Genes, Brain Chemicals And Complex Bee BehaviorUsing a new combination of techniques, U.S. and European researchers have identified 36 genes that encode brain chemicals likely to play a role in the complex behaviors of the honey bee--from working in and defending the hive to foraging, displaying and interpreting dance language. Understanding the jobs these chemicals, called neuropeptides, carry out in the honey bee will help scientists understand what they do in humans, the researchers........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 11/1/2006 8:31:01 PM)
Why There Are More Species In The Tropics?Why are there more species in the tropics than in the temperate regions of the globe? Many of the world's species live in the tropics (perhaps more than half), but the reason has been debated for more than 100 years.
Many researchers have hypothesized that climatic factors somehow cause species to originate more quickly in tropical regions. In a paper appearing in the recent issue of The American Naturalist, John Wiens and a group of........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 11/1/2006 5:26:05 PM)
Floating Lovers Count TooIn a paper from the recent issue of The American Naturalist, Vincenzo Penteriani, Fermín Otalora, and Miguel Ferrer, scientists at the Estacion Biologica de Doñana (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain), focus on the forgotten and invisible side of animal populations - the floaters. Floaters are dispersed individuals who enter the reproductive population when breeding territory or a potential mate become available.
The........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 11/1/2006 4:09:01 PM)
Save Threatened TurtlesEcology and conservation experts from the University of Exeter today urge international governments to work together to protect threatened Caribbean sea turtle populations.
The Cayman Islands, a UK Overseas Territory, once supported one of the world's largest sea turtle rookeries, which comprised some 6.5 million adult green and loggerhead turtles. These populations were driven into decline from the mid-1600s onwards, when massive harvesting........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/31/2006 9:24:18 PM)
Global Warming And Insect Population GrowthInsects have proven to be highly adaptable organisms, able through evolution to cope with a variety of environmental changes, including relatively recent changes in the world's climate. But like something out of a scary Halloween tale, new University of Washington research suggests insects' ability to adapt to warmer temperatures carries an unexpected consequence – more insects.
It appears that insect species that adapt to warmer climates........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/31/2006 4:50:15 AM)
New insight into cell divisionWhen cells divide, control mechanisms ensure that the genetic material, in other words the chromosomes, is correctly distributed to the daughter cells. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin have now explained the molecular principles of these control processes. The so-called checkpoint kinases, i.e. the enzymes which perform this controlling, are not directly associated only with the chromosomes, as was........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 10/29/2006 8:11:10 PM)
Untold Stories Of Elk SkeletonSeeing the well-preserved antlers, skull and partial skeleton of a very large elk that was found in northern Wisconsin was impressive enough. But what really intrigued Jean Hudson was what was found nearby - a Clovis point, a type of spearhead used by hunters from about 10,000 years ago.
Very few have been found this far north, and this spearhead may be the one that doomed the animal all those millennia ago, says Hudson, an associate........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/29/2006 7:45:44 PM)
Mate-attracting ChemicalsIt's all about "the birds and the bees." And now, "the silkworm moths and the fruit flies".
A chemical ecologist and a genetics researcher at the University of California, Davis, have joined forces to trick fruit flies into thinking that silkworm moths are potential mates.
Groundbreaking research in the labs of chemical ecologist Walter Leal and genetics researcher Deborah Kimbrell shows that genetically engineered fruit flies responded........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/27/2006 9:00:53 PM)
What Makes A Bee A He Or A She?Three years ago, researchers pinpointed a gene called csd that determines gender in honey bees, and now a research team led by University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Jianzhi "George" Zhang has unraveled details of how the gene evolved. The new insights could prove useful in designing strategies for breeding honey bees, which are major pollinators of economically important crops-and notoriously tricky to breed.
The findings of Zhang........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/27/2006 4:39:36 AM)
Pollinators Help One-third Of Crop ProductionPollinators such as bees, birds and bats affect 35 percent of the world's crop production, increasing the output of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide, finds a new study published recently (Wednesday, Oct. 25), in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences and co-authored by a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The study is the first global estimate of crop production that is reliant upon........Go to the Plant-science-blog (Added on 10/26/2006 4:56:15 AM)
New Theory For Mass ExtinctionsA new theory on just what causes Earth's worst mass extinctions may help settle the endless scientific dust-up on the matter. Whether you favor meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, cosmic rays, epidemics, or some other cause for the worst mass extinction events in Earth's history, no single cause has ever satisfied all scientists all the time for any extinction event. That may be because big extinctions aren't simple events.
