December 18, 2006, 9:19 PM CT

Top 10 Myths About Evolution

Though the United States is the world leader in science and technology, a number of of its citizens display a shocking ignorance regarding basic scientific facts. Recent surveys have revealed that only about half of Americans realize that humans have never lived side by side with dinosaurs, and about the same number reject the idea that humans developed from earlier species of animals. This lack of knowledge in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution springs from many negative influences in contemporary society: poor secondary education in some regions of the country, misinformation in the mass media, and deliberate obfuscation by supporters of Creationism and Intelligent Design.

In The Top 10 Myths About Evolution, educators Cameron M. Smith and Charles Sullivan clearly dispel the ten most common myths about evolution that continue to mislead average Americans. Using a refreshing, jargon-free style, they set the record straight on claims that evolution is "just a theory," that Darwinian explanations of life undercut morality, that Intelligent Design is a legitimate alternative to conventional science, that humans come from chimpanzees, and six other popular but erroneous notions.

Smith and Sullivan's reader-friendly, solidly researched text will serve as an important tool, both for teachers and laypersons seeking accurate information about evolution.........

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December 18, 2006, 9:15 PM CT

Biological Clock For Smell In Mice

Biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered a large biological clock in the smelling center of mice brains and have revealed that the sense of smell for mice is stronger at night, peaking in evening hours and waning during day light hours.

A team led by Erik Herzog, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, discovered the clock in the olfactory bulb, the brain center that aids the mouse in detecting odors.

The olfaction biological clock is hundreds of times larger than the known biological clock called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), located at the base of the brain right on top of where the optic nerves cross each other. Cells in both the SCN and the olfactory bulb keep 24-hour time and are normally highly sychronized to each other and environmental cycles of day-night.

"It's been a question for some time whether the SCN functions as the only biological clock," said Herzog. "One wouldn't believe that the ability to smell would cycle, but that's what we show.

" I think now that the SCN is like the atomic clock, important for keeping central time, and then there are all of these peripheral clocks - for timing tasks like sleep-wake, vigilance, digestion, olfaction, hearing, touch and vision, though not all yet found. It may be that the peripheral clocks are like individual wristwatches that we must periodically reset."........

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December 18, 2006, 9:09 PM CT

Discoveries Of New Species In Borneo's Rainforests

Researchers have discovered at least 52 new species of animals and plants this past year on the island of Borneo. The discoveries, described in a new WWF report, include 30 unique fish species, two tree frog species, 16 ginger species, three tree species and one large-leafed plant species.

"The more we look the more we find," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo Program. "These discoveries reaffirm Borneo's position as one of the most important centers of biodiversity in the world and why conservation there is so important."

Some of the creatures new to science include: a miniature fish, the world's second smallest vertebrate measuring less than a third of an inch in length and found in the highly acidic blackwater peat swamps of the island; six Siamese fighting fish, including one species with a beautiful iridescent blue-green marking; a catfish with protruding teeth and an adhesive belly which allows it to literally stick to rocks; and a tree frog with striking bright green eyes. The new ginger plants more than double the number of the Etlingera species found to date.

Several of these new species were found in the "Heart of Borneo," an 84,000 square mile mountainous region about the size of Kansas that is covered with equatorial rainforest in the center of the island. Large areas of the forest are at risk from destructive logging and expanding rubber, oil palm and pulp plantations. Since 1996, deforestation across Indonesia has increased to an average of 7,700 square miles each year, an area slightly smaller than Vermont. Today only half of Borneo's original forest cover remains.........

