Genomics. Bioinformatics. UMich. Visualization 2. Contagious cancer in dogs confirmed; origi. See article by Murgia et al. in the August 11, 2006, issue of the journal Cell for details.A new study in the August 11, 2006 issue of the journal Cell provides evidence that a form of cancer afflicting dogs has spread from one individual to another by the transmission of the tumor cells themselves. The disease demonstrates how a cancer cell can become a successful parasite with a worldwide distribution, according to the researchers. The findings may have broad implications for conservation biology and for scientists' understanding of cancer progression, the researchers said. Robin Weiss of University College London and his colleagues traced the origin of so-called canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) to a single clone. They estimated that the parasitic cancer arose at least 200 years ago in either a wolf or a closely related ancient dog breed.
They quickly found that DNA isolated from the tumor and blood samples were not a match. Source : Cell Press. Top 10: Life's greatest inventions - 09 April 2005 - New Sc. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2|3|4|5|6 1. Multicellularity 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1. Ponder this one in the bath. Sponges are a key example of multicellular life, an innovation that transformed living things from solitary cells into fantastically complex bodies. Cells have been joining forces for billions of years. Eukaryotes could make this leap because they had already evolved many of the necessary attributes for other purposes.
So what started it? Researchers are now trying to reconstruct the biology of the first multicellular creatures by studying the genomes of their nearest living relatives. Yet bigger and more complex isn't necessarily better. Claire Ainsworth. 2. THEY appeared in an evolutionary blink and changed the rules of life forever.
The first eyes appeared about 543 million years ago - the very beginning of the Cambrian period - in a group of trilobites called the Redlichia. So what happened in that magic million years? More From New Scientist. Genetic Music: Music from DNA and protein sequences. Group selection. Group selection was used as a popular explanation for adaptations, especially by V. C. Wynne-Edwards.[1][2] For several decades, however, critiques, particularly by George C. Williams,[3] John Maynard Smith[4] and C.M. Perrins (1964), historically cast serious doubt on group selection as a major mechanism of evolution.
However, some scientists have pursued the idea over the last few decades, and group selection models have seen a resurgence since the mid-1990s with increasing popularity.[5][6][7][8] Overview[edit] Group selection is possible when the aggregation of individuals into groups with a particular social structure promotes the fitness of group members. More complex forms of group behavior involve individuals sacrificing personal fitness on behalf of other members of the group, as when a sterile soldier termite self-sacrifices to protect the nest. Theoretical models of the 1960s suggested that group selection involving altruism is unlikely to evolve. Rb > c rbk + be > c. Swarm Behavior. I used to think ants knew what they were doing.
The ones marching across my kitchen counter looked so confident, I just figured they had a plan, knew where they were going and what needed to be done. How else could ants organize highways, build elaborate nests, stage epic raids, and do all the other things ants do? Turns out I was wrong. Ants aren't clever little engineers, architects, or warriors after all—at least not as individuals. When it comes to deciding what to do next, most ants don't have a clue.
How do we explain, then, the success of Earth's 12,000 or so known ant species? "Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. Blackwell Synergy: J Evolution Biol, Vol 19, Issue 5: Table of C. Eels and groupers hunt better together - life - 05 December 2006. Fish of two different species have been filmed helping each other to hunt. It is the first known instance of two unrelated species hunting cooperatively, except for humans. Like a hunter bringing a dog to flush out rabbits, groupers entice moray eels to hunt with them (movie 1). Surprisingly, this might also shed light on how our own species evolved. Groupers are bulky fish that hunt in daytime in the open water off coral reefs. Moray eels hunt by slithering through the reef at night.
When both hunt together, prey barely stands a chance: hide in the reef, the eel eats you; dash for open water, the grouper grabs you. Groupers appear to have worked this out - or at least learned by association that hunting around eels is a good idea. Flushed out Most of the time, the eel responded by following the grouper (movie 4), which repeated the dance more slowly over the crevice where prey was hiding. This finding has some bearing on our own species. More From New Scientist More from the web. Bacteria discovered 2 miles underground in. Researchers have discovered an isolated, self-sustaining, bacterial community living under extreme conditions almost two miles deep beneath the surface in a South African gold mine. It is the first microbial community demonstrated to be exclusively dependent on geologically produced sulfur and hydrogen and one of the few ecosystems found on Earth that does not depend on energy from the Sun in any way.
