Turtles Could Swim:
Around 164 million years ago the earliest aquatic turtles lived in lakes and lagoons on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, according to new research. Recent scientific fieldwork led by researchers from UCL and the Natural History Museum on Skye, an island off the north-western coast of Scotland, discovered a block of rock containing fossils that have been recognised as a new species of primitive turtle Eileanchelys waldmani.
'Gray's Paradox' Solved: Researchers Discover Secret Of Speedy Dolphins:
There was something peculiar about dolphins that stumped prolific British…
j7uy5 | November 26, 2008No, it is not newspapers and videos that are disrupting your endocrine
system (well, not that we know); rather, the topic
is in the media.
href="http://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/endocrine/index.cfm">Endocrine
disruptors are chemicals that mimic the effects of hormones.
Perhaps the best-known example is bisphenol-A.
Others include various pharmaceuticals, dioxin and
dioxin-like compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls, DDT and other
pesticides.
Today I'm not going to review the topic; other ScienceBloggers have
done so extensively. There are too many to list.
Just use the…
clock | November 25, 2008There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click.
Here is my pick for the week - you go and look for your own favourites...and in the meantime try your hand at making the funniest LOLCat to go with this article:
Whole Body Mechanics of Stealthy Walking in Cats:
The metabolic cost associated with locomotion represents a significant part of an…
clock | November 25, 2008Old Flies Can Become Young Moms:
Female flies can turn back the biological clock and extend their lifespan at the same time, University of Southern California biologists report. Their study, published online this month in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, casts doubt on the old notion of a tradeoff between reproduction and longevity.
Flies May Reveal Evolutionary Step To Live Birth:
A species of fruit fly from the Seychelles Islands often lays larvae instead of eggs, UC San Diego biologists have discovered. Clues to how animals switch from laying eggs to live birth may be found in the well-…
clock | November 24, 2008There are new articles published tonight in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - here are my picks:
A Social Amoeba Discriminates in Favor of Kin:
Though seemingly simple life forms, microorganisms can display surprisingly complex behaviors, such as altruism and cheating, that are more often associated with "higher" organisms. This paradox makes microorganisms--which are more amenable to laboratory investigations than, say, dolphins or elephants--ideal for investigating social evolution. Take the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. When food is…
clock | November 24, 2008Plants Grow Bigger And More Vigorously Through Changes In Their Internal Clocks:
Hybrid plants, like corn, grow bigger and better than their parents because many of their genes for photosynthesis and starch metabolism are more active during the day, report researchers from The University of Texas at Austin in a new study published in the journal Nature.
How Red Wine Compounds Fight Alzheimer's Disease:
Scientists call it the "French paradox" -- a society that, despite consuming food high in cholesterol and saturated fats, has long had low death rates from heart disease. Research has suggested…
clock | November 23, 2008
Crafting Your Image For Your 1,000 Friends On Facebook Or MySpace:
Students are creating idealized versions of themselves on social networking websites -- Facebook and MySpace are the most popular -- and using these sites to explore their emerging identities, UCLA psychologists report. Parents often understand very little about this phenomenon, they say.
Oh, What A Feeling! Regaining Ability To Interpret Emotions After Severe Brain Injury:
People who have lost the ability to interpret emotion after a severe brain injury can regain this vital social skill by being re-educated to read body…
clock | November 23, 2008
Simple Eyes Of Only Two Cells Guide Marine Zooplankton To The Light:
Researchers unravel how the very first eyes in evolution might have worked and how they guide the swimming of marine plankton towards light. Larvae of marine invertebrates - worms, sponges, jellyfish - have the simplest eyes that exist. They consist of no more than two cells: a photoreceptor cell and a pigment cell. These minimal eyes, called eyespots, resemble the 'proto-eyes' suggested by Charles Darwin as the first eyes to appear in animal evolution. They cannot form images but allow the animal to sense the direction of…
clock | November 21, 2008
Darwin Was Right About How Evolution Can Affect Whole Group:
Worker ants of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your fertility. The highly specialized worker castes in ants represent the pinnacle of social organization in the insect world. As in any society, however, ant colonies are filled with internal strife and conflict. So what binds them together? More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin had an idea and now he's been proven right.
Evolutionary biologists at McGill University have discovered molecular signals that can maintain social harmony in ants by putting constraints on…
clock | November 20, 2008So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Copying and Evolution of Neuronal Topology:
We propose a mechanism for copying of neuronal networks that is of considerable interest for neuroscience for it suggests a neuronal basis for causal inference, function copying, and natural selection within the…
clock | November 19, 2008Light Inside Sponges: Sponges Invented (and Employed) The First Fiber Optics:
Fiber optics as light conductors are obviously not just a recent invention. Sponges (Porifera) -- the phylogenetically oldest, multicellular organisms (Metazoa) -- are able to transduce light inside their bodies by employing amorphous, siliceous structures.
Pollinator Decline Not Reducing Crop Yields Just Yet:
The well-documented worldwide decline in the number of bees and other pollinators is not, at this stage, limiting global crop yields, according to a new study.
Turtles Alter Nesting Dates Due To Temperature…
clock | November 19, 2008
How Cockroaches Keep Their Predators 'Guessing':
When cockroaches flee their predators, they choose, seemingly at random, amongst one of a handful of preferred escape routes, according to a report published on November 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.
Sleep Helps People Learn Complicated Tasks:
Sleep helps the mind learn complicated tasks and helps people recover learning they otherwise thought they had forgotten over the course of a day, research at the University of Chicago shows.
What Makes An Axon An Axon?:
Inside every axon is a dendrite waiting to get out. Hedstrom et…
evolgen | November 19, 2008Back in the day, you could sequence a genome and get a Nature paper out of it. Pretty soon, the sexiness of genome sequencing wore off, and it took a bit more to get into a vanity journal. You had to sequence something cute and cuddly, something extinct, or a lot of genomes at once. Any other genome sequencing projects were relegated to lower tier journals.
Now, it appears that even sequencing the genome of charismatic megafauna only gets you a press release. As TR Gregory points out, the sequencing of the Kangaroo genome was announced in such a manner (Science by press release). But check…
clock | November 18, 2008There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Mass Mortality of Adult Male Subantarctic Fur Seals: Are Alien Mice the Culprits?:
Mass mortalities of marine mammals due to infectious agents are increasingly reported. However, in contrast to previous die-offs,…
clock | November 18, 2008
Men With Facial Scars Are More Attractive To Women Seeking Short-term Relationships:
Men with facial scars are more attractive to women seeking short-term relationships, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found. It was previously assumed that in Western cultures scarring was an unattractive facial feature and in non-Western cultures they were perceived as a sign of maturity and strength. Scientists at Liverpool and Stirling University, however, have found that Western women find scarring on men attractive and may associate it with health and bravery.
'Orphan' Genes Play An…