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December 15, 2006, 5:10 AM CT

Ebola-Outbreak Kills 5000 Gorillas

Since reports of ape die-offs first circulated widely in 2003, sceptics have doubted how large these die-offs were and whether Ebola was even the cause. The new study, led by Magdalena Bermejo of the University of Barcelona, allays these doubts because it was conducted in a closely monitored gorilla population where genetic tests confirmed Ebola as the cause of death. Bermejo and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Uppsala University first showed that 93% (221 of 238) individually known gorillas at the Lossi Sanctuary in northwest Congo were killed by Ebola during outbreaks in 2002 and 2003. They then used transect surveys to show that 95% gorilla mortality rates extended over a much larger area of several thousand square kilometres. Chimpanzees were also heavily affected, with a mortality rate of 77%.

Lossi was just one in a series of large gorilla and chimpanzee die-offs caused by Ebola over the last twelve years. Accurate figures on exactly how a number of apes have died are still not available. But given the large amount of prime habitat affected, these Ebola outbreaks may have killed as much as 25% of the world gorilla population. Especially troubling has been the concentration of Ebola impact on large, remote protected areas that were designed to be the bulwarks of ape conservation efforts. Ebola has not totally made apes totally extinct from these areas but it has pushed once huge populations down to smaller sizes at which they are dramatically less resilient to illegal hunting and other looming threats.........

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December 13, 2006, 8:00 PM CT

Identification of carbon dioxide receptors in insects

Mosquitoes don't mind morning breath. They use the carbon dioxide people exhale as a way to identify a potential food source. But when they bite, they can pass on many dangerous infectious diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, and West Nile encephalitis. Now, reporting in today's advance online publication in Nature, Leslie Vosshall's laboratory at Rockefeller University has identified the two molecular receptors in fruit flies that help these insects detect carbon dioxide. The findings could prove to be important against the fight against global infectious disease.

"Insects are particularly sensitive to carbon dioxide, using it to track food sources and assess their surrounding environment," says Vosshall, Chemers Family Associate Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller. "The neurons in insects that respond to carbon dioxide were already known, but the molecular mechanism by which these neurons sense this gas was a mystery".

One protein, called Gr21a, was previously known to be expressed in the carbon dioxide responsive neurons, which are in the antennae of the fruit fly. Since in the fly, chemosensory receptors commonly work together as a pair of unrelated proteins, Walton Jones, a former biomedical fellow and first author of the paper, began by looking for other members of the gustatory receptor family, and observed that the Gr63a protein was always co-expressed with Gr21a, both in the larva and in the adult fly.........

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December 13, 2006, 7:19 PM CT

Tigers Can Maintain High Numbers

A landmark study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) says tigers living in one of India's best-run national parks lose nearly a quarter of their population each year from poaching and natural mortality, yet their numbers remain stable due to a combination of high reproductive rates and abundant prey. The study, which appears in the journal Ecology, underscores the need of maintaining protected areas with high prey densities in an overall tiger conservation strategy, along with anti-poaching efforts and eliminating trade in tiger body parts.

The nine-year study in India's Nagarahole National Park found that an average of 23 percent of the park's tigers either move away or die each year from either naturally or from poaching outside of the park, yet total numbers remained high.

"This study shows that even well-protected wild tiger populations have naturally high rates of annual losses, and yet do fine because of their high reproductive rates," said WCS researcher Dr. Ullas Karanth, lead author of the study. "The conservation implications of this study show that effectively protecting reserves to maintain high prey densities is a key pillar in an overall strategy for the conservation of tigers".

The research team, which included Dr. Karanth and Dr. Jim Nichols from USGS, used remote cameras to identify individual tigers and then accurately estimate population trends in the park. Tigers can produce between 3-4 cubs per litter every 2-3 years.........

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December 13, 2006, 6:56 PM CT

Oysters Can Take Heat And Heavy Metals

Pollution is bad for the sea life and so is global warming, but aquatic organisms can be resilient. However, even organisms tough enough to survive one major onslaught may find that a double whammy is more than their molecular biology can take.

