Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

In flowers called columbines, evolution of the length of nectar spurs–the long tubes leading to plants’ nectar–happens in a way that allows flowers to match the tongue lengths of the pollinators that drink their nectar, biologists have found. The scientists were Justen Whittall of the University of California at Davis and Scott Hodges of the University of California at Santa Barbara. They were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Their results appear in this week’s issue of the journal Nature……..

A simple, cheap therapy using just oxygen could allow growers to store organic produce for longer and go a long way towards reducing the price of organic fruit and vegetables, reports Lisa Richards in Chemistry and Industry, the magazine of the SCI. Currently UK shoppers have to pay twice as much for some organic products. Organic apples, for example, are around double the price of conventionally grown apples in Sainburys, Waitrose and Tesco……..

Compared to the mushroom fossils known, a 20-million-year oldehas been found embedded in a 100-million-year-old piece of amber, making it the oldest ever ………

Nearly all of the 162 land-breeding frog species on Caribbean islands, including the coqui frogs of Puerto Rico, originated from a single frog species that arrived on a sea voyage from South America. They came 30 to 50 million years ago, as per DNA-sequence analyses by researchers at Penn State. Similarly, the researchers observed that the Central American relatives of these Caribbean amphibians also arose from a single species that arrived by raft from South America……..

Botany Photo of the Day will have brief written entries on weekends, holidays and my vacations from April through September. – ………

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a component of the National Institutes of Health, have discovered a survival mechanism in a common type of bacteria that can cause illness. The mechanism lets the bacteria protect itself by warding off attacks from antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are defense molecules sent by the body to kill bacteria……..

Organic fruit and vegetables may be healthier for the dinner table, but not necessarily for the environment, a University of Alberta study shows. The study, conducted by a team of student scientists in the Department of Rural Economy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, showed that the greenhouse gas emitted when the produce is transported from great distances mitigates the environmental benefits of growing the food organically……..

Researchers at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania have found that deleting a gene important in embryo development leads to premature aging and loss of stem cell reservoirs in adult mice. This gene, ATR, is essential for the body’s response to damaged DNA, and mutations in proteins in the DNA damage response underlie certain types of cancer and other disorders in humans. This work appears in the inaugural issue of Cell Stem Cell……..

Researchers have long wondered if local animal cultures exist, and now, based on findings by scientists at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, the University of Texas and St. Andrews University, Scotland, they have their answer: Yes. The study, available in todays online edition of Current Biology, confirms captive chimpanzees have the capacity to sustain the same kind of multiple-tradition cultures a number of scientists believe exist in the wild, providing further evidence chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor five to six million years ago who had a similar level of cultural complexity……..

Nearly all of the 162 land-breeding frog species on Caribbean islands, including the coqui frogs of Puerto Rico, originated from a single frog species that rafted on a sea voyage from South America about 30-to-50-million years ago, as per DNA-sequence analyses led by a research group at Penn State, which would be reported in the 12 June 2007 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and posted in the journal’s online early edition this week. Similarly, the researchers observed that the Central American relatives of these Caribbean frogs also arose from a single species that arrived by raft from South America……..