Science News
clock | April 7, 2008Bioethics Grows Up:
When I taught my first course in bioethics to first-year students at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in the spring semester of 1981, bioethics was still in its formative years. There were scant few textbooks around and even fewer anthologies, and I could not assume that any of my students had ever read anything by a bioethicist or about bioethics. The key institutions in the field at that time, the Hastings Center, then in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and the Kennedy Institute at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, were barely over a decade…
clock | April 7, 2008Bats Play A Major Role In Plant Protection:
If you get a chance to sip some shade-grown Mexican organic coffee, please pause a moment to thank the bats that helped make it possible. At Mexican organic coffee plantations, where pesticides are banned, bats and birds work night and day to control insect pests that might otherwise munch the crop.
Animals Are 'Stuck In Time' With Little Idea Of Past Or Future, Study Suggests:
Dog owners, who have noticed that their four-legged friend seem equally delighted to see them after five minutes away as five hours, may wonder if animals can tell when time…
clock | April 5, 2008Go at it! These are sooooo....bloggable ;-)
Computer Taught To Recognize Attractiveness In Women:
"Beauty," goes the old saying, "is in the eye of the beholder." But does the beholder have to be human? Not necessarily, say scientists at Tel Aviv University. Amit Kagian, an M.Sc. graduate from the TAU School of Computer Sciences, has successfully "taught" a computer how to interpret attractiveness in women. But there's a more serious dimension to this issue that reaches beyond mere vanity. The discovery is a step towards developing artificial intelligence in computers. Other applications for…
clock | April 4, 2008Exactly How Much Housework Does A Husband Create?:
Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women, according to a University of Michigan study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families. For men, the picture is very different: A wife saves men from about an hour of housework a week.
The figure included in the article states something quite different, see what Larry says about it.
Fossil From Last Common Ancestor Of Neanderthals And Humans Found In Europe, 1.2 Million Years Old:
University of Michigan researcher Josep M. Pares is part of a team that has…
clock | April 2, 2008Good Sexual Intercourse Lasts Minutes, Not Hours, Therapists Say:
Satisfactory sexual intercourse for couples lasts from 3 to 13 minutes, contrary to popular fantasy about the need for hours of sexual activity, according to a survey of U.S. and Canadian sex therapists.
Mouse Calls During Courtship Help Search For Emotion-controlling Genes:
Scientists have long known that emotions and other personality traits and disorders run together in families. But finding which genes are most important in controlling emotions has proven difficult. Humans and mice have similar numbers of genes, but mice…
clock | April 1, 2008There are 47 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Here are some of the coolest titles - you go and find your own.
Ultrasonic Vocalizations Induced by Sex and Amphetamine in M2, M4, M5 Muscarinic and D2 Dopamine Receptor Knockout Mice:
Adult mice communicate by emitting ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during the appetitive phases of sexual behavior. However, little is known about the genes important in controlling call production. Here, we study the induction and regulation of USVs in muscarinic and dopaminergic receptor knockout (KO) mice as well as wild-type controls during sexual…
clock | April 1, 2008Climate Change And Human Hunting Combine To Drive The Woolly Mammoth Extinct:
Does the human species have mammoth blood on its hands? Scientists have long debated the relative importance of hunting by our ancestors and change in global climate in consigning the mammoth to the history books. A new paper uses climate models and fossil distribution to establish that the woolly mammoth went extinct primarily because of loss of habitat due to changes in temperature, while human hunting acted as the final straw.
Anne-Marie, Kambiz and artificialhabitat have more.
Study Questions 'Cost Of Complexity…
clock | March 31, 2008Climate Change, Humans, and the Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth:
What caused the woolly mammoth's extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting that the more-plausible cause was human expansion. Testing these competing hypotheses has been hampered by the difficulty in generating quantitative estimates of the relationship between the mammoth's contraction and the climatic and/or human-induced drivers of extinction. In this study, we combined paleo-climate simulations…
clock | March 31, 2008Teenaged Dome-skulled Dinosaurs Could Really Knock Heads, Virtual Smash-ups Show:
After half a century of debate, a University of Alberta researcher has confirmed that dome-headed dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs could collide with each other during courtship combat. Eric Snively, an Alberta Ingenuity fellow at the U of A, used computer software to smash the sheep-sized dinosaurs together in a virtual collision and results showed that their bony domes could emerge unscathed.
Squid Beak Is Both Hard And Soft, A Material That Engineers Want To Copy:
How did nature make the squid's beak super…
clock | March 30, 2008American West Heating Nearly Twice As Fast As Rest Of World, New Analysis Shows:
The American West is heating up more rapidly than the rest of the world, according to a new analysis of the most recent federal government temperature figures. The news is especially bad for some of the nation's fastest growing cities, which receive water from the drought-stricken Colorado River. The average temperature rise in the Southwest's largest river basin was more than double the average global increase, likely spelling even more parched conditions.
