. . BIOLOGY
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July 14, 09: Each year, millions of dragonflies arrive on the Maldive Islands, an event which is well known to people living there. Millions of dragonflies fly thousands of kilometers across the sea from southern India to Africa. So says a biologist in the Maldives, who claims to have discovered the longest migration of any insect. If confirmed, the mass exodus would be the first known insect migration across open ocean water. It would also dwarf the famous trip taken each year by Monarch butterflies, which fly just half the distance across the Americas.
July 4, 09: Honeybee hordes use two weapons --heat and CO2-- to kill their natural enemies, giant hornets. Japanese honeybees form "bee balls" --mobbing and smothering the predators. This has previously been referred to as "heat-balling", but a study has now shown that CO2 also plays a role in its lethal effectiveness. Scientists describe how hornets are killed within 10 minutes when they are trapped inside a ball of bees.
. . Japanese giant hornets, which can be up to 5cm long, are voracious predators that can devastate bees' nests and consume their larvae.
Jun 29, 09: Lions form prides to defend territory against other lions, not to improve their hunting success, new research reveals.
June 18, 09: Tiny mussel-like creatures living 100 million years ago made giant sperm longer than their own bodies, proving size has always mattered for some animals when it comes to sex, scientists said. Giant sperm are still around today. A human sperm, for example, would have to be 40 meters long to measure up against a fruit fly's. The insect is only a few millimeters in size but can produce 6 cm-long coiled sperm.
. . Scientists have been unsure if such gigantism is a freakish one-off. Now the discovery that ostracodes, an extinct ancient class of arthropods, displayed the same trait shows that making giant sperm is a long-standing and evolutionarily successful reproduction strategy. Modern versions of these tiny animals also have extra large sperm, but not to the extent of their relatives 100 million years ago.
June 17, 09: A human body contains a natural complement of 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Prokaryotes, organisms that lack a cell nucleus like bacteria and archaea, form the majority of the Earth’s biomass and are responsible for cycling its most important nutrients.
We’re still in the early stages of this research: Only six studies have been published on bacterial nanowires, but a number of intriguing possibilities exist about what role they could play in the bacterial world.
. . Bacterial species also had the ability to grow nanowires. The oxygen-making cyanobacteria that “invented” photosynthesis produce conductive nanowires in response to limited amounts of CO2. Heat-loving, methane-producing consortia of microorganisms even appear to produce nanowires that connect organisms from separate domains of life.
. . We are slowly, yet steadily, realizing that many (perhaps most?) bacteria produce nanowires. And the extracellular structures connecting bacterial cells into complex integrated communities create a pattern that looks suspiciously like a neural network.
. . When one considers that individual cells —-each with their own set integrated of metabolic reactions-— are connected by electrically conductive filaments, this hypothesis is quite reasonable. The rate or frequency of electron transfer from one organism to another could reasonably serve a form of communication.
. . Nanowires are composed largely of protein, but the type of proteins appears to vary from organism to organism. They can grow to be more than ten times the length of a typical bacterium and are typically 8 to 10 nanometers in diameter. Long wires like this could be used as a kind of breathing tube. The evidence suggests that nanowires can transfer electrons over distances ten times the length of an individual cell.
Feb 25, 09: Scientists have found some odd life forms in Lake Huron. Peculiar geological formations are supporting floating plumes and purple mats of microbes dwelling in enclaves of the Great Lake, researchers report. The odd biology is more akin to what is found in some of Earth's most extreme environments.
. . The mats are located about 20 meters below the surface of Lake Huron --the third largest of the Great Lakes-- where researchers have found sinkholes made by water dissolving parts of an ancient underlying seabed.
. . Around these sinkholes are brilliant purple mats of cyanobacteria --cousins of microbes found at the bottoms of permanently ice-covered lakes in Antarctica-- and pallid, floating ponytails of other microbial life. The water there is dense, oxygen-free and salty, and therefore hostile to most familiar, larger forms of life in the lakes.
. . The scientists report that some deep sinkholes act as catch basins for dead and decaying plant and animal matter and collect a soft black sludge of sediment topped by a bacterial film.
In the oxygen-depleted water, cyanobacteria carry out photosynthesis using sulfur compounds rather than water and give off hydrogen sulfide, the smelly rotten-egg gas. Where the sinkholes are deeper still and light fails, microorganisms use chemical means rather than photosynthesis to metabolize the sulfurous nutrients.
Nov 25, 08: In a technical tour de force with potentially profound implications for the study of emerging diseases, researchers have built the largest-ever self-replicating organism from scratch.
. . The organism is a virus based on genome sequences taken from a bat-borne version of SARS, a lethal respiratory disease that jumped from animals to humans in 2002. The synthetic virus could help explain how SARS evolved, and the same approach could be used to investigate other species-hopping killers.
. . "This gives us a system to more quickly answer the questions of where a virus came from, of how to develop vaccines and treatments for a brand-new virus that leaps to humans like SARS did."
