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Amazing Facts

Plants’ International Travel Upsets Evolutionary Idea
June 16, 2007
They may be rooted in soil, but plants really get around.  Some of them make it around the world.  One example has upset a long-believed evolutionary idea.     First of all, plants have a social life.  National Geographic published a story about how plants socialize and communicate.  “Plants have family values, too, it seems, […]
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Cell Biology

Could Germ Toxicity Be an Environmental Effect?
June 15, 2007
Listeria becomes nasty when starved of oxygen, reported EurekAlert.  “Limiting oxygen produces bacteria up to 100 times more invasive than similar bacteria grown with ample oxygen supplies.” Could this imply that a world with different atmospheric or soil conditions could have been less prone to disease?  Could the bacteria we fear most have been placid […]
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Genetics

Genome Complexity Unveiled: No Junk, Only Function
June 15, 2007
Any remaining doubts that the idea of “junk DNA” has itself been junked should vanish under the latest findings about genome complexity.  A number of recent news stories have revealed astonishing levels of regulation and organization in the non-coding regions of DNA.  It turns out that genes are not the only interesting things in the […]
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Dumb Ideas

The Evolution of Vomit
June 14, 2007
Upchucking “could have an adaptive value in evolution,” wrote Dan Jones in Nature1 in a news feature about moral psychology.  Why are we disgusted at certain things, like maggots and rotting food?  Evolution, he asserted without a burp, throwing in disgusting things like OPM and OPI (other people’s morals and other people’s ideologies) — Evolution […]
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Fossils

Huge Forest Fossilized Suddenly
June 14, 2007
Nature1 had some interesting comments about the fossil forest found in a coal mine a few months ago (see 04/23/2007).  Kirk Johnson of the Denver Museum of Natural History said that a vast area (over 3.8 square miles) must have been inundated quickly for this fossil graveyard to be preserved. Rapid burial can result from […]
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Birds

Imaginary Dinosaur Feathers Found – Again!
June 13, 2007
Last year, we reported that imaginary feathers had been found on a dinosaur fossil (see 02/08/2006).  Now, more imaginary feathers have turned up.  This turkey was big, too: the dinosaur plumed in the imaginary feathers stood almost 12 feet tall.  Everyone’s talking about it: Fox News, MSNBC News and Science News among others.  National Geographic […]
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Mammals

Why Do Some Fruit Bats Have Color Vision?
June 12, 2007
One would think bats don’t need color, since most fly at night.  That’s what scientists thought, reported Max Planck Institute, until color-vision cones were found in some species.  Some species have two cone types, giving them bichromatic vision, and some have only one, making them effectively color blind.     Bats come in two orders: […]
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Terrestrial Zoology

Ma Lizards Dress Their Young
June 12, 2007
Leapin’ lizards: the side-blotched lizards of the American southwest are able to dress their kids in the latest scale fashions.  A press release from UC Santa Cruz shows that hormones from mom can dramatically affect the pattern and coloration of offspring.  The scientists observing this phenomenon think it has something to do with matching their […]
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Dumb Ideas

Invent Animals: Just Add Phosphorus
June 11, 2007
“Phosphate does a body good,” announced Leslie Mullen in an article for Astrobiology Magazine, a NASA website.  So good, in fact, it builds whole new body plans.  Her story suggests that the Cambrian explosion was due to a rise in phosphate in the oceans.     In the Cambrian explosion, virtually all the animal phyla […]
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Politics and Ethics

MRI Inventor Honored
June 11, 2007
Dr. Raymond V. Damadian, inventor of the MRI scanner, received the 2007 National Inventor of the Year Award in Washington DC, according to a press release from the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation.     Damadian, head of FONAR Corporation, which he founded in 1978, received the 2007 award for inventing the Upright MRI, a […]
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Intelligent Design

Origin of Life Made Simple: Stochastic Innovation Answers I.D.
June 8, 2007
A press release from UC San Francisco teases, Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage – so experts believe.  But what preceded these pre-life steps?     A pair of UCSF scientists has developed a model explaining how simple chemical and […]
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Amazing Facts

Video Clip:  The Rich Little Bird
June 7, 2007
A popular video clip has been circulating around the internet for over a year.  It shows an Australian lyre bird imitating other birds and man-made sounds.  Click here to watch the 3.5 minute performance.  Narrated by David Attenborough, it was voted the #1 most popular Attenborough moment from the naturalist’s TV shows. Speaks for itself.  […]
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Marine Biology

Did Sponges Invent Nerves?
June 6, 2007
Scientists didn’t expect to find working neurons in a sea sponge, among the simplest of multicellular organisms.  Sponges lack internal organs and a nervous system.  Yet there they were, according to Science Daily, with synapses and apparent means of communication across them.     “This pushes back the origins of these genetic components of the […]
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Amazing Facts

Color-Blind Cephalopods Perform Colorful Camouflage Tricks
June 6, 2007
Roger Hanlon has studied octopi, squid and cuttlefish for decades.  He stands in awe of their ability to camouflage themselves.  In a Primer article for Current Biology,1 he detailed some of their sleight-of-skin magic tricks.     His article has frames from a movie clip that show an octopus changing its skin from plain to […]
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Cell Biology

No More Need for Embryonic Stem Cells?
June 6, 2007
Harvesting human eggs and creating embryos for embryonic stem cells may soon become a thing of the past.  Nature Science Update reported that four teams have verified that normal skin cells in mice can be reprogrammed to act identically to embryonic stem cells.     The technique, called “induced pluripotent stem cell” (iPS), holds promise […]
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