The new........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 10/24/2006 7:19:41 PM)
Strange Bacteria Thriving Two Miles UndergroundA Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight. As per members of the team, the finding suggests life might exist in similarly extreme conditions even on other worlds.
The self-sustaining bacterial community, which thrives in nutrient-rich groundwater found near a South African gold mine,........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 10/22/2006 11:29:00 PM)
Newton's Apple Tree Bears FruitEd Vetter (S.B. 1942) gave MIT an apple tree that is a direct descendant of the tree under which Isaac Newton sat when he is said to have conceived the theory of gravity.
"I couldn't think of a better place than MIT to put a tree that illustrates a law of physics," says Vetter, whose tree stands in MIT's President's Garden, a sunny spot off the Infinite Corridor.
This fall, the beloved tree bore bright, healthy fruit--a sure sign of........Go to the Plant-science-blog (Added on 10/22/2006 8:19:43 PM)
First New Mammal Found In Europe In 100 YearsMeet the Cypriot mouse-the first new mammal species to be discovered in Europe in more than a century.
The researchers who announced the find yesterday think the previously unknown creature is confined to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus (map of Cyprus).
The mouse differs from other European mice by having a bigger head, bigger ears, bigger eyes, and bigger teeth, says its discoverer, French zoologist Thomas Cucchi.
Cucchi, who is........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/17/2006 9:58:56 PM)
New Research To Cut Animal TestingScientists at The University of Manchester have been awarded £130,000 to develop new techniques to reduce the need for animals in drug testing.
Current checks to establish whether a new drug is carcinogenic can be inconclusive and require further testing on live animals to establish whether they are harmful or not.
Dr Richard Walmsley and his colleagues at the University spin-out company he founded, Gentronix, have developed techniques........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/17/2006 9:41:47 PM)
Dietitian Offers Substitutes For Spinach's NutrientsWhile the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has lifted the ban on fresh spinach and the produce is back on a number of grocery store shelves and restaurant plates, some consumers may not be so eager to return to eating the leafy greens that left at least three people dead and 199 others sickened across 26 states after an E coli O157:H7 outbreak.
A dietitian at Washington University in St. Louis offers advice on finding new sources of the........Go to the Plant-science-blog (Added on 10/16/2006 9:22:50 PM)
Apricot And Cashew Nut LeftoversI was surfing this morning and this article got my attention.
Apricot and cashew nut by-products can be used as renewable feedstocks to make nanomaterials, say researchers in the US.
George John and Praveen Kumar Vemula from the City College of the City University of New York, US, have used plant-derived resources to make a variety of soft nanomaterials, which are useful for a wide variety of applications.
John started with amygdalin,........Go to the Plant-science-blog (Added on 10/16/2006 9:09:37 PM)
Giant Pandas Can See ColorThey may be black and white, but new research at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Zoo Atlanta shows that giant pandas can see in color. Graduate researcher Angela Kelling tested the ability of two Zoo Atlanta pandas, Yang Yang and Lun Lun, to see color and observed that both pandas were able to discriminate between colors and various shades of gray. The research is reported in the psychology journal Learning and Behavior, volume 34 issue........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/15/2006 8:17:21 PM)
Plants Become Air Quality DetectivesWhat does a garden have to do with the chemistry of the atmosphere and air quality? One of the newest exhibits at NASA Goddard's Visitor Center, Greenbelt, Md., is a project correlation to NASA's Aura satellite. Aura is currently studying atmospheric chemistry and air pollution from space. The new Aura Ozone Monitoring Garden is used to study air quality from the ground by seeing how ozone in the air damages the leaves of certain plants.
........Go to the Plant-science-blog (Added on 10/12/2006 7:53:58 PM)
Water Temperatures, Pollution Have Oysters In Hot WaterOysters exposed to high water temperatures and a common heavy metal are unable to obtain sufficient oxygen and convert it to cellular energy, as per a new study presented at The American Physiological Society conference, Comparative Physiology 2006.