. . The field of synthetic biology has progressed with extraordinary rapidity. Six years ago, polio became the first virus to be synthesized. Three years ago, biologists reconstructed an influenza strain from the 1918 epidemic, in the process discovering what made it so lethal. The synthetic SARS virus is even more complicated than either of those creations. And as such research has progressed, concerns have intensified over viruses jumping from animals to people, then spreading rapidly through a globalized world of international travel and migration.
Nov 21, 08: Rapid, unconscious eye movements explain a famous optical illusion in which a still image appears to move. When the eye movements, called microsaccades, were suppressed, test subjects reported that the Enigma illusion —-an illustration that seems to flicker and turn-— remained stationary.
. . Scientists don't yet understand exactly how microsaccades contribute to vision, but they seem to help us perceive peripheral details while fixated on an object. "If we can prove that microsaccades are involved, this rules out the hypothesis that the illusion comes solely from the visual cortex. It may be involved, but the illusion starts with the eye", she said.
May 3, 08: Akhenaten wasn't the most manly pharaoh, even though he fathered at least a half-dozen children. In fact, his form was quite feminine, which has puzzled experts for years. And he was a bit of an egghead.
. . Dr. Irwin Braverman, a Yale U physician who analyzed images of Akhenaten, has a new theory on why. He'll be presenting his findings at an annual conference at the U of Maryland on the ailments and deaths of historic figures.
. . The female form was due to a genetic mutation that caused the pharaoh's body to convert more male hormones to female hormones than needed, Braverman believes. And Akhenaten's head was misshapen because of a condition in which skull bones fuse at an early age.
. . The pharaoh had "an androgynous appearance. He had a female physique with wide hips and breasts, but he was male and he was fertile and he had six daughters."
. . Egyptologist and archaeologist Donald B. Redford was interested in Braverman's findings and looked forward to the conference but said he currently supports an older theory. He believes that Akhenaten had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder marked by lengthened features, including fingers and the face. [Some think Lincoln had it.]
. . Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic condition that can also cause gynecomastia, or male breast enlargement, has also been suggested, but Braverman said he suspects familial gynecomastia, a hereditary condition that leads to the overproduction of estrogen. The Yale doctor said determining whether he is right can easily be done if Egyptologists can confirm which mummy is Akhenaten's and if Egyptian government officials agree to DNA analysis.
May 2, 08: The New York Botanical Garden may be best known for its orchid shows and colorful blossoms, but its researchers are about to lead a global effort to capture DNA from thousands of tree species from around the world.
Mar 3, 08: British marine experts have found what they claim is a world first --a six-legged octopus, or "hexapus", whom they have christened Henry. The unique sea creature, is believed to be the result of a birth defect rather than an accident.
. . Octopuses are renowned for having three hearts and blue blood, but "No-one has ever heard of another case of a six-legged octopus."
Dec 10, 07: Researchers have discovered what they believe is a new deep water coral and sponge beds found several km below the ocean surface, officials said. The a lemon-yellow bamboo coral tree and a giant sponge were discovered last month in depth from 1km to 2km.
. . The vast national monument, nearly 100 times larger than Yosemite National Park, was created by President Bush last year out of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which stretch out 1,000 miles from the main Hawaiian Islands.
Dec 10, 07: Turning off a sex "switch" triggered when female insects mate may be a smart and green way of controlling pests in the future. Scientists said on Sunday they had found a molecular receptor, or switch, common to all insects that sets off post-mating behaviors like egg-laying.
. . Developing a chemical to artificially block its action could stop insect populations in their tracks and help fight the spread of many human and animal diseases. "If you had an inhibitor of this receptor then you could interfere with its function and it would, in effect, be a birth control pill for insects", said Barry Dickson from the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria.
. . Many female insects undergo profound changes in behavior after mating. Some species start laying multiple eggs. Female mosquitoes, for example, seek out a meal of blood --often spreading malaria in the process.
. . Scientists have known for some time that such behavior is triggered by a so-called sex peptide molecule in the male's seminal fluid, but it has been unclear how it exerts its impact on the female. Now Dickson and his colleagues have identified the receptor for the molecule in fruit flies and shown it is key to post-mating behavior. Females lacking the receptor continue to behave as virgins, even after mating.
. . Crucially, the same receptor has been found in all insects studied so far, suggesting it may be possible to develop a widely applicable chemical blocker that would be far more effective and environmentally friendly than insecticides. Modern insecticides are good at killing bugs, but because insects breed so prolifically, those that die are quickly replaced.
. . By contrast, females dosed with a sex peptide receptor blocker would remain alive and continue to compete in the breeding pool, producing a bigger impact on the wider population. Dickson said it was possible such a blocker might be introduced into breeding ponds where larvae grow or else planted in pheromone traps designed to attract insects.
Nov 23, 07: Myoglobin is similar to hemoglobin, which gives blood its bright red color and carries oxygen through the bloodstream. Myoglobin is found in muscle tissue and also has an affinity for oxygen. "It is the binding state of oxygen to the myoglobin that creates the variation in meat color."
. . Bird meat is muscle. Muscles are made of two types of fibers: Fast-twitch fibers contract quickly for infrequent bursts of activity. Durable slow-twitch fibers are used for regular, extended periods of activity. All that exercise makes the slow-twitchers suck wind. Luckily, myoglobin keeps a supply on hand.
