Science News
clock | July 14, 2008Monday - the day when PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology publish new articles, among others, these:
Persistent Leatherback Turtle Migrations Present Opportunities for Conservation :
Highly migratory marine animals routinely cross international borders during extensive migrations over thousands of kilometers, thus requiring conservation strategies with information about habitat use and movement patterns. Critically endangered leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) in the eastern Pacific have suffered a severe population decline in recent years. In this study, we present the largest multi-year…
clock | July 13, 2008Who 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…
clock | July 12, 2008I was busy, so I did not have time to take a look until now at what is new this week in PLoS Genetics, Computational Biology, Pathogens and Neglected Tropical Diseases. Go take a look at these papers and others:
Evolution of Evolvability in Gene Regulatory Networks:
A cell receives signals both from its internal and external environment and responds by changing the expression of genes. In this manner the cell adjusts to heat, osmotic pressures and other circumstances during its lifetime. Over long timescales, the network of interacting genes and its regulatory actions also undergo…
clock | July 12, 2008Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral:
Children between the ages of seven and 12 appear to be naturally inclined to feel empathy for others in pain, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, who used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to study responses in children.
Scientists Identify Genetic Basis For The Black Sheep Of The Family:
Coat color of wild and domestic animals is a critical trait that has significant biological and economic impact. Researchers have now identified the genetic basis for black coat color, and white, in a breed of domestic…
clock | July 10, 2008Antony Williams, who I had a great time with over coffee yesterday, alerted me to his blog post about a new chemical with some amazing properties - shining UV light onto the solution turns the liquid green instantaneously, and removal of the UV source results in instant change of color from green back to transparent.
Aaron Rowe and Kyle Finchsigmate also blogged about it.
You can see the chemical structure here:
See those two rings with nitrogens highlighted in blue? See the bond that connects those two rings? That bond is broken by UV light and immediately rebinds once the light is gone…
clock | July 10, 2008Do We Think That Machines Can Think?:
When our PC goes on strike again we tend to curse it as if it was a human. The question of why and under what circumstances we attribute human-like properties to machines and how such processes manifest on a cortical level was investigated in a project led by Dr. Sören Krach and Prof. Tilo Kircher from the RWTH Aachen University (Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy) in cooperation with the Department of "Social Robotics" (Bielefeld University) and the Neuroimage Nord (Hamburg).
Surveying German Subs Sunk Off North Carolina During World War II:
NOAA…
clock | July 9, 2008Big Brains Arose Twice In Higher Primates:
After taking a fresh look at an old fossil, John Flynn, Frick Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues determined that the brains of the ancestors of modern Neotropical primates were as small as those of their early fossil simian counterparts in the Old World. This means one of the hallmarks of primate biology, increased brain size, arose independently in isolated groups--the platyrrhines of the Americas and the catarrhines of Africa and Eurasia.
Fossil Feathers Preserve Evidence Of Color, Say Scientists:
The…
clock | July 8, 2008There are 57 new articles in PLoS ONE this week, and it is hard to choose which ones to highlight!
Superfast Vocal Muscles Control Song Production in Songbirds:
Birdsong is a widely used model for vocal learning and human speech, which exhibits high temporal and acoustic diversity. Rapid acoustic modulations are thought to arise from the vocal organ, the syrinx, by passive interactions between the two independent sound generators or intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of sound generating structures. Additionally, direct neuromuscular control could produce such rapid and precisely timed acoustic…
clock | July 8, 2008
Rare Microorganism That Produces Hydrogen May Be Key To Tomorrow's Hydrogen Economy:
An ancient organism from the pit of a collapsed volcano may hold the key to tomorrow's hydrogen economy. Scientists from across the world have formed a team to unlock the process refined by a billions-year old archaea. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute will expedite the research by sequencing the hydrogen-producing organism for comparative genomics.
Are Hands-free Cellphones Really Safer?:
Since April 1 when Nova Scotia outlawed the use of hand-held cellphones while driving, sales of hands…
clock | July 7, 2008A Gene Wiki for Community Annotation of Gene Function:
Gene portals (e.g., Entrez Gene [1] and Ensembl [2]) and model organism databases (e.g., Mouse Genome Database [3], Rat Genome Database [4], FlyBase [5]) are popular and useful tools for researching gene annotation and enforcing data standards. These databases provide a large volume and diversity of information on each gene, including protein and transcript sequences, genome location, genomic structure, aliases, links to literature, and gene function. These sites are considered to be the definitive sources for these types of gene…
clock | July 7, 2008Oh, how I hate this (mis)use of the term!
