Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

This spring farmers responded to the ethanol industry’s demand for grain by increasing their corn acreage by 19 percent over last year, as per U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates. What if that happens again next year? What if farmers decide against crop rotations and plant corn on the same fields, year after year? Or, what if farmers begin growing biomass crops such as switchgrass for the production of ethanol from plant fiber?……..

The mating ritual of the honey bee is a mysterious affair, occurring at dizzying heights in zones identifiable only to a queen and the horde of drones that court her. Now a research team led by the University of Illinois has identified an odorant receptor that allows male drones to find a queen in flight. The receptor, on the male antennae, can detect an available queen up to 60 meters away……..

When powerful magnets line up the bodys protons before radiofrequency waves can grab their attention away, its called spin physics. When signals generated by the movement are mathematically transformed into dramatic images of hearts, lungs and other organs its called a magnetic resonance image. Protons normally would be pointing in many different directions, says Dr. Tom Hu, director of the Small Animal Imaging Program at the Medical College of Georgia. But if you put an object in the MRI, the magnet will line up the protons and what that does is generate the original, steady state. Then, by applying different radio frequencies, pretty much like what you do with a car antenna, you can pursue radio frequencies to perturb the system and you pretty much listen to it……..

That fruit fly hovering over your kitchen counter may be attracted to more than the bananas that are going brown; it may also want a sip of your carbonated water. Fruit flies detect and are attracted to the taste of carbon dioxide dissolved in water, such as water found on rotting fruits containing yeast, concludes a study appearing in the August 30 issue of the journal Nature. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the study, suggest that the ability to taste carbon dioxide may help a fruit fly scout for food that is nutritious over that which is too ripe and potentially toxic. The research is partly funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health……..

The Johns Hopkins scientist who first showed that the absence of the protein myostatin leads to oversized muscles in mice and men has now found a second protein, follistatin, whose overproduction in mice lacking myostatin doubles the muscle-building effect. Results of Se-Jin Lees new study, appearing on August 29 in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, show that while mice that lack the gene that makes myostatin have roughly twice the amount of body muscle as normal, mice without myostatin that also overproduce follistatin have about four times as much muscle as normal mice……..

TexasLow oxygen levels in coastal waters interfere with fish reproduction by disrupting the fishes hormones, a marine scientist from The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute has found. Incidents of seasonal low levels of oxygen, known as hypoxia, have increased dramatically in coastal waters throughout the world over the past few decades, largely as a result of increased run-off from human agricultural and industrial activities. Hypoxias long-term impact on marine animal populations is unknown……..

This is a follow-up photograph to last year’s BPotD on Magnolia delavayi (or Delavay’s magnolia). Peter Wharton described the plant in a comment accompanying that entry, so I’ll direct you there if you’d like to read ………

Planning for a summer delivery for your child? You might want to choose an ophthalmologist along with an obstetrician. If your child is born in the winter or fall, it will have better long-range eyesight throughout its lifetime and less chance of requiring thick corrective glasses, predicts a Tel Aviv University investigation led by Dr. Yossi Mandel, a senior ophthalmologist in the Israel Defense Forces Medical Corps……..

Cooperation is widespread in the natural world but so too are cheats mutants that do not contribute to the collective good but simply reap the benefits of others cooperative efforts. In evolutionary terms, cheats should indeed prosper, so how cooperation persists despite the threat of cheat takeover is a fundamental question. Recently, biologists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford have observed that in bacteria, cheats actually orchestrate their own downfall……..

In order to determine if other primates also use special vocalizations while interacting with infants, scientists studied a group of free-ranging rhesus macaques, which live on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. They studied the vocalizations exchanged between adult females and observed that grunts and girneys increased dramatically when a baby was present. They also observed that when a baby wandered away from its mother, the other females looked at the baby and vocalized, suggesting that the call was intended for the baby……..