. . Myoglobin latches onto oxygen and stores it away in muscles until the muscles become tired. Muscles that are used more regularly contain more myoglobin. Turkeys use their legs continuously, which is why thighs and drumsticks are dark meat. Flightless domestic turkeys don’t use their chest muscles much. Their well-rested breasts become our white meat. "Beef has lots of myoglobin and therefore is dark."
Nov 19, 07: Something about a baby turns us unto clowns. And it looks like we aren’t the only primates to make such fools of ourselves over small members of our species.
. . Rhesus monkey females, according to Jessica Whitham of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, also make fools of themselves over babies. When a baby is around, adult females wag their tails and emit two particular vocalizations that are directed at the little ones and their mothers.
. . All macaques make soft grunting noises during social interactions, feeding and group movement. The grunt seems to be a generalized macaque phrase that says, "Hey!" In the baby context, females ramp up their grunts and do them over and over, getting more agitated with every syllable.
. . Around babies, females also make a call called a girney, a whining sound that apparently goes well with a grunt. Sounding like wheezing, puffing calliopes, females approach the mother or the baby. Although they look rather scary in their excitement, the noises apparently signal, "I'm no threat. I won’t hurt the baby."
. . Sometimes the females move in and touch or grab the baby, or they groom the mother who might be higher ranking and, under different circumstances, less tolerant.
. . Other times, they grunt and girney when babies wander away from their mothers, which means they are directing the calls to babies alone. In fact, females reserve most of their girneys for babies, as if this nasal wheeze were a sort of baby talk. But interestingly, mothers don’t girney at their own babies, so in the case of macaques it's grandma, auntie and the neighbors who are doing all the coochie-cooing.
Nov 11, 07: Igbo-Ora, a sleepy farming community in southwest Nigeria, welcomes visitors with a sign proclaiming "The Land of Twins". "There is hardly a family here without a set of twins", said community leader Olayide Akinyemi, a 71-year-old father of 12. The town's high incidence of twins has baffled fertility experts --underscoring a more regional twin trend and an array of elaborate African rituals around them.
. . The rate of identical twins is pretty steady throughout the world at about 0.5% of all births. But West Africa bucks that trend, particularly with a much higher incidence of fraternal, or non-identical twins than in Europe or Japan. Overall, almost 5% of all Yoruba births produce twins, the Belgian study said, compared with just around 1.2% for Western Europe and 0.8% for Japan.
. . Yam consumption may be one explanation for Africa's largesse, some West Africans and Western experts believe. Yams contain a natural hormone phytoestrogen which may stimulate the ovaries to produce an egg from each side.
. . In pre-colonial times, some communities used to kill twins and occasionally their mothers, believing a double birth was an evil portent and that the mother must have been with two men to bear two children at once.
July 12, 07: The American Psychological Association is embarking on the first review of its 10-year-old policy on counseling gays and lesbians, a step that gay-rights activists hope will end with a denunciation of any attempt by therapists to change sexual orientation. A six-member task force set up by the APA has its first meeting beginning next Tuesday.
. . Such efforts --often called reparative therapy or conversion therapy-- are considered futile and harmful by many gay-rights activists. Conservative groups defend the right to offer such treatment, and say people with their viewpoint have been excluded from the review panel.
. . The current APA policy, adopted in 1997, opposes any counseling that treats homosexuality as a mental illness, but does not explicitly denounce reparative therapy. The APA has decided to review the policy at a time when gay-rights groups are increasingly critical of such treatment and groups that support it.
. . Conservatives contend that the review's outcome is preordained because the task force is dominated by gay-rights supporters.
. . One of the task force members, New York City psychiatrist Jack Drescher, said the conservatives don't acknowledge the harm that might be caused when a gay patient --even voluntarily-- undergoes therapy to suppress or change sexual orientation.
. . "They want a rubber stamp of approval for a form of therapy that's questionable in its efficacy and they don't want to deal with the issue of harmful side effects", said Drescher, who is editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy.
July 4, 07: They were born within minutes of each other, but the British twins celebrating their first birthday are far from identical: one of the girls is black while the other is white with blond hair and blue eyes.
Jun 21, 07: Firstborn sons have higher IQs than their younger brothers, and their social status within the family may explain why, researchers reported. A study that used military draft records for more than 240,000 Norwegian men found that firstborns had an edge of 2.3 IQ points on their next oldest brothers, who in turn beat brothers born third by 1.1 points on average.
. . Men who had been raised as the eldest, whether they were born first, second, or third, had IQs to match their first-born peers. The same was true for those raised or born second.
. . "This study provides evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such." The findings swayed even skeptics of the theory that birth order affects intelligence. The effect seems to vanish with greater age gaps between siblings.
. . "There is no reason to suspect that this should not be valid concerning women as well as men."
May 29, 07: For female cheetahs in the Serengeti, the call of the wild is just too hard to resist as new research shows nearly half of their litters are made up of cubs with different fathers.
