Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

Ground cover may be one workable method to reduce the effects of erosion that future biomass harvests are predicted to bring. Iowa State University scientists are looking at ways to use ground cover, a living grass planted between the rows of corn, in production farming. The seemingly limitless national appetite for ethanol has industry and government looking beyond the kernel to the entire corn plant for more fuel……..

Humans often choose partners based on behavioural keys that are displayed during social interactions. The way we behave in different social contexts can reflect personality traits or temperament that may inspire long-term love. Behavioural norms that we perceive as sexually attractive are not culturally or evolutionarily arbitrary……..

Brightly colored beetles or butterfly larvae nibbling on a plant may signal the presence of chemical compounds active against cancer cell lines and tropical parasitic diseases, according to researchers at Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Such clues could speed drug discovery and provide insight into the ecological relationships between tropical-forest plants and insects that feed on them. The report is published in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment…….

A new analysis indicates that birds don’t fly alone when migrating at night. Some birds, at least, keep together on their migratory journeys, flying in tandem even when they are 200 meters or more apart. The study, from scientists at the University of Illinois and the Illinois Natural History Survey, appears this month in Integrative and Comparative Biology. It is the first to confirm with statistical data what a number of ornithologists and observers had long suspected: Birds fly together in loose flocks during their nocturnal migration……..

From the surface, the two areas of ocean off the coasts of northern New Jersey and Long Island, New York look the same. But to NOAA scientists, the four-square-mile patches could not be more different as they view real-time underwater images and environmental data to try to figure out what lives there and how climate change is affecting marine life, particularly very young fish……..

By Susan Brown. Conservation biologists from UC San Diego are collaborating with researchers from the African Conservation Centre and other institutions to map patterns of biodiversity and land use in East Africa in unprecedented detail. Their maps, combined with climate models, will project how climate change will alter biodiversity and help to shape policy for setting aside conservation easements……..

A study reported in the current issue of Science challenges the long-held belief that diversity of marine species has been increasing continuously since the origin of animals. Dr. Thomas D. Olszewski, a geology and geophysics professor at Texas AandM University, has been a part of the international team that carried out this decade-long study, which concludes that most of the diversification occurred early on - relatively speaking……..

I came upon this lovely bunching of little white flowers when Seth and I were taking a break from trying (without much success) to cut the fallen cedar out of the ………

Thank you to Dougeee@Flickr of Georgia, USA, for contributing today’’s photograph to BPotD (via the Flickr BPotD Group Pool | original). Much ………

People in the tropics depend heavily on the products and services the forest supplies. However, the natural regeneration process from agricultural land to forest often stagnates at the scrub stage. Some plants and shrubs grow vigorously and become dominant as a result of which young trees do not receive enough light to grow……..