The discovery, appearing in the October 20 issue of Science, raises the possibility that similar bacteria could live beneath the surface of other worlds, such as Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa. "These bacteria are truly unique, in the purest sense of the word," said lead author Li-Hung Lin, now at National Taiwan University, who performed many of the analyses as a doctoral student at Princeton and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory. The international team led by T. C. More information: American Scientist Online - Investigating. Smelly squirrels fool hungry snakes - life. Squirrels are the unlikely inventors of a cloaking device that lets them thwart rattlesnakes by using the snakes' own scent against them.
Female California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) chew on skins shed by Pacific rattlesnakes (Crotalus oreganus) then lick themselves and their pups, apparently to anoint them with the odour of the enemy. But does this olfactory disguise fool the snakes? To find out, Barbara Clucas of the University of California in Davis captured rattlesnakes and offered them filter paper scented with snake skins, squirrel fur, or both. The snakes were drawn to the squirrel-scented paper, lingering over the spot and flicking out their tongues as they do when they hunt. Papers scented by both snake and squirrel, or by snake alone, failed to interest them.
"The rattlesnakes exhibited much more foraging behaviour to the squirrel scent alone," Clucas says. Clucas reported her findings at the Animal Behavior Society meeting this week in Snowbird, Utah. &8230;free your imagination&8230;. The Bioluminescence Web Page. University of Rochester Press Release. September 8, 2006 'JP Masly shows flies he used to confirm old evolutionary theory' Mobile Genes Found to Pressure Species Formation Biologists at the University of Rochester have discovered that an old and relatively unpopular theory about how a single species can split in two turns out to be accurate after all, and acting in nature.
The finding, reported in today's issue of Science, reveals that scientists must reassess the processes involved in the origin of species. The beginnings of speciation, suggests the paper, can be triggered by genes that change their locations in a genome. "In the 1930s there was speculation that parts of chromosomes that switch from one location to another might cause a species to split into two different species," says John Paul Masly, lead author of the paper and doctoral student at the University of Rochester. Curiously, the hypothesis nearly died twice. In theory, the idea was sound, but scientists long debated whether it actually happened in nature.
Researchers publish dog genome sequence. Public release date: 7-Dec-2005 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Geoff Spencerspencerg@mail.nih.gov 301-451-8325NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute An international team, led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, today announced the publication of the genome sequence of the dog. In the Dec. 8 issue of the journal Nature, the researchers present a detailed analysis of the dog genome and describe how the data offer the potential for improving the health of man and man's best friend.
"When compared with the genomes of human and other important organisms, the dog genome provides a powerful tool for identifying genetic factors that contribute to human health and disease," said Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which supported the research. In the first phase, they acquired high-quality DNA sequence covering nearly 99 percent of the dog genome, from a female boxer named Tasha.
Gene Expression: "Black" and "white" twin. Beautiful people tend to have girls, say. AMB Community & Scientists Find the Genes. More Than Human by Ramez Naam. Ligers-a cross between a lion and a tiger- AMAZING ANIMAL....!! The 10ft Liger who's still growing... He looks like something from a prehistoric age or a fantastic creation from Hollywood. But Hercules is very much living flesh and blood - as he proves every time he opens his gigantic mouth to roar. Part lion, part tiger, he is not just a big cat but a huge one,standing 10ft tall on his back legs. He is the accidental result of two enormous big cats living close together at the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species, in Miami, Florida, and already dwarfs both his parents. "Ligers are not something we planned on having," said institute owner Dr Bhagavan Antle. 50mph runner... Today there are believed to be a handful of ligers around the world and a similar number of tigons, the product of a tiger father and lion mother.
