http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/biology-blog.html Biology blog from biology-blog.com, the place for information. Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT en-us http://www.biology-blog.com/images/blogs/biology-blog.jpg http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/biology-blog.html 114 99 http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/9-2010/free-as-a-bird.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/9-2010/free-as-a-bird.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT It may seem like birds have the freedom to fly wherever they like, but scientists at the University of Missouri have shown that what's on the ground has a great effect on where a bird flies. This information could be used by foresters and urban planners to improve bird habitats that would help maintain strong bird populations........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/9-2010/effects-of-sound-on-marine-life.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/9-2010/effects-of-sound-on-marine-life.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT A combination of the biology of marine mammals, mechanical vibrations and acoustics has led to a breakthrough discovery allowing researchers to better understand the potential harmful effects of sound on marine mammals such as whales and dolphins. An international team of scientists from San Diego State University, UC San Diego, and the Kolmården Zoo in Sweden has developed an approach that integrates advanced computing, X-ray Computerized axial tomography scanners, and modern computational methods that give a 3D simulated look inside the head of a Cuvier's beaked whale........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/complex-interactions-keep-pests-under-control.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/complex-interactions-keep-pests-under-control.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Proponents of organic farming often speak of nature's balance in ways that sound almost spiritual, prompting criticism that their views are unscientific and naïve. At the other end of the spectrum are those who see farms as battlefields where insect pests and plant diseases must be vanquished with the magic bullets of modern agriculture: pesticides, fungicides and the like........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/ants-use-multiple-antibiotics-as-weed-killers.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/ants-use-multiple-antibiotics-as-weed-killers.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Research led by Dr Matt Hutchings and published recently in the journal BMC Biology shows that ants use the antibiotics to inhibit the growth of unwanted fungi and bacteria in their fungus cultures which they use to feed their larvae and queen. These antibiotics are produced by actinomycete bacteria that live on the ants in a mutual symbiosis........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/genome-comparison-of-ants.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/genome-comparison-of-ants.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT By comparing two species of ants, Shelley Berger, PhD, the Daniel S. Och University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues Danny Reinberg, PhD, New York University, and Juergen Liebig, PhD, Arizona State University, have established an important new avenue of research for epigenetics -- the study of how the expression or suppression of particular genes affects an organism's characteristics, development, and even behavior........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/move-closer-to-making-any-crop-drought-tolerant.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/move-closer-to-making-any-crop-drought-tolerant.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Drought-tolerant crops have moved closer to becoming reality. A collaborative team of researchers has made a significant advance on the discovery last year by the University of California, Riverside's Sean Cutler of pyrabactin, a synthetic chemical that mimics a naturally produced stress hormone in plants to help them cope with drought conditions........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/make-way-for-ducklings.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/make-way-for-ducklings.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Parent birds know best when it comes to taking care of their babies. But, when food gets scarce and they are forced to fly longer distances to grab a bite, "egg sitting" time drops off. What impact does this have on their brood? "I guess everybody, from a human health perspective, knows that what a mother does during pregnancy can have all sorts of effects on her babies," says Bill Hopkins, an associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Tech. He is holding a duckling in his hand. It's one of a number of he and his team are studying. "We study how these little guys can be affected by the things that mom does"........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/glue-that-holds-oyster.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/glue-that-holds-oyster.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Oyster reefs are on the decline, with over-harvesting and pollution reducing some stocks as much as 98 percent over the last two centuries. With a growing awareness of oysters' critical roles filtering water, preventing erosion, guarding coasts from storm damage, and providing habitat for other organisms, scientists have been investigating how oyster reefs form in order to better understand the organisms and offer potential guidance to oyster re-introduction projects........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/evolutionary-response-to-climate-change.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/evolutionary-response-to-climate-change.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Researchers at the University of Oregon have determined the fine-scale genetic structure of the first animal to show an evolutionary response to rapid climate change. They used a high-throughput sequencing technique called Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD) tagging to make the discovery. Their results, which focus on the pitcher plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii, are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/light-particles-to-accelerate-algae-growth.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/light-particles-to-accelerate-algae-growth.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Researchers and engineers seek to meet three goals in the production of biofuels from non-edible sources such as microalgae: efficiency, economical production and ecological sustainability. Syracuse University's Radhakrishna Sureshkumar, professor and chair of biomedical and chemical engineering in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science, and SU chemical engineering Ph.D. student Satvik Wani have uncovered a process that is a promising step toward accomplishing these three goals........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/understanding-root-and-seedling-development.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/understanding-root-and-seedling-development.