Male Biological Clock Also 'Ticking': Fertility Problems Greater For Men Over 35:
Pregnancy rates decrease and miscarriages increase when a father is over 35 years of age, a scientist will tell the 24th annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology on July 7. Dr. Stéphanie Belloc, of the Eylau Centre for Assisted Reproduction, Paris, France, will say that this is the first time that such a strong paternal effect on reproductive outcomes has been shown.
Nature Reserves Attract Humans, But At A Cost To Biodiversity:…
clock | July 6, 2008Circadian Phase Resetting via Single and Multiple Control Targets:
The robust timing, or phase, of the circadian clock is critical in directing and synchronizing molecular, cellular, and organismal behaviors. The clock's failure to maintain precision and adaption is associated with sleeping disorders, depression, and cancer. To better study and control the timing of circadian rhythms, we make use of systems theoretic tools such as sensitivity analysis and model predictive control (MPC). Sensitivity analysis is used to identify key driving mechanisms without having to fully understand or…
clock | July 5, 2008Agriculture Linked To Frog Sexual Abnormalities:
A farm irrigation canal would seem a healthier place for toads than a ditch by a supermarket parking lot. But University of Florida scientists have found the opposite is true. In a study with wide implications for a longstanding debate over whether agricultural chemicals pose a threat to amphibians, UF zoologists have found that toads in suburban areas are less likely to suffer from reproductive system abnormalities than toads near farms -- where some had both testes and ovaries.
Music Went With Cave Art In Prehistoric Caves:
Thousands of years…
clock | July 4, 2008Body's Own 'Cannabis (Marijuana)' Is Good For The Skin, Scientists Find:
Scientists from Hungary, Germany and the U.K. have discovered that our own body not only makes chemical compounds similar to the active ingredient in marijuana (THC), but these play an important part in maintaining healthy skin.
Experimental Philosophy Movement Explores Real-life Dilemmas:
Imagine a business executive who thinks: "I know that this new policy will harm the environment, but I don't care at all about that -- I just want to increase profits." Is the business executive harming the environment intentionally?…
clock | July 3, 2008Secret Of The Sweet-Sounding Stradivarius: Wood Density Explains Sound Quality Of Great Master Violins:
The advantage of using medical equipment to study classical musical instruments has been proven by a Dutch researcher from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). In collaboration with a renowned luthier, Dr. Berend Stoel put classical violins, including several made by Stradivarius, in a CT scanner. The homogeneity in the densities of the wood from which the classical violins are made, in marked contrast to the modern violins studied, may very well explain their superior sound…
clock | July 2, 2008Malagasy Chameleon Spends Most Of Its Short Life In An Egg:
There is a newly discovered life history among the 28,300 species of known tetrapods, or four-legged animals with backbones. A chameleon from arid southwestern Madagascar spends up to three-quarters of its life in an egg. Even more unusual, life after hatching is a mere 4 to 5 months. No other known four-legged animal has such a rapid growth rate and such a short life span.
Newcomer In Early Eurafrican Population?:
A complete mandible of Homo erectus was discovered at the Thomas I quarry in Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led…
clock | July 2, 2008There are 62 articles published this week in PLoS ONE. There are also two Journal Clubs going on right now - here and here. Here are some of my picks for the week - go read, rate, comment and send trackbacks:
A Comparison of Wood Density between Classical Cremonese and Modern Violins:
Classical violins created by Cremonese masters, such as Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu, have become the benchmark to which the sound of all violins are compared in terms of their abilities of expressiveness and projection. By general consensus, no luthier since that time has been able to…
clock | July 1, 2008New Map IDs The Core Of The Human Brain:
An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex -- the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking -- connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
Neuroscience Teaching Using Multi-Media:
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Williams College $228,987 to redesign the way introductory science of the brain is…
clock | July 1, 2008Penguins Setting Off Sirens Over Health Of World's Oceans:
Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world's oceans, and the culprit isn't only climate change, says a University of Washington conservation biologist.
Evolution Of Fruit Size In Tomato:
Domesticated tomatoes can be up to 1000 times larger than their wild relatives. How did they get so big?
Carbon Hoofprint: Cows Supplemented With RbST Reduce Agriculture's Environmental Impact:
Milk goes green: Cows that receive recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (rbST)…
evolgen | July 1, 2008Wired Magazine has published an article by Chris Anderson arguing that theory is dead (The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete). The argument: with our ability to generate vast amounts of data, there is no need for theory. Now, it's hard to parse what Anderson means by "theory" from the article. But he seems to be arguing that scientists are merely looking for correlations between various parameters, and claiming that's a sufficient analysis. Is it? Well, sometimes, yes, if it's based on a sound theoretical framework.
Deepak Singh has already called out…