. . And while the serial infidelities of the females does ensure a broader genetic mix to help the survival of the endangered species, it comes at a cost, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said. "Mating with more than one male poses a serious threat to females, increasing the risk of exposure to parasites and diseases. Females also have to travel over large distances to find new males, making them more vulnerable to predation, so infidelity is a heavy burden."
. . Cheetahs are a threatened species and are declining in number in the areas they inhabit. The effective breeding population is estimated to be below 10,000 individuals and the species faces threats from human attacks and habitat loss, said Sarah Durant, leader of the Serengeti Cheetah Project since 1991. "This is good news for conservation, as the genetic diversity of future generations of cheetah will be preserved by their duplicitous behavior."
May 22, 07: Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a U.S. zoo.
. . The joint Northern Ireland-U.S. research analyzed the DNA of a shark born in 2001 in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb. The shark was born in a tank with three potential mothers, none of whom had contact with a male hammerhead for at least three years. Analysis of its DNA found no trace of any chromosomal contribution from a male partner.
. . Shark experts said this was the first confirmed case in a shark of parthenogenesis, which is derived from Greek and means "virgin birth." Asexual reproduction is common in some insect species, rarer in reptiles and fish, and has never been documented in mammals. The list of animals documented as capable of the feat has grown along with the numbers being raised in captivity — but until now, sharks were not considered a likely candidate.
. . "As is typical with scientists, we doubted our own results and so we did it again, and then a third time using a new technique with new genetic approaches. This confirmed there was no DNA of any male", said Prodohl, an expert in fish genetics with specific knowledge of hammerhead DNA.
. . Before the study, many shark experts had presumed that the Nebraska birth involved a female shark's well-documented ability to store sperm for months. This seemed the most plausible scenario even though the sharks had arrived at the Nebraska zoo as immature pups. The lack of any paternal DNA in the baby shark ruled out this possibility.
. . "This phenomenon has now been demonstrated in all major vertebrate groups except for mammals", said Bob Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research. Prodohl said if self-impregnation was occurring in the wild because female sharks cannot find male partners amid rapidly declining shark populations, it would represent "an evolutionary dead end that compromises the survival of the species."
. . He said he suspected this was "already a problem in the real world", and noted the population of blue sharks off the west coast of Ireland had fallen by 90% in the past 12 years.
. . But Hueter said he doubted it was happening anywhere besides in captivity. He also argued that the power to self-impregnate represents "an evolutionary strategy to keep the population and species going when all else fails. Genetically, it's a last resort tactic because it leads to genetic uniformity, and eventually that will catch up with the population and make it less fit.
Apr 11, 07: Bats often risk getting drunk off cocktails of alcohol that stew inside ripened fruit. And just as driving is dangerous for intoxicated humans, so is flying for boozy bats. Now scientists find bats are savvy enough to dine on certain types of fruit sugar to help them get over the ill effects of alcohol. These findings could shed light on how wildlife deals with alcohol.
. . Bats make up one-quarter of all mammal species. [!] Almost one-third of all bats live on the juices of fruits and the nectar of flowers. Fruits such as figs and dates accumulate ethanol, or drinking alcohol, as they ripen. While Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) prefer such fruits when they are ripe, as little as a 1% concentration of ethanol is toxic for the bats. Even concentrations of less than 1% ethanol can make fruit bats sluggish against predators or hamper their ability to avoid obstacles. (For comparison, pale lager beers that most consumers are familiar with are typically 5% alcohol by volume.)
. . Breath tests revealed that alcohol levels dropped faster after feeding on fructose-loaded meals than when given food containing either sucrose or glucose. They also found that as the amount of booze in food increased, the fruit bats preferred fructose-rich food more than glucose-laden food.
. . Curiously, even though sucrose did not appear to help combat intoxication as well as fructose did, the fruit bats preferred food that contained sucrose over foods with either fructose or glucose, regardless of whether or not there was alcohol in the food.
A DNA survey of wild and domestic pigs has thrown new light on how early humans reached the remote Pacific. Scientists from Durham and Oxford Universities have found a clear genetic link between modern and ancient pigs in East Asia and several Pacific islands. This suggests that colonists who transported the animals may have travelled from Vietnam via numerous islands.
. . Studies of the samples revealed a single genetic heritage shared by modern Vietnamese wild boar and modern feral pigs on the islands of Sumatra, Java, and New Guinea. The same link was also found between Ancient Lapita pigs in Near Oceania, and modern and ancient domestic pigs on several Pacific Islands.
. . The findings contradict established theories that colonists originated in Taiwan or Island Southeast Asia, and travelled along routes that pass through the Philippines as they dispersed into the remote Pacific.
Feb 22, 07: New Zealand fishermen may have caught the largest Colossal squid ever found -- weighing around 450kg (992 pounds) and with rings the size of tires.
Feb 19, 06: Humans have got it reversed compared to most of the animal kingdom when it comes to the relative sizes of males and females.
. . For insects and spiders [NOT the same thing], as with most non-human animals, the majority of females outsize their male counterparts. A new study looks at why sexual dimorphism—the non-sexual size and shape differences between the sexes—exists in the world of six- and eight-legged creatures.
