Science News
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007
Add this to the list of environmental worries: The generation
of electricity is a highly water-intensive process. It takes
three times as much water to produce the electricity needed for a home,
than the water used in that home.
href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0417/p01s02-wogi.html">Trade-off
looms for arid US regions: water or power?
Water consumed by electric utilities could account for up to 60 percent
of all nonfarm water used in the US by 2030.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Albuquerque, N.M. - The
drive to build more power plants for a growing nation – as…
clock | April 18, 2007Scientists Unravel Intricate Animal Behaviour Patterns:
There is a scene in the animated blockbuster "Finding Nemo" when a school of fish makes a rapid string of complicated patterns--an arrow, a portrait of young Nemo and other intricate designs. While the detailed shapes might be a bit outlandish for fish to form, the premise isn't far off. But how does a school of fish or a flock of birds know how to move from one configuration to another and then reorganize as a unit, without knowing what the entire group is doing?
New research by University of Alberta scientists shows that one movement…
j7uy5 | April 17, 2007
href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17617">
Dust
Dampens Hurricane Formation
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
I'm hardly an expert, but it appears that there is some evidence that
the amount of dust in the air over the Atlantic is a factor in
determining the severity of the hurricane season. More dust =
less ocean warming. Like so many things, this is hypothetical:
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Using dust observations
collected by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s
Aura satellite, they found that the Sahara…
clock | April 17, 2007Neurotic Men Die Sooner Than Their More Mellow Counterparts:
While mellowing with age has often been thought to have positive effects, a Purdue University researcher has shown that doing so could also help you live longer.
Strong Marriage Helps Couples Deal With Tempermental Baby:
Couples with infants who are particularly fussy or difficult typically do just fine as parents - as long as they have a strong marital relationship. A new study found that a couple's relationship with each other was key in determining how they reacted as parents when faced with a temperamental baby. "When couples…
clock | April 16, 2007NASA Engineer Helps Train Puppy For Future Leadership Role:
One of NASA's newest workers is a top dog ... literally. A golden retriever puppy named Aries goes to work every day at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. as part of the "Leader Dogs for the Blind" program. Her mentor is structural engineer Evan J. Horowitz.
Snake Venom As Therapeutic Treatment Of Cancer?:
This certainly sounds unusual, but Dr. Son and colleagues report on the effectiveness of the snake venom toxin (SVT) Vipera lebetina turanica in the inhibition of androgen-independent prostate cancer (AICAP) in the…
clock | April 15, 2007Sex And Prenatal Hormone Exposure Affect Cognitive Performance:
Yerkes researchers are using their findings to better understand sex differences in cognitive performance, which may lead to increased understanding of the difference in neuropsychological disorders men and women experience.
In one of the first research studies to assess sex differences in cognitive performance in nonhuman primates, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have found the tendency to use landmarks for navigation is typical only of females.
This finding, which corroborates findings in rodents and…
evolgen | April 14, 2007
As you've probably already heard, George Allen's favorite primate has had its genome sequenced. I promised to blog on the article, but this is not the post. Instead, this post is to kvetch about the coverage of this story in the popular press. It's another adventure in bad science reporting!
Here are two examples of people misreporting the sequencing of a macaque genome:
The Los Angeles Times reports that the "Macaque genome is decoded". They also report, "A team of researchers has deciphered the genome of the rhesus macaque". Decoded and deciphered, but not sequenced. Thomas H. Maugh II,…
clock | April 14, 2007
More Flight Than Fancy?:
Scientists from the universities of Exeter and Cambridge have turned a textbook example of sexual selection on its head and shown that females may be more astute at choosing a mate than previously thought. New research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and published online on 5 April in Current Biology, shows that differences in the lengths of the long tail feathers possessed by male barn swallows are more about aerodynamics than being attractive. Female barn swallows favour mates with longer tails and the prominent male tail 'streamers' that extend beyond the tail…
clock | April 13, 2007Tyrannosaurus Rex And Mastodon Protein Fragments Discovered, Sequenced:
Scientists have confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the fossil bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) and a half-million-year-old mastodon. Their results may change the way people think about fossil preservation and present a new method for studying diseases in which identification of proteins is important, such as cancer.
Here's a local angle to the same story.
Human-Chimp Differences Uncovered With Analysis Of Rhesus Monkey Genome:
An international consortium of…
evolgen | April 13, 2007According to Physorg.com, this study on epigenetic inheritance in chickens "shake[s] Darwin's foundation". Who knew inheritance in a flightless bird could induce an earthquake in northern Australia? That's not what they're referring to? They're not claiming that a neo-Lamarckian process could produce seismic activity?
For everyone running around like a chicken with its head cut off (where's my damn rim-shot?), this result is more of a shot at Mendel than Darwin. And it's not all that surprising. Don't get me wrong, it's cool to see the inheritance of acquired characteristics (unless Reed…
clock | April 12, 2007Sperm Cells Created From Human Bone Marrow:
Human bone marrow has been used to create early-stage sperm cells for the first time, a scientific step forward that will help researchers understand more about how sperm cells are created.