Look at the size of the head on this thing.. Urban mice evolve. Urban planners for rodents take note: In big cities, small citizens can get squeezed out. This may come as no surprise -- urban sprawl deals a heavy blow to native wildlife. But sometimes, as any pigeon watcher knows, a species can thrive amid the flurry of human activity. When cities grow, some animals take over where others, who can't adapt in time, move out.
Lucky for one Midwestern mouse, it doesn't always take eons to evolve. Just ask Oliver Pergams. As the University of Illinois biologist (with co-authors Dennis Nyberg and Wayne Barnes) reported in a recent issue of the journal Nature, a remarkable show of natural selection has played out among the white-footed mice of Chicago - in just 150 years. It's very rare to see evolutionary change among mammals in such a short timespan. But can you take the country out of the mouse? In the early 1800s, before the land around Chicago was put to the plow, the land consisted of prairies scattered with woodlands and wetlands. But why?
The complete work of Charles Darwin. Crickets on Hawaiian Island develop silent. Public release date: 22-Sep-2006 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Iqbal Pittalwalaiqbal@ucr.edu 951-827-6050University of California - Riverside RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- In only a few generations, the male cricket on Kauai, one of the Hawaiian Islands, underwent a mutation – a sudden heritable change in its genetic material – that rendered it incapable of using song, its sexual signal, to attract female crickets, according to a new study by UC Riverside evolutionary biologists. In addition, the researchers found that although the new male crickets' wings lack the file and scraper apparatus required for producing sound, the males are able to mate successfully with females, thus ensuring evolutionary success. The males accomplish this with a change in behavior, suggesting that behavior can help what may seem like a harmful mutation spread. "With each visit we made to Kauai since 1991, we observed fewer crickets," said Zuk, the first author of the paper.
Field experiment details: Creature With No Brain Makes New Phylum A. Science/Nature | Ancient web sp. The oldest-known spider web with prey still entrapped has been found preserved in a chunk of amber in Spain. The mesh of silk strands - snaring the remains of a fly, beetle, mite and wasp - dates back 110 million years to the time of the dinosaurs. The fossil web appears to have been designed along the same lines as the round nets woven by modern spiders. The find, described in Science, sheds light on the early evolution of spiders and the insects they fed on. The web consists of some 26 silk strands preserved in a thin layer of amber together with an arachnid's prey. Although it is not intact, enough of the web structure has survived to convince its discovers - from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and the American Museum of Natural History, New York, US - that it was probably a classical wheel-shaped, or orb, web.
"Spiders today have a huge impact as predators on insect populations, along with birds and bats. " Flying insects Winged insects were spreading rapidly across the globe. Today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx. These bacteria use radiated water as food. Last modified: Thursday, October 19, 2006 Deep exploration of Earth's biosphere raises excitement about the potential for life on Mars FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006 BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and eight collaborating institutions report in this week's Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth's surface.
Think that's weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy. The discovery is a confirmed expansion of Earth's biosphere, the three-dimensional shell that encompasses all planetary life. The research has less Earthly implications, however. Photo by: Lisa Pratt IU Bloomington Geological Sciences Professor Lisa Pratt (left) and Princeton University Geosciences Professor Tullis Onstott (right) collect samples of microbes from groundwater in fractured rock 1.1 km below the Earth's surface in the Lupin gold mine, Nunavut Territory, Canada.
New Scientist Breaking News &045; Hardy l. Lichens can survive unprotected in the harsh conditions of space, a European Space Agency experiment discovers. The organisms are a composite of algae and fungi. They are commonly found on the surface of rocks on Earth and can survive in extreme conditions such as high mountains latitudes. Lichens are the most complex form of life now known to have survived prolonged exposure to space. In an experiment led by Leopoldo Sancho from the Complutense University of Madrid, two species of lichen - Rhizocarpon geographicum and Xanthoria elegans - were sealed in a capsule and launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket on 31 May 2005.
Once in Earth orbit, the lid of the container opened and the samples were exposed to the space environment for nearly 15 days before the lid resealed and the capsule returned to Earth. The lichens were subjected to the vacuum of space and to temperatures ranging from -20°C on the night side of the Earth, to 20°C on the sunlit side. Hitching a ride Symbiotic relationship. Biology New.