Building The Body Electric. The invasive species war. Meet the Contenders for Earliest Modern Human. Iceman’s Genome Furnishes Clues to His Ailments and Ancestry. New Ant Species Discovered in the Amazon Likely Represents Oldest Living Lineage of Ants. Sept. 16, 2008 AUSTIN, Texas — A new species of blind, subterranean, predatory ant discovered in the Amazon rainforest by University of Texas at Austin evolutionary biologist Christian Rabeling is likely a descendant of the very first ants to evolve.
Swarm troopers: Mutant armies waging war in the wild - life - 12 September 2011. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2|3 We can now genetically modify animals to kill off their own kind, while leaving other species unharmed Editorial: "Give geo- and genetic engineering a fair trial" IN THE urban jungle of Juazeiro in Brazil, an army is being unleashed.
It is an army like no other: the soldiers' mission is to copulate rather than fight. Genetics Explain How Bedbugs Infest a Building. PHILADELPHIA—When you have bedbugs (Cimex lectularius), less interesting is the question of how they got there than the conundrum of how best to get them out.
Ridding homes and businesses of these pests has become a multimillion dollar industry in many cities in the U.S. and throughout the world. A few scientists, however, are now asking just how these populations have been spreading from town to town and from headboard to headboard. Answering that question might lead to better ways of controlling their spread into the future. “Zombie” Fly Parasite Killing Honeybees. A parasitic fly landing on a honeybee.
Courtesy of Christopher Quock. Dirty Dancing: Dung Beetles Get Down to Walk the Line. As a dung beetle rolls its planet of poop along the ground it periodically stops, climbs onto the ball and does a little dance.
Why? It's probably getting its bearings. A series of experiments published in the January 18 issue of PLoS ONE shows that the beetles are much more likely to perform their dance when they wander off course or encounter an obstacle. Until now, no one had any idea what a jitterbugging dung beetle was up to. Emily Baird of Lund University in Sweden and her colleagues study how animals with tiny brains—such as bees and beetles—perform complex mental tasks, like navigating the world. New fruit fly gene discovered. Provided Drosophila melanogaster Scientists thought that most new genes were formed from existing genes, but Cornell researchers have discovered a gene in some fruit flies that appears to be unrelated to other genes in any known genome.
The new gene, called hydra, exists in only a small number of species of Drosophila fruit flies, which suggests it was created about 13 million years ago, when these melanogaster subgroup species diverged from a common ancestor. Let's protect Earth's unseen life - opinion - 06 March 2012. Microbes are being failed by existing conservation efforts.
We need a global strategy to ensure their survival. Bony Bacteria. The Dwindling Web. Humans have harvested the sea for tens of thousands of years, but only in the past few centuries have we begun to take a big toll on ecosystems.
The two food webs below show predatory relationships among life-forms in the northern Adriatic Sea. Island of Secrets: In search of a tree kangaroo on New Britain. In July of 2011, John Lane, an explorer and geologist from California State University-Chico, mounted a biological research expedition to a remote wilderness region of New Britain, a volcanic island off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
The greater PNG region is a hotspot of biodiversity, but one that is highly threatened by oil palm plantations and other industries. It Does Take a Village by Melvin Konner. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 422 pp., $29.95; $19.95 (paper) Forget love, biological sex is a battlefield. Gender isn’t a simple thing. A person can be male, female, both, neither, and more—and that identity doesn’t have to have anything to do with the particular genital plumbing they were born with. But the plumbing itself—the biological sex, rather than gender or socio-cultural sex—is also a lot more complicated (and interesting) than we often give it credit for. Don’t believe me? Then check out “DMRT1 prevents female reprogramming in the postnatal mammalian testis,” a research letter published in September in the journal Nature.
That title is full of typical peer-reviewed paper jargon, but let me break it down for you: There’s a genetic factor, present in male mammals, that is vital to making sure those mammals develop male sex characteristics. Pirate-Eye Pigeons Reveal How the Brain Talks to Itself. As a baby bird develops, its body contorts to fit within the confines of its egg.
The bird's neck twists so that one side of its head is tucked against its chest. In this position, the bird's left eye remains nestled among sprouting feathers—where it does not receive much light from the outside world—whereas the right eye is pressed up against the eggshell, glimpsing flickers of light and shadow through a veil of calcium carbonate. Can the Bulldog Be Saved? Coyotes Are the New Top Dogs. By Sharon Levy of Nature magazine Near the dawn of time, the story goes, Coyote saved the creatures of Earth.
According to the mythology of Idaho's Nez Perce people, the monster Kamiah had stalked into the region and was gobbling up the animals one by one. Dogs, But Not Wolves, Use Humans As Tools. Sometime between fifteen and thirty thousand years ago, probably in the Middle East, the long, protracted process of domestication began to alter the genetic code of the wolf, eventually leaving us with the animals we know and love as domestic dogs. Humanity's Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals - Megan Garber. Over 20,000 years ago, humans won the evolutionary battle against Neanderthals. The Thoughtful Animal. Do the Eyes Have It? Dog domestication may have helped humans thrive while Neandertals declined Pat Shipman We all know the adage that dogs are man’s best friend.
How to Build a Dog. Dogs - A Healthy Future. National Geographic Photography Contest Winners: 2011. More than 20,000 photographs, from over 130 countries were submitted to the National Geographic Photography contest, with both professional photographers and amateur photo enthusiasts participating. The grand prize winner was chosen from the three category winners: Nature - Shikhei Goh, People - Izabelle Nordfjell, Places - George Tapan. Alan Turing's 60-Year-Old Prediction About Patterns in Nature Proven True. Image by Flickr user quinn.anya. Penn Researcher Helps Discover and Characterize a 300-Million-Year Old Forest, Preserved Like Pompeii. Do Plants Think? How aware are plants? This is the central question behind a fascinating new book, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University.
Deep Life. Buried microbes exist at limit between life and death - life - 17 May 2012. Defying Depth. Microbes Flourish Under Arctic Sea Ice. Patch of seagrass is world's oldest living organism - life - 06 February 2012. Researcher Sees Biological Regime Change Under Way in Alaska. How fairy wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas. Zoologger: Unique life form is half plant, half animal - life - 13 January 2012. The Smart Way to Play God with Earth's Limited Land. Watch How Life Recovers from Devastation. Plant blooms after 30,000 years in permafrost - life - 20 February 2012. A Rose is a Rose, Until it Isn’t: Five Reasons Plant DNA is Totally Crazy. Zoologger: Meet the polar bear's replacement - environment - 20 April 2012.
Life-changing experiments: The biological Higgs. Baboons Show Their Word Skills. Traces of Elusive Species Sought in Bloodsucking Leech DNA. 24 New Lizard Species Discovered, Half Close to Extinction. Bat-Killing Fungus Continues Deadly Spread; Death Toll Now at 7 Million. Mounting Evidence Suggests Sharks Are In Serious Trouble.