VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Dumb Ideas

Can a Cell Improve by Lowering Its Standards?
May 26, 2004
The title of a paper in PNAS is intriguing: “Artificially ambiguous genetic code confers growth yield advantage.”  An international team claims to have created a beneficial mutation.  They removed the editing ability of a protein involved in translating the genetic code, and got it to survive in a nutrient-starved environment.  They suggest that the resulting […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Hippos Sweat Their Own Sunscreen
May 25, 2004
You know that reddish fluid on hippo skin that turns brown?  It’s not just funny colored sweat.  Japanese scientists reported in Nature1 that it acts as a sunscreen and an antibiotic.  See also the BBC News report on this finding. 1Saikawa et al., “Pigment chemistry: The red sweat of the hippopotamus,” Nature 429, 363 (27 […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Cormorant Eyes Rapidly Refocus in Dives Into Murky Water
May 24, 2004
You’re hang gliding over a lake, and you spot a fish below.  From your hovering position, you drop into a rapid, steep dive headfirst into the water.  Whoops; your eyes just went out of focus, and you lost your fish in the murky depths.  Too bad you’re not a cormorant.     Cormorants (a kind […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Plant Evolution Modeled in Computer
May 24, 2004
Simulation games are popular on computers.  Darwinian biologists seem to like them, too.  What they cannot go back in time to observe, they sometimes try to recreate in silico, inside the silicon chips of a computer.  Karl J. Niklas (Cornell) tried to simulate plant evolution, and wrote about it in Annual Review of Earth and […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Fish Antifreeze Provided by “Pseudogene”
May 13, 2004
Freezing water forms crystals that can rip and tear at cells.  Yet there are fish in arctic waters that can survive even below the freezing point of sea water.  They accomplish this by means of special “antifreeze proteins” that interfere with the damaging effects of water crystals.     Scientists knew about AFP (anti-freeze protein) […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Whale Flippers Inspire Aeronautical Engineers
May 11, 2004
Have you seen the bumpy flippers on humpback whales, you know, the species whose males serenade their mates?  Don’t laugh.  Scientists have found that the ungainly flippers actually have superior lift, less drag, and are less susceptible to stalling.  Engineers are imitating the whale flippers for advanced aircraft and helicopter rotors, reports EurekAlert from studies […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Virus: Like DNA in a Hard Plastic Shell
May 7, 2004
A European team of biophysicists studied the mechanical properties of a virus and found the shell, made of protein, to act like hard plastic.  Writing in PNAS,1 they described the coat of a bacteriophage they studied: The protective proteinaceous shells (capsids) of viruses are striking examples of biological materials engineering.  These highly regular, self-assembled, nanometer-sized […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Fish See With Electric Eyes
May 5, 2004
Biologists knew that some electric fish shock their prey and others with weak electricity can navigate with it, but they didn’t know till recently just how much information these fish can detect with their unique sense.  French and British scientists ran some experimental tests on weakly electric fish, the African elephantnose fish Gnathonemus petersii, which […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Homology for Dummies
May 5, 2004
Current Biology likes to give its readers primers on various concepts. The topic in the May 4 issue is homology.1 Caleb Webber and Chris P. Ponting explain this important evolutionary term for the rest of us. The Q&A format also introduces homology’s siblings: analogy, orthology, paralogy, xenology, and synteny. Some readers may not realize that […]
CONTINUE READING
Solar System

Io, Io, It’s Off to Work We Go
May 4, 2004
The innermost large moon of Jupiter, Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. About the size of our moon but no more than a speck of light in small telescopes, Io caused a sensation when Galileo first glimpsed it and the other three major satellites of Jupiter in 1610. Back then, […]
CONTINUE READING
Bible and Theology

How Climate Influenced the Dead Sea and History
May 3, 2004
The Bible and science converge at one of the most remarkable lakes on Earth.
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Neanderthals Matured Faster
April 29, 2004
The news media are all echoing a story out of Nature April 291 that Neanderthals matured by age 15, as indicated by their teeth.  A News and Views article in the same issue by Jay Kelley2 begins, It is nearly 150 years since the existence of Neanderthals was first recognized, but debate about their relationship […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

How Tall Can a Tree Grow?
April 22, 2004
130 meters (426 ft) seems to be the upper limit on the height of a tree, say researchers from Humboldt State, Northern Arizona University and Pepperdine University, in the April 22 issue of Nature.1  To find this out, they had to establish working stations at the tops of northern California redwoods, the tallest trees on […]
CONTINUE READING
Dinosaurs

Dinosaur Extinction Theory #481b
April 22, 2004
Let’s try another one.  Temperature imbalances after the asteroid impact 65 million years ago caused cooler global temperatures.  This caused more eggs to hatch male, since in reptiles, egg temperatures can influence the sex of the hatchlings.  So a shortage of females gradually led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.     Why, then, didn’t […]
CONTINUE READING
Darwin and Evolution

Can Evolution Create Homologous Structures by Different Paths?
April 22, 2004
Günter Thebien (Friedrich Schuller U, Jena, Germany) is baffled about how two plants arrived at similar structures by different evolutionary pathways. In the April 22 issue of Nature,1 he asks, Structures that occur in closely related organisms and that look the same are usually considered to be homologous – their similarity is taken to arise […]
CONTINUE READING
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id="2"]