A new study has observed that even relatively low levels of heavy metal pollution can interfere with the metabolic processes of oysters, and that the effects of the pollution become especially notable when oyster metabolism is also affected by high seasonal temperatures. The combined effect is strong enough to lead to fatal weakness and disease, adding a fundamental explanation for documented oyster declines in the wild. The effect also reveals an additional impact that warming coastal waters may have on cold-blooded organisms.

Investigating the mechanisms by which the heavy metal cadmium and temperature can each affect metabolic processes in oysters, a new report by a team headed by University of North Carolina at Charlotte ecophysiologist Inna Sokolova finds that both cadmium and temperature independently decrease the efficiency of metabolic processes in the oysters' mitochondria - the place where stored food is turned into the energy living cells run on.

The study also finds that cadmium can cause an increase in the production of reactive oxygen species - dangerous metabolic by-products - while higher temperatures hamper the cellular processes that normally prevent the compounds from causing damage. The findings will appear in the recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.........

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December 11, 2006, 9:22 PM CT

Upsetting Notions about Honey Bees

Genetic research, based on information from the recently released honey bee genome, has toppled some long-held beliefs about the honey bee that colonized Europe and the U.S.

According to research published recently in Science, an international professional journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the four most common subspecies of honey bee originated in Africa and entered Europe in two separate migrations, said Dr. Spencer Johnston, entomologist with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station and one of the authors of the article.

A large number of different bee species exist in Asia, where it had long been thought the honey bee originated, Johnston said.

"Their origin in Africa was suggested in other studies, but our result shows it dramatically to be true," he said.

Taking genetic information from the honey bee genome sequencing effort, researchers from Texas A&M University, University of Illinois, Cornell University, Washington State University, University of Kansas and the University of California-Irvine, and one private producer traced the genealogy of honey bees. Two branches originate in Africa.

The honey bee is not native to North America; it was introduced from Europe for honey production in the early 1600s, Johnston said. Subspecies were introduced from Italy in 1859, and later from Spain, Portugal and elsewhere.........

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December 10, 2006, 5:39 PM CT

Unusual Deep Sea Animals

We are all familiar with dolphins, whales and sharks; we know what tuna and snapper look like, but what about some less familiar fish such as lizardfish, giant squid, or blind eels? There are so a number of lesser known animals in the depths of the ocean that we hear little or nothing about most times, it is interesting to investigate a few of these creatures and understand them a little more.

The first on our list of deep sea creatures is the fangtooth fish. This fish is one of the most evil looking ocean predators. It lives in the deep ocean and catches its prey by luring them in with glowing light organs called photophores. In such a dark abyss, fish are attracted to the light put off by the organ and once they are close enough the fangtooth fish catches them in his numerous large teeth. He looks like an underwater vampire.

Another carnivorous sea animal is the deep-sea lizardfish. These interesting fish look almost like a short snake in water. Their mouths are covered with harpoon-tipped teeth that grasp their prey and don't let go, similar to a fish hook. These teeth are hinged so that they can flattened down when prey is going in and stand up when resisting. They don't even need to actively swallow; the struggling prey just ratchets itself inside. With their glowing yellow eyes, the lizardfish is a wonder to behold.........

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December 10, 2006, 5:46 PM CT

Amazing Forms Of Life

I was reading the news about deep-sea creatures found in the Atlantic Ocean, and thought I might share some of this with you. The report speaks about mysterious creatures that are found in the deep sea. In one place the researchers found Atlantic shrimp, which was living around a vent that was releasing water heated to 765 degree Fahrenheit!

An underwater peak in the Coral Sea was home to a type of shrimp thought to have gone extinct 50 million years ago.

More than 3 miles beneath the Sargasso Sea, in the Atlantic, researchers collected a dozen new species eating each other or living on organic material that drifts down from above.

"Animals seem to have found a way to make a living just about everywhere," said Jesse Ausubel of the Sloan Foundation, discussing the findings of year six of the census of marine life.

Added Ron O'Dor, a senior scientist with the census: "We can't find any place where we can't find anything new".

Read more........

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