. . There are two routes to getting big, scientists say. Either the larger sex grows faster or it undergoes a longer period of growth. The group looked at 155 species in which females are larger and found that the key is not how long it takes them to mature but the rate at which they grow. “In the insects I research, females are larger than males. But it turns out they mature at the same age, and it takes the same amount of time to get to adult size”, she said. Females, then, must undergo more rapid growth.
. . So why are the males so much smaller? “In most animals, the advantages of large size are apparent, whereas the disadvantages are not,” Fairbairn's colleague Wolf Blanckenhorn said. He proposes a theory to explain the advantages of small size: While females are bulking up, males are devoting their energy and resources to growing mature reproductive organs, which are much larger and more elaborate than in females -—and relative to overall body size, are also significantly bigger than those of mammals.
. . While men are thought to grow big and strong to better compete for mates, insects and spiders might maximize their reproductive potential by staying small overall.
Jan 4, 07: Coast redwoods grow in a 470-mile ribbon from southern Oregon to Big Sur, and routinely top 300 feet, or the height of a 30-story building. (The giant sequoia, the redwood's inland cousin, have massive trunks that make them the world's biggest trees by volume.)
. . Only 36 coast redwoods taller than 360 feet have been recorded. Atkins or Taylor had a hand in locating 28 of them. In the 370-feet-and-up category, there are only four. Atkins and Taylor found them all. The odds of finding a tree taller than the 379.1-foot Hyperion are less than 1%.
Dec 20, 06: Scientists have made a breakthrough in their understanding of the genetics behind human eye color. They found that just a few "letters" out of the six billion that make up the genetic code are responsible for most of the variation in human eye color.
. . The study, which focused on twins, their siblings and parents, shows --conclusively-- that there is no "gene" for eye color. Altogether, the single letter changes identified in the study accounted for 74% of total variation in eye color, the researchers said.
Dec 20, 06: A man who went missing in western Japan survived in near-freezing weather without food and water for over three weeks by falling into a state similar to hibernation, doctors said.
. . Mitsutaka Uchikoshi had almost no pulse, his organs had all but shut down and his body temperature was 71 degrees Fahrenheit when he was discovered on Rokko mountain in late October, said doctors who treated him at the nearby Kobe City General Hospital. He had been missing for 24 days.
. . Doctors were still uncertain how exactly Uchikoshi survived for weeks with his metabolism almost at a standstill.
Nov 22, 06: Hearing a word usually conjures up an image but some people can begin to taste the word even before it is spoken. They have a rare form of synaesthesia, or crossing of the senses, where the taste of the word is triggered by its meaning, scientists said.
. . Synaesthesia usually runs in families. About one in 23 people [WOW! ] have some form of crossed sensory experience but in most cases people experience colors when they hear a letter or number. "This word-taste variant within synaesthesia is so unusual we don't have a good idea of how common it is."
In a study that sheds light on the biology of aggression, scientists swapped genes in gender-bending fruit flies to make boys fight like girls and girls fight like boys.
. . Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna focused on a gene in fruit flies dubbed "fruitless", an important player in behavioral differences between the sexes of these insects. The gene is known for its role in male courtship, but also controls another sex-specific behavior --how flies fight, according to the research.
. . When they fight, female fruit flies rely on maneuvers like shoving and head butts to an opponent's body. Males use tactics that include lunging, boxing and rearing up on their back legs and snapping down their forelegs to flatten an adversary.
. . The researchers swapped the male and female versions of the gene in fruit flies and observed the consequences. Males with the feminine gene used female fighting tactics, while the females with the masculine gene fought like the boys.
. . People do not have an exact equivalent to the "fruitless" gene, Kravitz added, but probably have other human genes serving similar functions.
Nov 9, 00: European men descend from 10 genetic forefathers.
. . Most Europeans can trace their roots back to two ancient groups of hunter-gatherers, rather than the Neolithic farmers who settled more recently, say geneticists. They all seem to have been descended from men who moved to Europe from the Ural mountains of Central Asia and the Middle East in three successive waves.
. . Mutations in the Y chromosome can be used as a kind of molecular clock, and the researchers found that 95% of the men's genes could be traced to one of 10 categories.
. . "It is possible to see three clusters of distinct geography and culture", the researchers wrote.
. . "The first comprises Basques and Western Europeans, the second Middle Eastern and the third Eastern European populations from Croatia, Ukraine, Hungary and Poland."
. . Researchers have found that 80% of modern European men have inherited their Y chromosomes from Palaeolithic ancestors who lived between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago.
. . One of the most important findings is that the older of these two lineages is linked to people who spread to Europe from Central Asia 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, says Giuseppe Passarino of Stanford University. Around half of modern European men are descended from these people.
. . The second lineage represents a second wave of migrants, which came from the Middle East about 25,000 years ago. The researchers link this group with a people called the Gravettian.
. . Finally, about 9000 years ago, Neolithic farmers migrated to Europe from the Middle East. But only about 20% of modern European men can trace their ancestry to these people.