Are You What You Eat? New Study Of Body Weight Change…
clock | March 29, 2008Cooperative Classrooms Lead To Better Friendships, Higher Achievement In Young Adolescents:
Students competing for resources in the classroom while discounting each others' success are less likely to earn top grades than students who work together toward goals and share their success, according to an analysis of 80 years of research.
Despite Awareness Of Global Warming Americans Concerned More About Local Environment:
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently declared climate change a top international threat, and Al Gore urged politicians to get involved to fight global warming. Results…
clock | March 28, 2008
Evolution Of New Species Slows Down As Number Of Competitors Increases:
The rate at which new species are formed in a group of closely related animals decreases as the total number of different species in that group goes up, according to new research. The research team believes these findings suggest that new species appear less and less as the number of species in a region approaches the maximum number that it can support.
Zoologists Unlock New Secrets About Frog Deaths:
New research from zoologists at Southern Illinois University Carbondale opens a bigger window to understanding a deadly…
clock | March 28, 2008This week's PLoS Computational Biology is chockful of interesting articles, including these:
Open Access: Taking Full Advantage of the Content:
This Journal and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) at large are standard bearers of the full potential offered through open access publication, but what of you, the reader? For most of you, open access may imply free access to read the journals, but nothing more. There is a far greater potential, but, up to now, little to point to that highlights its tangible benefits. We would argue that, as yet, the full promise of open access has not been…
clock | March 27, 2008Reason For Almost Two Billion Year Delay In Animal Evolution On Earth Discovered:
Scientists from around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth's ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. They have discovered that a deficiency of oxygen and the heavy metal molybdenum in the ancient deep ocean may have delayed the evolution of animal life on Earth for nearly 2 billion years.
Brain's 'Sixth Sense' For Calories Discovered:
The brain can sense the calories in food, independent of the taste mechanism, researchers have found in…
clock | March 26, 2008Living Upside-down Shapes Spiders For Energy Saving:
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Spain and Croatia led an investigation into the peculiar lifestyle of numerous spider species, which live, feed, breed and 'walk' in an upside-down hanging position. According to their results, such 'unconventional' enterprise drives a shape in spiders that confers high energy efficiency, as in oscillatory pendulums.
Space Tourism: Suborbital Vehicle Expected To Fly Within Two Years:
A small California aerospace company has just unveiled a new suborbital spaceship that will provide affordable…
clock | March 25, 2008Americans Sleeping More, Not Less, Says New Study
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Americans average as much sleep as they did 40 years ago, and possibly more, according to University of Maryland sociologists.
Yes, when you suddenly start including the unemployed in the study.
Mantis Shrimp Vision Reveals New Way That Animals Can See:
Mantis shrimp can see the world in a way that had never been observed in any animal before, researchers report in the March 20th Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The discovery--which marks the fourth type of visual system--suggests that the ability to…
clock | March 25, 2008Bunch of new, cool stuff in PLoS ONE today - here are the titles that piqued my curiosity (and you know the spiel: rate, note, comment, trackback):
Australia's Oldest Marsupial Fossils and their Biogeographical Implications:
We describe new cranial and post-cranial marsupial fossils from the early Eocene Tingamarra Local Fauna in Australia and refer them to Djarthia murgonensis, which was previously known only from fragmentary dental remains. The new material indicates that Djarthia is a member of Australidelphia, a pan-Gondwanan clade comprising all extant Australian marsupials together with…
clock | March 24, 2008New Zealand's 'Living Dinosaur' -- The Tuatara -- Is Surprisingly The Fastest Evolving Animal:
In a study of New Zealand's "living dinosaur" the tuatara, evolutionary biologist, and ancient DNA expert, Professor David Lambert and his team from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara, which are up to 8000 years old. They found that, although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined.
See more…
clock | March 24, 2008Circadian Remodeling of Neuronal Circuits Involved in Rhythmic Behavior:
Circadian systems evolved as a mechanism that allows organisms to adapt to the environmental changes in light and dark which occur as a consequence of the rotation of Earth. Because of its unique repertoire of genetic tools, Drosophila is a well established model for the study of the circadian clock. Although the biochemical components underlying the molecular oscillations have been characterized in detail, the mechanisms used by the clock neurons to convey information to the downstream pathways remain elusive. In the…
j7uy5 | March 24, 2008GrrlScientist wrote
href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2008/02/diagnosing_bipolar_disorder_wi.php">a
post last month about a potential genetic test for bipolar
disorder. Read that first to get some background.
Now, it turns out that a company is selling a testing kit that you can
use yourself, in the privacy of your own home, to see if you have genes
that increase the risk of bipolar disorder.
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/23/health/main3960929.shtml">At-Home
Psychiatric Gene Tests Stir Debate
New Methods Of Testing Patients' Risk May Lead To More…