Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

A newly released co-author of studyed by professor Kam Tang of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science reveals that tiny aquatic organisms known as "water fleas" play an important role in carrying hitchhiking bacteria to otherwise inaccessible lake and ocean habitats. The article, "Bacteria dispersal by hitchhiking on zooplankton," appeared in the June 29 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was co-authored by researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Stechlin, Gera number of........

View a video of Helen Hansma of the University of California, Santa Barbara. That age-old question, "where did life on Earth start?" now has a new answer. If the life between the mica sheets hypothesis is correct, life would have originated between sheets of mica that were layered like the pages in a book........

A lot has changed about the way researchers study sexual selection and reproduction. Some of it has to do with new tools; some of it has to do with new attitudes. There is a lot more going on than just "sperm meets egg". "It was simply thought of as "this army of sperm competing," so it functioned as a raffle; the more tickets you bought, the more sperm you transferred, the more likely you were to win out in that competition," explains Scott Pitnick, a professor of biology at Syracuse University. "Females were perceived as these passive vessels in which this competition played out--that females didn't play an active role. That's really not the case.".......

A beneficial yeast that tolerates fungicide may offer a "one-two punch" against Fusarium graminearum, the fungal culprit behind Fusarium head blight ("scab"). U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Ohio State University (OSU) researchers isolated an improved variant of the yeast Cryptococcus flavescens about two years ago, and are evaluating its potential as a biocontrol agent........

As the fate of Europe's largest collection of fruit and berries hangs in the balance of a Russian court decision, the Global Crop Diversity Trust issued an urgent appeal for the Russian government to embrace its heroic tradition as protector of the world's crop diversity and halt the planned destruction of an incredibly valuable crop collection near St. Petersburg. Pavlovsk Experiment Station is the largest European field genebank for fruits and berries, and is part of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, where Russian researchers famously starved to death rather than eat the seeds under their protection during the 900-day siege of Leningrad during World War II........

The black locust trees were in bloom last weekend. We saw them clouding the roadside as we got farther south on our drive to Roundrock. I have a few locust trees in my woods, but I only happened by one of them in my tromping about then, and it wasn’t blooming. This one is on my neighbor’s property and I passed it on my way to his cabin to get some water (ours having all leaked out on the drive down, which I think I told you about). Although black locust is believed to have been native to parts of Missouri, its original range was more prominently in Appalachia. Now it is .........

.....and yet another thank you to frequent BPotD contributor Jim in San Francisco (aka J.G. in S.F.@Flickr) for submitting today"s set of photographs (original image 1 | original image 2 | original image 3 | Botany Photo of the Day Flickr Pool). As always, I"m .........

A University of British Columbia zoologist has discovered a new corticosteroid hormone in the sea lamprey, an eel-like fish and one of the earliest vertebrates dating back 500 million years. These findings have shed light on the evolution of steroid hormones and may help conservation and management efforts for lampreys........

Revealing the science behind the homespun advice, a team of scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has identified and measured the molecular forces that enable cranberry juice to fight off urinary tract infections in people. The data is published in the paper "Direct adhesion force measurements between E. coli and human uroepithelial cells in cranberry juice cocktail," which was published on-line, ahead of print, by the journal Molecular Nutrition and Food Research. The research illuminates the basic mechanics of E. coli infections, which has implications for developing new antibiotic drugs and infection-resistant materials for invasive medical devices........

Cycads, "living fossil" descendents of the first plants that colonized land and reproduced with seeds, are rapidly going extinct because of invasive pests and habitat loss, particularly those species endemic to islands. But new research on Cycas micronesica published recently as the cover article in Molecular Ecology calls into question the characterization of these plants as relicts (leftovers of formerly abundant organisms), and gives a glimpse into how the remaining plantsthose that survived the loss of more than 90% of their populationcan be conserved and managed. By sampling what is left of C. micronesica on Guam, researchers, including some from the American Museum of Natural History, found moderate genetic variation within local populations and different levels of gene flow between populations........