DNA recovered from fossilised bones of the moa, a giant extinct bird, has revealed a new geological history of New Zealand, reports a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
| Biology | November 18, 2009 04:30 PM |
DNA recovered from fossilised bones of the moa, a giant extinct bird, has revealed a new geological history of New Zealand, reports a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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| Biology | November 18, 2009 04:30 PM |
With thousands of stinging cells that can emit deadly venom from tentacles that can reach ten feet in length, the 50 or so species of box jellyfish have long been of interest to scientists and to the public. Yet little has been known about the evolution of this early branch in the animal tree of life.
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| Biology | November 18, 2009 04:30 PM |
Visually impaired people appear to be fearless, navigating busy sidewalks and crosswalks, safely finding their way using nothing more than a cane as a guide. The reason they can do this, researchers suggest, is that in at least some circumstances, blindness can heighten other senses, helping individuals adapt.
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| Biology | November 17, 2009 04:29 PM |
Are ladybugs being overtaken by wasps? A Université de Montréal entomologist is investigating a type of wasp (Dinocampus coccinellae) present in Quebec that forces ladybugs (Coccinella maculata) to carry their larvae. These wasps lay their eggs on the ladybug's body, a common practice in the insect world, yet they don't kill their host.
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| Biology | November 17, 2009 04:29 PM |
A new study finds that a species of sea star stays cool using a strategy never before seen in the animal kingdom. The sea stars soak up cold sea water into their bodies during high tide as buffer against potentially damaging temperatures brought about by direct sunlight at low tide.
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| Biology | November 16, 2009 05:19 PM |
Most of the linguistic functions in humans are controlled by the left cerebral hemisphere. A study of captive chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center (Atlanta, Georgia), reported in the January 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex), suggests that this "hemispheric lateralization" for language may have its evolutionary roots in the gestural communication of our common ancestors. A large majority of the chimpanzees in the study showed a significant bias towards right-handed gestures when communicating, which may reflect a similar dominance of the left hemisphere for communication in chimpanzees as that seen for language functions in humans.
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| Biology | November 11, 2009 06:27 PM |
The concept of altruism has long been debated in philosophical circles, and more recently, evolutionary biologists have joined the debate. From the perspective of natural selection, altruism may have evolved because any action that improves the likelihood of a relative's survival and reproduction increases the chance of an individual's DNA being passed on. Social behavior, kin recognition, and altruism are well known in the animal kingdom; however, although plants have the ability to sense and respond to other plants, their ability to recognize kin and act altruistically has been the subject of few studies.
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| Biology | November 11, 2009 06:27 PM |
If humans are genetically related to chimps, why did our brains develop the innate ability for language and speech while theirs did not?
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| Biology | November 11, 2009 06:27 PM |
The most extensive DNA study to-date of Africa's rarest monkey reveals that the species had an intriguing sexual past. Of the last two remaining populations of the recently discovered kipunji, one population shows evidence of past mating with baboons while the other does not, says a new study in Biology Letters. The results may help to set conservation priorities for this critically endangered species, researchers say.
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| Biology | November 10, 2009 03:17 PM |
Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.
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| Biology | November 6, 2009 01:25 AM |
Spanish researchers have studied the fossil record of hadrosaurs, the so-called 'duck-billed' dinosaurs, in the Iberian Peninsula for the purpose of determining that they were the last of their kind to inhabit the European continent before disappearing during the K/T extinction event that occurred 65.5 million years ago. Most notable among these fossils is the discovery of a new hadrosaur, the Arenysaurus ardevoli, found in Huesca, Spain.
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| Biology | November 4, 2009 07:11 PM |
For more than 25 years, all attempts at culturing pearls from the queen conch (Strombus gigas) have been unsuccessful—until now. For the first time, novel and proprietary seeding techniques to produce beaded (nucleated) and non-beaded cultured pearls from the queen conch have been developed by scientists from Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI). With less than two years of research and experimentation, Drs. Héctor Acosta-Salmón and Megan Davis, co-inventors, have produced more than 200 cultured pearls using the techniques they developed. Prior to this breakthrough, no high-quality queen conch pearl had been cultured. This discovery opens up a unique opportunity to introduce a new gem to the industry. This significant accomplishment is comparable to that of the Japanese in the 1920s when they commercially applied the original pearl culture techniques developed for pearl oysters.
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| Biology | November 2, 2009 05:01 PM |
Moose eat plants; wolves kill moose. What difference does this classic predator-prey interaction make to biodiversity?