Researchers hypothesize that laughter originated as a way for early humans to forge partnerships. It was preceded by the debut of the smile, which communicated a positive disposition to other individuals. But a more complex signal became necessary because smiles were easy to fake. Laughter --much more easily detected when counterfeit-- was the answer.
Oct 3, 01: British scientists said they have identified the first language gene in a breakthrough that could help to explain how language and speech develop in humans. Scientists pinpointed the gene by studying three generations of a family with a history of speech problems.
Sept 31, 01: Echinoderms -- starfish and their cousins: The small sea creatures don't just wear their bones on their sleeves: They are also nearly covered in eyes.
Rather, tiny lenses that operate like eyes and far supersede in their smallness and efficiency anything the greatest modern technologists can fabricate in a lab. Hendler said the amazing structures show that even life as we know it is often more bizarre than we know.
. . A brittlestar does not use each lens to see in the traditional sense. But combined, the lenses may form a kind of compound eye that can serve as a rudimentary warning system.
"This is the first example, so far as I am aware, of an organism with a body surface that is largely covered with crystalline lenses that are part of a complex photoreceptor system", Hendler said. "This is an extraordinary adaptation that had not been appreciated, and it certainly is an example of how varied life is as a result of evolution."
. . But each crystal in the brittlestar is a near-perfect lens far smaller than anything that can be created with current human technology, according to the new study.
3-29, 01: The case of the cross-dressing chromosome.
. . Surprised scientists said that nearly half of all genes related to the earliest stages of sperm production reside not on the male sex Y chromosome as expected, but on the X chromosome, universally considered the female sex chromosome.
. . Researchers also said the finding raises the possibility that infertility due to low sperm production may be passed on to male children through their mothers, much like color-blindness or hemophilia. Researchers until now have studied only the Y chromosome in the search for the genetic underpinnings of low sperm counts.
. . Nov 9, 00: Microbiologist Ed Carpenter of the State University of New York in Stony Brook and his colleagues have found between 200 and 5000 bacteria per milliliter of melted snow from the pole.
. . To their surprise, biochemical tests and electron microscope images show that the organisms can grow and divide even at 17 °C--the coldest condition the team tested.
. . All the bacteria are previously unknown species.
. . The finding suggests that life could exist in other environments previously thought too harsh, such as the polar ice cap on Mars.
Nov 9,00: A second study in Nature by Dr Richard Betts showed that planting new forests in cold parts of the world like Siberia and Canada could be doing more harm than good. This is because in northern countries, where the ground is covered in snow, forests absorb more of the sun's heat than the terrain. The additional exposure to the sun has a warming influence that could offset part of the cooling effect of the CO2 uptake.
Oct 27th, 00. Of all the emerging technologies that could be used to improve the safety of genetically modified crops, perhaps the most promising is one that would let crops clone themselves, as many wild plants do already.
. . This phenomenon, called apomixis, could not only slam the door on accidental gene transfer, it could also benefit farmers--especially the poorest ones--because they could save seeds each year from the same elite plants and replant them.
Oct 25th, 00. EVOLUTION IS AN OBSERVATION, not the theory. "There is a widely held perception that when one population splits into two different environments, traits evolve quickly and, as a result, the two new populations become less likely to interbreed. That is, they become reproductively isolated. This process, called ecological speciation, may be one of the easiest and fastest ways that new species arise. Our results suggest that this perception may not only be correct, but in spades", said Hendry. "The classic examples of ecological speciation are for groups that have existed for 10,000 years.
. . Even the fastest examples are for some insects over 200-400 generations. In these cases, we know reproductive isolation evolved sometime in the past, but we don't know how quickly."
. . In contrast, Hendry's team found evolutionary adaptations and reproductive isolation in salmon after only 12-14 generations: some 60-70 years. Specifically, scientists studied salmon introduced into Lake Washington, in Washington State, during the 1930s and 1940s.
Oct 18, 00. Scientists in the US have revived a 250-million-year-old bacteria. It's believed to be the oldest living creature ever discovered, millions of years before the dinosaurs.
. . The bacterium was in a state of suspended animation in a salt crystal from a cavern near Carlsbad, New Mexico.
. . The age also begs the question of whether organisms can survive long enough for a trip between planets. "If an organism were encased in a crystal and blown off a planet somewhere, or blown off of this one due to a meteor collision, it has a reasonable probability of surviving long enough to travel not just from planet to planet but [planetary] system to [planetary] system", one scientist said. (The "Panspermia" Theory)
. . They're now comparing the bacterium to its modern relatives and looking for even older ones.
Oct 18, 00. Scientists report that 34 million years ago, severe climate changes wiped out 90% of all tiny sea creatures along the Gulf Coast of the US.
. . How can scientists know ancient temps? Actually there are many ways. That's fortunate, because each can be cross-checked with others, greatly increasing accuracy.
. . One way: Otoliths ("ear-stones") are an internal part of fish's ears, and are made of calcium carbonate (chalk). They accrete like tree rings, producing layer after layer after layer as the fish grows. The chemical composition of that material changes according to the temperature of the water in which the fish live. Those materials can be precisely measured, giving science one more "thermometer to the past".
