Archive for the ‘Animals’ Category
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
One of the most significant questions facing marine ecologists today, is just how much of an impact global variations in the environment are having on the dispersal of larval and juvenile marine species from open oceans to coral reefs. Previously, tracking how fish larvae migrate was done through direct observation ...
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Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Barry Dickson, director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Austria, and his group are interested in the genetic basis of innate behaviour. They focus on the reproductive behaviour of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Two years ago, the team was able to identify the fruitless gene as ...
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Monday, November 26th, 2007
Honey bees with pupal brood cells. Honeybee larvae produce silk to reinforce the wax cells in which they pupate. (Credit: Nick Pitsas, CSIRO)
Moths and butterflies, particularly silkworms, are well known producers of silk. And we all know spiders use it for their webs. But they are not the only invertebrates ...
Posted in Animals, genetic, mind, scientists | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
Researchers at the Wildlife Conservation Society and other institutions declare that improvements in management of existing protected areas in South Asia could double the number of tigers currently existing in the region.
Specifically, the study examined 157 reserves throughout the Indian subcontinent--comprising India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal. It found that 21 ...
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Sunday, November 4th, 2007
The DNA of a 4-year-old Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon, whose well-documented lineage can be traced back several generations to Sweden, has been sequenced. Cinnamon is one of several mammals that are currently being analyzed using "light" (two-fold) genome sequence coverage. To make sense of Cinnamon's raw sequence data, a multi-center ...
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Friday, November 2nd, 2007
Fluorescence shown along the body structure of amphioxus. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego)
Fluorescent proteins found in nature have been employed in a variety of scientific research purposes, from markers for tracing molecules in biomedicine to probes for testing environmental quality. Until now, such proteins have ...
Posted in Animals, ScienceNews, genetic, research | No Comments »
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
The DNA pioneer James Watson retired yesterday from his post as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state. The move is the coda to the race row that engulfed his visit to London last week following comments he made suggesting that black people were less intelligent than ...
Posted in Animals, Medicine, genetic, human | No Comments »
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
A rare Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), one of only an estimated 30 left in the wild has been captured and health-checked by experts from a consortium of conservation organizations, before being released.
Representatives from a group of organizations, including the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Biology and Soils, the ...
Posted in Animals, climate, human, research, scientists | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Bacteria that cause tumours in plants modify plant genomes by skilfully exploiting the plants' first line of defence. Utilising the plant's own proteins, bacterial genes infiltrate first the nucleus then the plant genome, where they reprogramme the plant\'s metabolism to suit their own needs. This process was published in Science.
The ...
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Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Culls of badgers should be carried out to control the TB epidemic in cattle, the government's chief science adviser has recommended.Sir David King's advice is diametrically opposed to a near 10-year government study of badger-culling, which said it could "make no meaningful contribution" to controlling the spread of TB in ...
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