Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

The technique lizards use to grab their grub influences how they move, as per scientists at Ohio University. A research team led by doctoral student Eric McElroy tracked 18 different species of lizards as they walked or ran in order to understand how their foraging styles impact their biomechanics. The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, was featured in the April 1 edition of the Journal of Experimental Biology……..

The pathogen responsible for Sudden Oak Death first got its grip in California’s forests outside a nursery in Santa Cruz and at Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County before spreading out to eventually kill millions of oaks and tanoaks along the Pacific Coast, as per a new study led by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. It provides, for the first time, evidence of how the epidemic unfolded in this state……..

Darwin’s tree of life represents the path and estimates the time evolution took to get to the current diversity of life. Now, new findings suggest that this tree, an icon of evolution, may need to be redrawn. In research would be reported in the April 13 advance online issue of Nature, scientists at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo have joined forces to reveal that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of other organisms — an unexpected and controversial finding that may dissolve a dominant ideology in the field……..

Air pollution from power plants and automobiles is destroying the fragrance of flowers and thereby inhibiting the ability of pollinating insects to follow scent trails to their source, a new University of Virginia study indicates. This could partially explain why wild populations of some pollinators, especially bees which need nectar for food are declining in several areas of the world, including California and the Netherlands……..

University of Delaware researchers, in collaboration with U.S. and international colleagues, have found a new type of molecule–a kind of “micro-switch”–that can turn off genes in rice, which is the primary source of food for more than half the world’s population. The discovery is published in the March 25 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America……..

I’m taking a class on the chemistry of biological systems this term (part of the reason why it has been relatively quiet around here recently). A large section of the course was on the details of protein synthesis, or how the ribosome takes mRNA and turns it into protein. Somehow this film was never shown in class, where a (literal) interpretation of the molecular dance is ………

Whenever I put the word “porn” on my blog I get lots of hits. I need all the help I can get, so as a sort of follow-up to my post on the science behind variegated leaves, here’s some variegated leaf porn from Roger Williams Park Botanical Conservancy in ………

A new study mapping the evolutionary history of animals indicates that Earth’s first animal–a mysterious creature whose characteristics can only be inferred from fossils and studies of living animals–was probably significantly more complex than previously believed. The study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is the cover story of the April 10, 2008 issue of Nature Using new high-powered technologies for analyzing massive volumes of genetic data, the study defined the earliest splits at the base of the animal tree of life. The tree of life is a hierarchical representation of the evolutionary relationships between species that was introduced by Charles Darwin. (See diagram……..

Even large amounts of manufactured nanoparticles, also known as Buckyballs, don’t faze microscopic organisms that are charged with cleaning up the environment, as per Purdue University researchers. In the first published study to examine Buckyball toxicity on microbes that break down organic substances in wastewater, the researchers used an amount of the nanoparticles on the microbes that was equivalent to pouring 10 pounds of talcum powder on a person. Because high amounts of even normally safe compounds, such as talcum powder, can be toxic, the microbes’ resiliency to high Buckyball levels was an important finding, the Purdue researchers said……..

The Human Genome Project revealed that only a small fraction of the 3 billion “letter” DNA code actually instructs cells to manufacture proteins, the workhorses of most life processes. This has raised the question of what the remaining part of the human genome does. How much of the rest performs other biological functions, and how much is merely residue of previous genetic events? ……..