Gives a new meaning to the word "boner", doesn't it? OK, too late at night - I am losing all sense of what is appropriate on a science blog. Actually, the study is interesting besides its potential for humor.
clock | April 12, 2007Misclassified For Centuries, Medicinal Leeches Found To Be 3 Distinct Species:
Genetic research has revealed that commercially available medicinal leeches used around the world in biomedical research and postoperative care have been misclassified for centuries. Until now, the leeches were assumed to be the species Hirudo medicinalis, but new research reveals they are actually a closely related but genetically distinct species, Hirudo verbana. The study also shows that wild European medicinal leeches are at least three distinct species, not one. "This raises the tantalizing prospect of three…
clock | April 11, 2007Evolution Of Symbiosis:
The aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum depends on a bacterial symbiont, Buchnera aphidicola, for amino acids it can't get from plants. The aphid, in turn, provides the bacterium with energy and carbon as well as shelter inside specialized cells. Such interdependent relationships are not unusual in the natural world. What is unusual, report Helen Dunbar, Nancy Moran, and colleagues in a new study published this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology, is that a single point mutation in Buchnera's genome can have consequences for its aphid partner that are sometimes…
clock | April 10, 2007Some Bottlenose Dolphins Don't Coerce Females To Mate:
Mating strategies are straightforward in bottlenose dolphins, or are they? Much of the work carried on male-female relationships in that species to date show that males tend to coerce females who are left with little choice about with whom to mate. This explains the complex relationships we observe in male bottlenose dolphins, which are only paralleled by human social strategies: the formation of alliances and alliances of alliances, also called coalitions. These alliances and coalitions are then used to out-compete other male bands to…
evolgen | April 8, 2007Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney are arguing that science education is so fucked up and the press are so piss poor that scientists need to go swift boat vets in order win the public debates against anti-science types. According to Nisbet and Mooney, the general public are too stupid to understand the real science, so scientists need to dumb it down. And we can't rely on the press (which everyone calls "the media") to accurately communicate science, so we need to give them catch phrases and slogans. Scientists need ad wizards to convince the public that the earth is more than 10,000 years old,…
clock | April 8, 2007Flies Don't Buzz About Aimlessly:
Have you ever stopped to wonder how a fruit fly is able to locate and blissfully drown in your wine glass on a warm summer evening, especially since its flight path seems to be so erratic? Mark Frye at the University of California and Andy Reynolds at Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom have been pondering this very question. Fruit flies explore their environment using a series of straight flight paths punctuated by rapid 90° body-saccades. Some of these manoeuvres avoid obstacles in their path. But many others seem to appear spontaneously. Are the…
clock | April 7, 2007Here, have a go at it. Even better, if you can get the actual paper and dissect it on your blog, let me know so I can link to that. Have fun!
Good Behavior, Religiousness May Be Genetic:
A new study in Journal of Personality shows that selfless and social behavior is not purely a product of environment, specifically religious environment. After studying the behavior of adult twins, researchers found that, while altruistic behavior and religiousness tended to appear together, the correlation was due to both environmental and genetic factors.
According to study author Laura Koenig, the…
clock | April 6, 2007Behavioral Ecology: Late Breeding Female Birds Surprisingly Had More Offspring:
Starting to breed late in life is a bad idea if you want to maximise the number of offspring that you produce - or so the theory goes. But doubt has now been cast on this hypothesis - one of the biggest assumptions in behavioural ecology - by researchers from the universities of Bristol and Cape Town and published today in Current Biology.
Climate Change: Natural Wonders Of The World Face Destruction:
From the Amazon to the Himalayas, ten of the world's greatest natural wonders face destruction if the climate…
clock | April 5, 2007I was waiting until the last installment was up to post about this. Revere on Effect Measure took a recent paper about a mathematical model of the spread of anti-viral resistance and wrote a 16-part series leading the readers through the entire paper, from the title to the List of References and everything in between. While the posts are unlikely to garner many comments, this series will remain online as a valuable resource, something one can use to learn - or teach others - how a scientific paper is to be analyzed.
As you can see, it takes a lot of time to read a paper thoroughly. It also…
clock | April 5, 2007
Want To Monitor Climate Change? P-p-p-pick Up A Penguin!:
We are used to hearing about the effects of climate change in terms of unusual animal behaviour, such as altering patterns of fish and bird migration. However, scientists at the University of Birmingham are trying out an alternative bio-indicator -- the king penguin -- to investigate whether they can be used to monitor the effects of climate change.
Scientists Directly Control Brain Cell Activity With Light:
Every thought, feeling and action originates from the electrical signals emitted by diverse brain cells enmeshed in a tangle of…