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| Biology | November 2, 2009 05:01 PM |
Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has remained a mystery. Now, researchers reporting in the November 3rd issue of Current Biology who have compared DNA from four of the world's dozen or so known Falklands wolf museum specimens to that of living canids offer new insight into the evolutionary ancestry of these enigmatic carnivores.
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| Biology | November 2, 2009 05:01 PM |
We all know adolescents get testy from time to time. Thank goodness we don't have young tyrannosaurs running around the neighborhood.
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| Biology | November 2, 2009 05:01 PM |
The complicated sex life of the papaya is about to get even more interesting, thanks to a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will fund basic research on the papaya sex chromosomes and will lead to the development of a papaya that produces only hermaphrodite offspring, an advance that will enhance papaya health while radically cutting papaya growers' production costs and their use of fertilizers and water.
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| Biology | October 29, 2009 11:20 PM |
The coconut rhinoceros beetle (CRB) invasion, first detected in 2007, has been checked by the determined efforts of UOG scientists, Guam Department of Agriculture and the United States Department of Agriculture. "We've stopped the expected population explosion," says UOG entomologist Aubrey Moore, "due to the rapid response of the government of Guam and the federal government. The infestation has been contained to the northwest coast of the island, but we have yet to see a decrease in the population."
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| Biology | October 28, 2009 08:09 PM |
Dinosaurs may be the focus of much Cretaceous fossil hunting, but a Penn State researcher and his colleagues are hot on the trail of fossil plants in Patagonia, Argentina, thanks to a $1.57 million grant from the National Science Foundation as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
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| Biology | October 27, 2009 10:54 PM |
The Government of Nepal announced today an expansion of Bardia National Park in the Terai Arc Landscape by 900 sq km, which will increase critical habitat for tigers.
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| Biology | October 27, 2009 10:54 PM |
Experiments led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have demonstrated that normally friendly ants can turn against each other by exploiting the chemical cues they use to distinguish colony-mates from rivals.
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| Biology | October 26, 2009 10:13 PM |
What do a West African drummer and a sperm whale have in common? According to some reports, they can both spot rhythms in the chatter of an ocean crowded with the calls of marine mammals -- a feat impossible for the untrained human ear.
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| Biology | October 26, 2009 10:13 PM |
Cornell researchers have discovered a genetic mechanism in fruit flies that prevents two closely related species from reproducing, a finding that offers clues to how species evolve.
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| Biology | October 25, 2009 02:28 AM |
A Spanish researcher has analysed the preferences of wolves from the north east of the Iberian Peninsula to demonstrate that, in reality, their favourite prey are roe deer, deer and wild boar, ahead of domestic ruminants (sheep, goats, cows and horses).
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| Biology | October 20, 2009 11:26 PM |
"2009 Deep Ocean Odyssey" will be held October 21, 2009 in Kristiansand, Norway from 12:00-15:00 Western European Time and live webcast at http://www.mar-eco.no/
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| Biology | October 20, 2009 11:26 PM |
Genetic information from an extinct species of bison preserved in permafrost for thousands of years could help improve modern agricultural livestock and breeding programs, according to University of Adelaide researchers.
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| Biology | October 15, 2009 07:21 PM |
By directly manipulating the activity of individual neurons, scientists have given flies memories of a bad experience they never really had, according to a report in the October 16th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.
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| Biology | October 14, 2009 07:21 PM |
The evolution of altruism has long puzzled researchers and has mainly been explained previously from ultimate perspectives—I will help you now because I expect there to be some long-term benefit to me. However, a new study by researchers at the Primate Research Institute (PRI) and the Wildlife Research Center (WRC) of Kyoto University shows that chimpanzees altruistically help conspecifics, even in the absence of direct personal gain or immediate reciprocation, although the chimpanzees were much more likely to help each other upon request than voluntarily. The findings are published October 14 in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.
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| Biology | October 14, 2009 07:21 PM |
Imagine the gruesome sound of bones snapping as a thirsty, 30-ton dinosaur tramples a heap of fresh carcasses on his way to a rapidly shrinking lake.
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| Biology | October 14, 2009 07:21 PM |
For an animal that has a brain about the size of two grains of sand, a lot of plasticity seems to be packed into the head of the tropical paper wasp Polybia aequatorialis.
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| Biology | October 14, 2009 07:21 PM |
When Professor Joel Levine's team genetically tweaked fruit flies so that they didn't produce certain pheromones, they triggered a sexual tsunami in their University of Toronto Mississauga laboratory. In fact, they produced bugs so irresistible that normal male fruit flies attempted to mate with pheromone-free males and even females from a different species—generally a no-no in the fruit fly dating scene.
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