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT A biosensor utilizing black platinum and carbon nanotubes developed at Purdue University will help give researchers a better understanding of how the plant hormone auxin regulates root growth and seedling establishment. Marshall Porterfield, an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering and biomedical engineering, created a new sensor to detect the movement of auxin along a plant's root surface in real time without damaging the plants........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/hitchhiking-bacteria-can-go-against-the-flow.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/hitchhiking-bacteria-can-go-against-the-flow.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT A newly released co-author of studyed by professor Kam Tang of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science reveals that tiny aquatic organisms known as "water fleas" play an important role in carrying hitchhiking bacteria to otherwise inaccessible lake and ocean habitats. The article, "Bacteria dispersal by hitchhiking on zooplankton," appeared in the June 29 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was co-authored by researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Stechlin, Gera number of........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/what-happens-between-mica-sheets.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/what-happens-between-mica-sheets.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT View a video of Helen Hansma of the University of California, Santa Barbara. That age-old question, "where did life on Earth start?" now has a new answer. If the life between the mica sheets hypothesis is correct, life would have originated between sheets of mica that were layered like the pages in a book........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/fluorescent-fruit-flies-shed-new-light.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/fluorescent-fruit-flies-shed-new-light.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT A lot has changed about the way researchers study sexual selection and reproduction. Some of it has to do with new tools; some of it has to do with new attitudes. There is a lot more going on than just "sperm meets egg". "It was simply thought of as "this army of sperm competing," so it functioned as a raffle; the more tickets you bought, the more sperm you transferred, the more likely you were to win out in that competition," explains Scott Pitnick, a professor of biology at Syracuse University. "Females were perceived as these passive vessels in which this competition played out--that females didn't play an active role. That's really not the case."....... ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/flower-dwelling-yeast.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/flower-dwelling-yeast.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT A beneficial yeast that tolerates fungicide may offer a "one-two punch" against Fusarium graminearum, the fungal culprit behind Fusarium head blight ("scab"). U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Ohio State University (OSU) researchers isolated an improved variant of the yeast Cryptococcus flavescens about two years ago, and are evaluating its potential as a biocontrol agent........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/as-crops-wither-in-russias-severe-drought.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/8-2010/as-crops-wither-in-russias-severe-drought.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT As the fate of Europe's largest collection of fruit and berries hangs in the balance of a Russian court decision, the Global Crop Diversity Trust issued an urgent appeal for the Russian government to embrace its heroic tradition as protector of the world's crop diversity and halt the planned destruction of an incredibly valuable crop collection near St. Petersburg. Pavlovsk Experiment Station is the largest European field genebank for fruits and berries, and is part of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, where Russian researchers famously starved to death rather than eat the seeds under their protection during the 900-day siege of Leningrad during World War II........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/ancient-stress-hormone-in-pre-historic-fish.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/ancient-stress-hormone-in-pre-historic-fish.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT A University of British Columbia zoologist has discovered a new corticosteroid hormone in the sea lamprey, an eel-like fish and one of the earliest vertebrates dating back 500 million years. These findings have shed light on the evolution of steroid hormones and may help conservation and management efforts for lampreys........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/how-cranberry-juice-fights-bacteria.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/how-cranberry-juice-fights-bacteria.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Revealing the science behind the homespun advice, a team of scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has identified and measured the molecular forces that enable cranberry juice to fight off urinary tract infections in people. The data is published in the paper "Direct adhesion force measurements between E. coli and human uroepithelial cells in cranberry juice cocktail," which was published on-line, ahead of print, by the journal Molecular Nutrition and Food Research. The research illuminates the basic mechanics of E. coli infections, which has implications for developing new antibiotic drugs and infection-resistant materials for invasive medical devices........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/rapidly-disappearing-ancient-plant-cycads.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/rapidly-disappearing-ancient-plant-cycads.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT Cycads, "living fossil" descendents of the first plants that colonized land and reproduced with seeds, are rapidly going extinct because of invasive pests and habitat loss, particularly those species endemic to islands. But new research on Cycas micronesica published recently as the cover article in Molecular Ecology calls into question the characterization of these plants as relicts (leftovers of formerly abundant organisms), and gives a glimpse into how the remaining plantsthose that survived the loss of more than 90% of their populationcan be conserved and managed. By sampling what is left of C. micronesica on Guam, researchers, including some from the American Museum of Natural History, found moderate genetic variation within local populations and different levels of gene flow between populations........ ]]> http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/breaking-biomass-better.html http://www.biology-blog.com/blogs/permalinks/7-2010/breaking-biomass-better.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:11:00 GMT One of the challenges in making cellulosic biofuels commercially viable is to cost-effectively deconstruct plant material to liberate fermentable energy-rich sugars. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is funding several projects focused on identifying enzymes in organisms that optimally degrade cellulosic feedstocks. One such source are fungi, which break down dead wood and leaf litter in forests; in fact, some pest management companies consider wood rot more destructive for homes than termites........ ]]>