Science News
clock | March 1, 2007City Ants Take The Heat:
While Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, has generated greater awareness of global warming, most people remain unaware of the more rapid warming that has occurred within major cities. In fact, large cities can be more than 10 degrees hotter than their surroundings. These metropolitan hot spots, which scientists refer to as urban heat islands, can stress the animals and plants that make their home alongside humans. Until recently, biologists had focused so much on the effects of global climate change, that they had overlooked the effects of urban warming.
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clock | February 28, 2007Researchers Discover Key To Body's Ability To Detect Subtle Temperature Changes:
Scientists have long known the molecular mechanisms behind most of the body's sensing capabilities. Vision, for example, is made possible in part by rhodopsin, a pigment molecule that is extremely sensitive to light. It is involved in turning photons into electrical signals that can be decoded by the brain into visual information. But how the human body is able to sense a one-degree change in temperature has remained a mystery.
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Antarctic Marine Explorers Reveal First Hints Of Biological Change After…
clock | February 26, 2007Why Even Close Associates Sometimes Have Trouble Communicating:
Particularly among close associates, sharing even a little new information can slow down communication. Some of people's biggest problems with communication come in sharing new information with people they know well, newly published research at the University of Chicago shows.
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Older Adults May Be Unreliable Eyewitnesses, Study Shows:
A University of Virginia study suggests that older adults are not only more inclined than younger adults to make errors in recollecting details that have been suggested to them, but are…
clock | February 24, 2007Wow! It seems that all the exciting sience news today are coming from my school:
Researchers Find Genes Involved In Nicotine Resistance In Fruit Flies:
North Carolina State University researchers have gleaned insight into the genes involved in resistance to nicotine in the lab rat of many gene studies - Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. The research team led by Dr. Greg Gibson, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, and his graduate student, Gisele Passador-Gurgel, found that regulation of levels of a certain enzyme - ornithine amino transferase - plays an important role in…
clock | February 23, 2007Do You Hear What I See? Research Finds Visually Stimulated Activity In Brain's Hearing Processing Centers:
New research pinpoints specific areas in sound processing centers in the brains of macaque monkeys that shows enhanced activity when the animals watch a video. This study confirms a number of recent findings but contradicts classical thinking, in which hearing, taste, touch, sight, and smell are each processed in distinct areas of the brain and only later integrated.
Harmful Environmental Effects Of Livestock Production On The Planet 'Increasingly Serious,' Says Panel:
The harmful…
clock | February 22, 2007Boosting Brain Power -- With Chocolate:
Eating chocolate could help to sharpen up the mind and give a short-term boost to cognitive skills, a University of Nottingham expert has found. A study led by Professor Ian Macdonald found that consumption of a cocoa drink rich in flavanols -- a key ingredient of dark chocolate -- boosts blood flow to key areas of the brain for two to three hours.
Environment And Exercise May Affect Research Results, Study Shows:
A recently completed study at The University of Arizona may have implications for the thousands of scientists worldwide who use "knockout"…
clock | February 21, 2007Professor identifies mystery creature:
The odd-looking animal spotted in several Piedmont counties last year evidently was a hairless gray fox.
That's the conclusion of Jaap Hillenius. He examined the carcass of a similar animal that had been hit by a car in the Charleston, S.C., area.
So it wasn't an exotic cross-species, though some central North Carolina residents who spotted the animals had reported it having the head of a cat and the body of a canine.
Just a fox sans hair because of a mutant gene, said Hillenius, associate professor in the biology department at College of Charleston.…
clock | February 21, 2007New Research Finds People And Pigeons See Eye To Eye:
Pigeons and humans use similar visual cues to identify objects, a finding that could have promising implications in the development of novel technologies, according to new research conducted by a University of New Hampshire professor. Brett Gibson, an assistant professor of psychology who studies animal behavior, details his latest research in the journal article, "Non-accidental properties underlie shape recognition in mammalian and non-mammalian vision," published in Current Biology. Gibson and his colleagues found that humans and…
clock | February 20, 2007Storing Digital Data In Living Organisms:
DNA, perhaps the oldest data storage medium, could become the newest as scientists report progress toward using DNA to store text, images, music and other digital data inside the genomes of living organisms. In a report scheduled for the April 9 issue of ACS' Biotechnology Progress, a bi-monthly journal, Masaru Tomita and colleagues in Japan point out that DNA has been attracting attention as perhaps the ultimate in permanent data storage.