The study showed how cadmium, a heavy metal, reduces the oyster's tolerance of warmer water temperatures and makes it more vulnerable during the summer when water temperatures rise. Half of the........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/11/2006 5:02:07 AM)
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Why Wolves Not Dispersing As Fast As ExpectedIn 1995, 14 wolves were transferred to Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. from the Canadian Rocky Mountains, with 17 more joining them the following year. More than 1,000 healthy wolves have descended from the original 31, with about 150 of them still residing in the park boundaries.
However, wolves have been known to disperse at a rate of 100 km a year, but the Yellowstone wolves have only spread at one-tenth that rate. The slow........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 11/1/2006 4:47:40 PM)
Old Leaves Need To Die In TimeIn a study from the recent issue of The American Naturalist, researchers Alex Boonman and co-workers from the Netherlands show that it is beneficial for plants growing in a dense stand to shed their oldest, lower leaves once these become shaded. By using transgenic tobacco plants that do not shed their lower leaves, they were able to show that shaded old leaves become a burden to a plant because they no longer photosynthesize but still require........Go to the Plant-science-blog (Added on 11/1/2006 4:19:15 PM)
Missing Link In Elephant LineageA pig-sized, tusked creature that roamed the earth some 27 million years ago represents a missing link between the oldest known relatives of elephants and the more recent group from which modern elephants descended, an international team that includes University of Michigan paleontologist William J. Sanders has found.
The group's findings, to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 11/1/2006 3:51:18 PM)
New Species Discovered Inhawaiian IslandsA three-week scientific expedition to French Frigate Shoals in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument returned to Honolulu on Sunday with the discovery of a number of new species and a better understanding of marine biodiversity in the Hawaiian Archipelago.
An all-star team of world-renowned taxonomists (biologists specializing in identifying and naming organisms) and an experienced support crew collected and photographed........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/31/2006 5:06:00 AM)
Grasslands To Go NativeMontana rancher and inventor Lee Arbuckle may soon change the nation's market for native grass seed, a tricky-to-harvest crop worth hundreds of millions and vital to restoring wildlands.
With the help of the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center at Montana State University, Arbuckle and his wife Maggie have spent the last five years researching and developing a native grass seed harvester. The Arbuckle Native Seedster will be manufactured........Go to the Plant-science-blog (Added on 10/31/2006 4:56:05 AM)
Insights Into Spiders' Polymer ArtA team of MIT engineers has identified two key physical processes that lend spider silk its unrivaled strength and durability, bringing closer to reality the long-sought goal of spinning artificial spider silk.
Manufactured spider silk could be used for artificial tendons and ligaments, sutures, parachutes and bulletproof vests. But engineers have not managed to do what spiders do effortlessly.
As per a research findings reported in the........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/31/2006 4:19:18 AM)
Flight of the BumblebeeRebecca Flanagan has probably come as close as a human can to reading the mind of a bumblebee.
Flanagan, a graduate student in biological sciences, and Associate Professor Jeffrey Karron are studying the behaviors of bees as they gather pollen - which plant species the bees forage on, which flowers they probe and in what order, and how a number of blooms they visit before moving on to another plant. In doing so, the bees make plant........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/29/2006 6:52:27 PM)
How Female Pronghorns Choose Mate?When a female animal compares males to choose a mate, she can't order a laboratory genetic screen for each suitor. Instead, she has to rely on external cues that may indicate genetic quality. Until now, biologists have focused on elaborate ornaments, such as the peacock's tail, as cues that females might use.
The thorny problem has been to explain how the connection between male genetic quality and ornament quality can be maintained. If an........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/27/2006 9:23:21 PM)
What Killed Dinosaurs 65 Million Years AgoGrowing evidence shows that the dinosaurs and their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact alone, as per a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The Chicxulub impact may have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteor impacts and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/27/2006 5:19:21 AM)
Nuclear Receptors In Bee GenomeSusan Fahrbach, a Wake Forest University biologist, is among the more than 170 scientists who helped decode the honey bee genome. She contributed to the article on the bee genome sequence that appears in the Oct. 26 issue of Nature.
Her piece of the puzzle -- analyzing the nuclear hormone receptors found in the bee genome -- also appears in the current issue of Insect Molecular Biology.