October 18, 2000. Hair Study Reveals Beethoven Had Lead Poisoning.
Oct 5th. '00: Danish scientists have found a completely new kind of animal down a cold well in Greenland and are keeping a colony of them in a fridge, the Arctic magazine Polarfronten reported on the Internet.
. . The 0.1-millimeter long freshwater organism does not fit into any one of the previously known animal families -- making it only the fourth such creature to be discovered on the planet in the past 100 years.
. . Studies of the animal named "Limnognathia maerski" show that it shares some characteristics with certain seawater life-forms.
. . Scientists from Copenhagen University and Aarhus University in Denmark have established a new phylum -- or family -- for the tiny animal, whose most remarkable feature is a set of very complicated jaws.
October 4-11 --Environmentalists, politicians and scientists hammered out a global agenda to save endangered species and preserve the world's ecosystems at an international conservation conference in Jordan.
. . The World Conservation Union (IUCN) said its eight-day congress brought together 2,500 delegates from 140 countries in the biggest gathering of its kind in the Middle East and one of the largest since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
. . It set out a program, with a list of measurable, time-bound actions, designed to slow or reverse the extinction of 11,046 threatened mammals, birds and plants, to preserve marine and coastal environments, combat global warming and to manage the world's precious water resources.
April, '00: Surprise images of the insides of a 66 million-year-old dinosaur show it had the heart of a warm-blooded animal, adding to evidence that dinosaurs were not slow and plodding but quick and hungry, scientists said.
. They used a computed axial tomography (CAT) scan on a fossil nicknamed "Willo" to show the 66 million-year-old dinosaur had a four-chambered heart more akin to a human than to a lizard. Reptiles have three-chambered hearts.
. "We were surprised that it is as recognizable as it is--something that had been in the ground for 65 to 67 million years", Fisher said. "We did not think we would put it together in a 3-D model."
. To early paleontologists, this soft tissue was "only dirt". They just scraped it away to reveal the bones. How many pieces of evidence were lost?!
. Thescelosaurus ("marvelous lizard") weighed about 300 KGs and was 4 meters long.
Economic Euphoria May Blind US Citizens to Environmental Threats.January 17, 2000 World Watch
Optimism over a strong information-based economy and the Internet blind people to the growing threat of worldwide environmental catastrophe, says a new report released by the Worldwatch Institute. Rising global temperatures, increasingly destructive storms, melting glaciers, falling water tables, shrinking forests and disappearing species threaten the health of the Earth and its people.
"If we continue the irreversible destruction of these natural systems, our grandchildren will never forgive us", World Watch's Lester Brown said. Competitive Enterprise Institute has come up with a competitive Earth Report 2000, talks about positive trends as well as problems and advocates putting natural resources into private hands. Brown says we must stabilize climate and population. The report says that if the world's population can be held to 7 billion rather than 9 billion by 2050, it will make an enormous difference in the global environment, and that birth control and family planning services need to be provided to women throughout the world, and fossil fuels--coal, oil and gas--must be replaced with wind, solar cells and other renewable energy sources. North Dakota, South Dakota and Texas have the potential wind energy to meet the entire nation's electricity needs.
. . As rocks weather, the elements in them combine with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to create calcium carbonate, which gets stored in the oceans. "The silicate weathering cycle stabilizes the Earth's climate for a time", he said.
. . "Eventually, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will become so low that it will not be able to do so, but before then, there will not be sufficient carbon dioxide to sustain most plants.''
. . That means a planet like Earth can only sustain life for a limited period of time -- an important factor to keep in mind in searching for other planets where life might exist.
"If we calculated correctly, Earth has been habitable for 4.5 billion years and only has a half billion years left,'' he said.
Plants should actually be classified as belonging to three distinct kingdoms rather than to just one, according to the conclusions of a five-year project that involved 200 scientists from 12 countries. There are at least five major kingdoms, or branches, of multicellular life: animals, fungi, green plants, red plants, and brown plants.
. . Green plants, red plants, and brown plants evolved from three different varieties of one-celled, plantlike organisms and should therefore be grouped into separate kingdoms. Green plants comprise the largest of the plant kingdoms and include shrubs, trees, grasses, ferns, mosses, and flowering plants-about 500,000 species in all. Brown and red plants have survived mostly as species of seaweed and microscopic algae known as diatoms.
Nearly half the world's plant, animal and bird species exist in 25 concentrated areas which account for less than 2% of the Earth, researchers have found.
Governments, wildlife groups and international agencies are being urged to focus funds on the sites, to save a large chunk of the world's wildlife from extinction. Many of the areas, such as the Mediterranean Basin, Brazil's Atlantic forests and the Caucasus, have already suffered huge damage.
Some areas, such as the coastal forests of Tanzania and Kenya, are so damaged that more species will inevitably disappear in the coming years.
They estimate that spending $20 million US a year during the next five years on each of these areas might be enough to safeguard them. "The $500 million annually . . . is still only twice the cost of a single Pathfinder mission to Mars, which ironically has been justified largely on searching for extraterrestrial life at a time when life on Earth is disappearing", says the team's report.