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Epigenetics To Shape Stem Cell Future:
Everyone hopes that one day stem cell-based regenerative…
clock | February 19, 2007Light-sensitive Protein Found In Many Marine Bacteria:
New light has been shed on proteorhodopsin, the light-sensitive protein found in many marine bacteria. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have demonstrated that when the ability to respire oxygen is impaired, bacterium equipped with proteorhodopsin will switch to solar power to carry out vital life processes.
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The Last Wild Hunt: Deep-sea Fisheries Scrape Bottom Of The Sea:
An international team of leading fisheries…
clock | February 18, 2007
Robotic Cameras Join Search For 'Holy Grail Of Bird-watching':
In the bayous of eastern Arkansas, amidst ancient trees both living and dead that provide nourishment to creatures of the swamp, hangs a high-tech sentinel patiently waiting to capture video of an elusive bird once thought to be extinct. Developed by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Texas A&M University, the high-resolution intelligent robotic video system installed in the Bayou DeView area of the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas is part of a major effort to locate the ivory-billed…
clock | February 18, 2007I'm sure PZ is inundated with e-mails from readers asking for a real evo-devo explanation, but in the meantime read the news report and see the picture:
clock | February 16, 2007'Regressive Evolution' In Cavefish: Natural Selection Or Genetic Drift:
"Regressive evolution," or the reduction of traits over time, is the result of either natural selection or genetic drift, according to a study on cavefish by researchers at New York University's Department of Biology, the University of California at Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, and the Harvard Medical School. Previously, scientists could not determine which forces contributed to regressive evolution in cave-adapted species, and many doubt the role of natural selection in this process. Darwin himself, who…
clock | February 15, 2007The latest issue of Conservation Magazine has picked several 'people to watch in 2007', including Randy Olson and Martin Wikelski.
Who do you think are 'people to watch in 2007'?
clock | February 15, 2007Bats Prey On Nocturnally Migrating Songbirds:
It was until now believed that nocturnally migrating songbirds, while venturing into the unfamiliar night sky for accomplishing their long, challenging trans-continental migrations, could at least release anti-predator vigilance thanks to the concealment of darkness. A new study by Spanish and Swiss scientists -- published this week in PLoS ONE -- shows that migration at night is not without predation risk for passerines.
New DNA Method Helps Explain Extinction Of Woolly Mammoth, Other Ice Age Mammals:
What caused the extinction of the woolly…
clock | February 14, 2007Female Antarctic Seals Give Cold Shoulder To Local Males:
Female Antarctic fur seals will travel across a colony to actively seek males which are genetically diverse and unrelated, rather than mate with local dominant males. These findings, published in this week's Nature, suggest that female choice may be more widespread in nature than previously believed and that such strategies enable species to maintain genetic diversity.
How Badger Culling Creates Conditions For Spread Of Bovine Tuberculosis:
A stable social structure may help control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB) among badgers…
clock | February 13, 2007Scientists Clone Mice From Adult Skin Stem Cells:
For cells that hold so much promise, stem cells' potential has so far gone largely untapped. But new research from Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists now shows that adult stem cells taken from skin can be used to clone mice using a procedure called nuclear transfer. The findings are reported in the Feb. 12 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Manipulating Nature: Scientists Query Wildlife Birth-control Method:
Professor Cooper also raises concerns that individuals that…
clock | February 12, 2007Go ahead, rip into them. I know you want to...
No Missing Link? Evolutionary Changes Occur Suddenly, Professor Says:
Jeffrey H. Schwartz, University of Pittsburgh professor of anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, is working to debunk a major tenet of Darwinian evolution. Schwartz believes that evolutionary changes occur suddenly as opposed to the Darwinian model of evolution, which is characterized by gradual and constant change. Among other scientific observations, gaps in the fossil record could bolster Schwartz's theory because, for Schwartz, there is no "missing link."
Males…
clock | February 11, 2007Influence Of The Menstrual Cycle On The Female Brain:
What influence does the variation in estrogen level have on the activation of the female brain? Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Jean-Claude Dreher, a researcher at the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (CNRS/Université Lyon 1), in collaboration with an American team from the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland) directed by Karen Berman, has identified, for the first time, the neural networks involved in processing reward-related functions modulated by female gonadal steroid hormones. This result, which was…
clock | February 9, 2007Children's Sleep Problems Can Lead To School Problems:
It is obvious that young children who have difficulties sleeping are likely to have problems in school. A new study shows that African-American children and children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds fare worse than their counterparts when their sleep is disrupted. The study offers one of the first demonstrations that the relationship between children's performance and sleep may differ among children of different backgrounds. Conducted by researchers at Auburn University and Notre Dame University, it is published in the January/…