The honey bee was chosen to have its genome........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/26/2006 4:50:04 AM)
Trotting With Emus To Walk With DinosaursOne way to make sense of 165-million-year-old dino tracks may be to hang out with emus, say paleontologists studying thousands of dinosaur footprints at the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite in northern Wyoming. Because they are about the same size, walk on two legs and have similar feet, emus turn out to be the best modern version of the enigmatic reptiles that once trotted along a long-lost coastline in the Middle Jurassic.
"We don't have any........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/24/2006 7:11:03 PM)
Cougar Predation Key To Ecosystem HealthThe general disappearance of cougars from a portion of Zion National Park in the past 70 years has allowed deer populations to dramatically increase, leading to severe ecological damage, loss of cottonwood trees, eroding streambanks, and declining biodiversity.
This "trophic cascade" of environmental degradation, all associated with the decline of a major predator, has been shown in a new study to affect a broad range of terrestrial and........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/24/2006 7:04:34 PM)
How To Seal Dna BreaksResearchers investigating an important DNA-repair enzyme now have a better picture of the final steps of a process that glues together, or ligates, the ends of DNA strands to restore the double helix.
The enzyme, DNA ligase, repairs the millions of DNA breaks generated during the normal course of a cell's life, for example, linking together the abundant DNA fragments formed during replication of the genetic material in dividing cells.
........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 10/22/2006 8:38:40 PM)
Kartchner Caverns To Become Microbial ObservatoryUniversity of Arizona scientists will investigate the lives of Kartchner Caverns State Park's tiniest inhabitants with the help of a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
The five-year grant to the UA will add Kartchner Caverns, part of the Arizona State Parks system, to the National Science Foundation's worldwide network of Microbial Observatories.
Research at the networks' sites is revealing the goings-on of the........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 10/19/2006 10:01:35 PM)
Harmful Algal Bloom ModelsA new observation and modeling program focused on the southern Gulf of Maine and adjacent New England shelf waters could aid policymakers in deciding whether or not to re-open, develop, and manage offshore shellfish beds with potential sustained harvesting value of more than $50 million per year. These areas are presently closed to the harvest of certain species of shellfish due to the presence of red tide toxins.
Researchers at the Woods........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 10/16/2006 10:15:12 PM)
Tiger population decliningExperts say that illegal wildlife trade ranks among the most lucrative rackets in the world -- in the range of such enterprises as narcotics and arms smuggling. The international police organization Interpol estimates the annual turnover in wildlife trade is over $6 billion.
Tigers (Panthera tigris) are mammals of the Felidae family and one of four "big cats" in the Panthera genus. They are superpredators and the largest and most powerful........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/16/2006 9:42:41 PM)
Link Ice-age Climate-change Records To Ocean SalinitySudden decreases in temperature over Greenland and tropical rainfall patterns during the last Ice Age have been linked for the first time to rapid changes in the salinity of the north Atlantic Ocean, as per research published Oct. 5, 2006, in the journal Nature. The results provide further evidence that ocean circulation and chemistry respond to changes in climate.
Using chemical traces in fossil shells of microscopic planktonic life forms,........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 10/16/2006 9:19:13 PM)
Health of Florida's Coral ReefNASA satellite data was used to help monitor the health of Florida's coral reef as part of a field research effort completed this August and September.
The project was the first comprehensive assessment of the resiliency of reefs along the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The sanctuary is administered by NOAA in partnership with the Florida Department of Environmental........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/12/2006 9:04:16 PM)
In Wake Of Horse Slaughter BillThe American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, making its way from the U.S. House to the Senate, could leave thousands of horses with no final resting ground.
Composting may be an environmentally friendly option that fits in the "circle of life" frame of mind and may be less emotional, two area scientists said.
On Sept. 7 the House approved the Act, which bans the slaughter of horses for human consumption by a vote of 263-146. The Senate........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/12/2006 5:15:49 AM)
Uncovering Mysteries Of MemoryKeeping track of one set of keys is difficult enough, but imagine having to remember the locations of thousands of sets of keys. Do you use landmarks to remember where you put them? Do you have a mental map of their locations?
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire hope to learn more about memory and its evolution by studying the Clark's nutcracker, a bird with a especially challenging task: remembering where it buried its supply of........Go to the Animal-science-blog (Added on 10/11/2006 5:13:17 AM)
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