The findings have come from Dr. Norman Myers of Green College, Oxford, and researchers at Conservation International in Washington. The 25 sites identified contain the last remaining habitats of 133,149 plant species, or 44% of all the plant species known worldwide, and 9,645 or 35% of known reptile, amphibian, bird and mammal species. The area in which they survive constitutes 1.4% of the Earth's land surface.
"Having lost 88% of their primary vegetation, they all seem likely, in the absence of greatly increased conservation efforts, to lose much if not most of their remaining primary vegetation within the foreseeable future", say the scientists in the journal.
About 38% of the 25 "hotspots" are already in protected areas or national parks. "Some of these are little better than 'paper parks' but they offer a modicum of of legal status", says the team. But 62% of the land is outside formal conservation and protection schemes.
The 10 leading hotspots include the Tropical Andes, with 20,000 unique species of plants and 1,567 unique species of animals, and an area of islands in and around Indonesia.
The scientists admit the list may be incomplete. Areas such as the
Ethiopian Highlands and the Albertine Rift forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo may have exceptional concentrations of unique plant species but have been insufficiently surveyed.
BYLINE: Nick Nuttall, Times of London
On less than a square yard of a deceased whale recently found off the California coast, scientists counted 5,098 animals representing 178 species.
This recent finding indicates that the organisms found on or around whale falls are closely related to those found at hydrothermal vents and cold seeps.
As a dead whale sinks to the ocean floor, much of its remains decompose anaerobically, producing the same sulphurous chemicals that sustains the chain of sea life that exists at hydrothermal vents.
The breakdown of chemicals in the sulphur-rich water by which the bacteria obtain their energy is referred to as chemoautotrophy.
A newly-found organism--the biggest bacterium ever found --has been named thiomargarita namibiensis, or the "sulfur pearl of Namibia", because of its bluish-green white color. This hue comes from the nitrogen compounds --or nitrates-- and sulfur that make up 97% of its bulk.
Each is about three-quarters of a millimeter across, or the size of the period at the end of a sentence. This single-celled creature is 750 times larger than average bacteria and is the only one visible with the unaided eye.
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. . GIANT SEAPLANES that skim the water at half the speed of sound could someday be used to launch rockets into space, reports the New Scientist magazine.
. . "The developers believe that the technology could be highly competitive with traditional vertical take-off systems such as the space shuttle", the weekly magazine said.
. . Alexander Nebylov, the director of the International Institute for Advanced Aerospace Technology in St Petersburg in Russia said the main advantage of the rocket-propelled seaplane, or Ekranoplan, was the high initial launch speed. The Russians have had a huge such plane from a decade --originally intended for troop transport.
* *
. . It uses the "wing-on-ground effect" (WIG) which forms a cushion of air between the wing and the surface (water or ground or ice...) that allows it to skim the surface. Jet engines propel it to speeds of over 373 miles per hour, at which point the rockets of the spacecraft fire and push it into orbit. [Seems it would need wings to get the nose up.]
. . Nebylov said horizontal launches from the back of the seaplane would eliminate the need for external fuel tanks or solid rocket boosters.
. . The spacecraft would also land on the back of a moving Ekranoplan. Quite a trick!
SLOW LIGHT. In early '99, Harvard's Lene Verstergaard Hau used a special medium known as a Bose Einstein Condensate to slow light to 17 meters/second (usta be= 38 mph). The process works by forcing an extremely abrupt refraction in the light as it enters the medium. Now Hau and her colleagues have slowed the light further, to a speed of .5M/sec.
. Hau said that if the velocity could be slowed still more it might be possible to get atoms to surf on the front of the light pulse.
two below from NewScientist.com
. . Dr. Phillipa Uwins works in the Center for Microscopy and Microanalysis at Queensland University, Australia. Last year she was asked to analyse some rock samples taken from several miles under the seabed in a drilling operation off the coast of Western Australia. The temperature at this location was around 300 Fahrenheit (150 C) and the pressure was an incredible 2,000 times normal atmospheric pressure at sea level.
During an electron microscope examination, Uwins found what appeared to be tiny, dormant organisms only 20 nanometers across (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). She named them "nanobes."
To Uwins' surprise, filaments grew when samples of the nanobes were given some food and exposed to normal temperatures and pressures. She was also surprised because the cell walls of the nanobes survived the intense radiation and vacuum of the electron microscope.
Uwins teamed up with two microbiologists to further investigate the nanobes. A range of chemical tests indicated that the tiny objects contained DNA. This finding challenged the notion that a "cell" 20 nanometers in diameter was too small.
2-99: Another state of matter found. Kinda crystalline. (Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, collapsed, neutron...) I think that makes seven.
The hierarchy of numbers is the following:
million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion, undecillion, duodecillion, tredecillion, quatuordecillion, quindecillion, sexdecillion, septendecillion, octodecillion, novemdecillion, vigintillion. Each of these is one thousand times larger than the one before; the last one, vigintillion, is ten to the 63rd power.
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